Ron DeSantis’ advisors say they are ‘preparing to make the patient comfortable’ as his once-promising presidential bid nears life support with campaign funds drained, his biggest super PAC demoralized and Trump surging in the polls

A spokesman for Rod DeSantis’ struggling presidential campaign lashed out at a “successful media job” amid claims they have privately admitted his career is all but over.

Support for the Florida governor has fallen from 35 percent to 12 percent in the race for the Republican nomination, while Donald Trump has consolidated his runaway lead in the Iowa caucuses just three weeks away.

As DeSantis battles Nikki Haley for second place in the polls, a campaign manager said his task now is to “make the patient feel comfortable,” aides said. New York Times.

The newspaper spoke to a dozen people close to DeSantis’ election effort after a fall of turmoil that saw open antagonism between his campaign team and his supporters at the Never Back Down Super PAC.

“You’re running against a former president, you’re going to have to be perfect and lucky,” one said.

“We’ve been unlucky and far from perfect.”

Super PAC strategist Jeff Roe’s resignation last week came at the end of a months-long bloodbath that also saw the dismissal of his campaign manager, two Super Pac CEOs and its president.

And some have pointed out the governor’s preference for working with his trusted Florida friends rather than seasoned campaign professionals.

Super PACs are supposed to have independent relationships with the candidates they support to comply with campaign finance laws, but DeSantis made sure to have three old friends overseeing Roe on Never Back Down’s board of directors.

Roe lashed out at one of them, the governor’s college classmate, Scott Wagner, last month, reportedly telling him, “You’ve got a stick up your ass, Scott,” as they argued about how the campaign had burned $100 million.

‘Why don’t you come here and get it?’ Wagner allegedly responded and NBC reported that the two men “almost came to blows.”

That meeting led to the resignation of Super PAC CEO Chris Jankowski, who months earlier had helped oust campaign manager Generra Peck.

She was replaced by James Uthmeier, who had worked as DeSantis’ chief of staff in the governor’s office but had no campaign experience.

Meanwhile, Wagner has been promoted to president of the Super PAC and has been steadfast in his defense of the governor.

“Never Back Down has built a massive ground game with a solid infrastructure that allows us to bring the governor’s record and his vision to voters across the country,” he told the Times.

But the super PAC threw away $2.5 million in bookings for ads in Iowa and New Hampshire over the weekend amid claims it had been sidelined in the wake of the governor’s faltering results in the polls.

A new super PAC called Fight Right is now working on the governor’s behalf, but it is struggling to attract the scale of donations that surged when DeSantis was sweeping the polls.

Meanwhile, the professionals he rejected have gone on to work for the Trump campaign, taking with them their inside knowledge of the governor’s weaknesses.

And some of those remaining told the newspaper about the missteps that have dogged DeSantis’ campaign since it officially launched with a livestream on X, formerly Twitter, in late May.

Technical glitches left many unable to tune in, and while Peck boasted about “breaking the Internet,” Trump responded with a one-word response, “DeSaster.”

The governor’s initial high profile made him a prime target for other candidates who fear alienating Trump’s base of support, and DeSantis began attracting more negative publicity than all the others combined.

It also gave the conservative media that supported Trump a difficult path.

“I used to think that in the Republican primaries you could just do Fox News and talk on the radio and all that,” he told conservative news host Steve Deace in October.

‘And, first, I don’t think it’s enough, but second, there’s the fact that our conservative media sphere, you know, doesn’t necessarily promote conservatism. They have agendas too.

Never Back Down claimed to have knocked on two million doors in September, but nearly half were outside the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

The governor’s friend’s outsize influence was blamed for the super PAC’s biggest week of ad spending in Iowa in June, seven months before the caucus.

And the super PAC, which was tasked with attracting a flood of contributions from small donors, has still received less than $1 million.

DeSantis is the only candidate to have spoken at caucuses in all 99 Iowa counties, but he struggled in the early televised debates.

And his bumbling public persona has been exposed under the media spotlight, according to strategist Stuart Stevens, who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign and said DeSantis seemed like “personality-less Ted Cruz.”

“There was a superficial impression that DeSantis was in the style of big-state governors who had won Republican nominations and been successful: Reagan, Bush, Romney,” he told the newspaper.

‘But DeSantis is a very different kind of creature. These are positive, expansive and optimistic figures. DeSantis is not.”

The governor’s veteran pollster Ryan Tyson is reported to have said the goal now is to “make the patient comfortable,” but has since publicly denied this.

And the campaign’s current communications director, Andrew Romeo, insisted that his candidate was simply the target of unfair media coverage.

“Different days, same media work based on anonymous sources with agendas,” he told the Times.

‘While the media tried to proclaim this campaign dead in August, Ron DeSantis fought back and enters the home stretch in Iowa as the hardest-working candidate with the strongest running game.

“DeSantis has been underrated in every race he has run and always proved the skeptics wrong; we are confident he will defy the odds once again on January 15.”