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’s struggling presidential campaign has lashed out at a ‘media hit job’ amid claims they have privately admitted his race is nearly run.

Support for the Florida governor has slipped from 35 percent to 12 in the contest for the Republican nomination as Donald Trump has cemented his runaway lead with the Iowa caucus just three weeks away.

As DeSantis battles Nikki Haley for second place in the polls, one campaign chief said their task is now to ‘make the patient comfortable’, aides told the New York Times.

The paper spoke to a dozen people close to the DeSantis election effort after an autumn of upheaval which saw open antagonism between his campaign team and supporters in the Never Back Down Super PAC.

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

‘We’ve been unlucky and been far from perfect.’

The resignation of Super PAC strategist Jeff Roe last week came at the end of a months-long bloodbath which also saw the ousting of his campaign manager, two Super Pac chief executives and its chairman.

And some have pointed the finger at the governor’s preference for working with his trusted Florida friends than experienced campaign professionals.

Super PACs are supposed to have arms-length relationships with the candidates they support to conform with campaign finance laws but DeSantis ensured he had three old friends overseeing Roe on the governing board of Never Back Down.

Roe lashed out at one, the governor’s university classmate Scott Wagner last month, reportedly telling him ‘You have a stick up your a**, Scott’,’ as they rowed about how the campaign had burned through $100million.

‘Why don’t you come over here and get it?’ Wagner allegedly fired back with NBC reporting that the two men ‘nearly came to blows.’

That meeting prompted the resignation of super PAC chief executive Chris Jankowski who months earlier had helped force out campaign manager Generra Peck.

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

Wagner meanwhile has been promoted to chairman of the super PAC and has been robust in his defense of the governor.

‘Never Back Down has built a massive ground game with a robust infrastructure that allows us to deliver the governor’s record and his vision to voters around the country,’ he told the Times.

But the super PAC ditched $2.5 million in bookings for ads in Iowa and New Hampshire over the weekend amid claims it has been sidelined in the wake of the governor’s faltering showing 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 in when DeSantis was flying in the polls.

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

And some that remain told the paper of the missteps that have dogged the DeSantis campaign since it officially launched with a livestream on X, formerly Twitter, at the end of May.

Technical glitches left many unable to tune in and while Peck boasted of ‘breaking the internet’, Trump hit back with a one-word riposte, ‘DeSaster’.

The governor’s early high profile made him a prime target for other candidates afraid to antagonize Trump’s support base and DeSantis began attracting more negative advertising than all the others put together.

It also led to a less than easy ride from conservative media supporters of Trump.

‘I used to think in Republican primaries you kind of could just do Fox News and talk radio and all that,’ he told conservative news host Steve Deace in October.

‘And, one, I don’t think that’s enough but, two, there’s just the fact that our conservative media sphere, you know, it’s not necessarily promoting conservatism. They’ve got agendas, too.

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

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

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

DeSantis is the only candidate to have spoken at meetings in all 99 of Iowa’s counties but he struggled in the early televised debates.

And his awkward 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 came across as ‘Ted Cruz without the personality’.

‘There was a superficial impression that DeSantis was in the mode of big-state governors who had won Republican nominations and been successful — Reagan, Bush, Romney,’ he told the paper.

‘But DeSantis is a very different sort of creature. These were positive, expansive, optimistic figures. DeSantis is not.’

The governor’s longtime pollster Ryan Tyson is reported to have said the objective now is to ‘make the patient comfortable’, but has since publicly denied it.

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

‘Different day, same media hit job based on unnamed sources with agendas,’ he told the Times.

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

‘DeSantis has been underestimated in every race he’s ever run and always proved the doubters wrong — we are confident he will defy the odds once again on January 15.’