DeSantis’ embattled campaign looks ahead to South Carolina amid New Hampshire headwinds

By Steve Contorno, CNN

(CNN) — Days before the New Hampshire primary, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has retreated from waging an aggressive campaign in the Granite State, leaving the airwaves to his rivals and abruptly shifting his presidential campaign to South Carolina in an urgent move to salvage his White House bid.

The move comes as a super PAC supporting his campaign is dramatically cutting back as well, eliminating paid staff and scaling back plans to compete in Nevada and Super Tuesday states.

Amid the furious reshuffling, DeSantis will return to Florida on Thursday to attend to official business back home – a trip that is all but certain to spur speculation about his future as a presidential candidate.

Multiple sources close to the governor’s political operation remained adamant Wednesday afternoon that DeSantis is staying in the race and attributed the schedule changes to the late cancelation of the CNN and ABC debates. A senior official for his campaign, which is quickly moving a majority of its staff to South Carolina, said DeSantis will return to New Hampshire on Friday and attend events in the Palmetto State this weekend.

DeSantis’ half-hearted push in New Hampshire tacitly acknowledges the state is out of reach, a reality that has been apparent to many – including some of his top advisers and allies – for months. As DeSantis prioritized Iowa and tacked further to the right to appease conservatives there, he fell out of favor with New Hampshire’s more moderate New England electorate. The most recent CNN Poll conducted by the University of New Hampshire earlier this month measured DeSantis’ support at 5% – behind former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who have since dropped out of the race.

His campaign and supportive super PACs haven’t aired a television ad in New Hampshire for two months, while allies of former President Donald Trump and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley have invested millions duking it out on the airwaves there as the gap between them in polls has tightened.

In skipping ahead to South Carolina, his campaign hopes to undercut Haley in her home state before she turns her focus there.

Still, the 11th hour decision is illustrative of a badly damaged campaign in complete flux after losing to Trump in Iowa by nearly 30 points. Just hours before word leaked out that he was shifting focus to South Carolina, his deputy campaign manager David Polyansky seemed to reaffirm DeSantis’ commitment to the GOP’s first primary during an appearance on CNN, saying the governor would “grind in every state for delegates.”

“We will do it here in New Hampshire,” Polyansky said Wednesday morning. “We’re going to go to Nevada, where Nikki Haley’s not even competing for delegates. We’re going to go to South Carolina and do it.”

DeSantis, for his part, is hamstrung by a playing field that has quickly become unfavorable to him. He wants to keep debating his Republican rivals but can’t find a sparring partner. He wants conservative media to stop covering the front-runner like he’s already the nominee. He wants voters and donors to believe he’s in a two-man race even though he’s barely competing in the next contest on the primary calendar.

Unclear is how he will get any of that.

New Hampshire State Rep. Jason Osborne, an early supporter of DeSantis, could not hold back his disappointment as he held out hope the campaign wasn’t punting on his state.

“Selfishly, I would like them to go full bore at New Hampshire as I have been advocating for months,” Osborne said. “I think there’s a lot of opportunity with Nikki Haley refusing to debate. You have Christie and Vivek supporters up for grabs who I think are ripe to be DeSantis supporters. The polls here are notoriously bad. He overperformed polls in Iowa and I think he could overperform here by a greater amount.”

Yet, given the opportunity Wednesday by a voter to reaffirm his commitment to New Hampshire at a town hall in Hampton, DeSantis deflected to a canned response comparing Haley to Hillary Clinton.

Another attendee, Ann Marie Banfield, applauded after DeSantis left the stage Wednesday afternoon at Wally’s bar in Hampton, where he addressed a crowded back room of supporters. She said she intended to cast her ballot for DeSantis on Tuesday, regardless of his decision to focus on South Carolina. She said she blamed Nikki Haley for declining to take part in a debate in Manchester on Thursday.

“I do think it would help if he stayed,” Banfield said. “He was going to do the debate, but it was Nikki Haley who really walked away from that.”

The shift to South Carolina is a tactical Hail Mary with the ultimate goal of pushing Haley out of the race. The preferred outcome is for Haley to finish second in New Hampshire followed by a defeat in her home state. DeSantis intends to spend the next month leading up to the February 24 primary putting Haley’s record in the spotlight in hopes South Carolinians turn against their former governor.

“When Nikki Haley fails to win her home state, she’ll be finished and this will be a two-person race – and her donors are starting to come to the same conclusion,” said DeSantis campaign spokesman Andrew Romeo. “While they continue to have buyers’ remorse over backing a bubble wrapped candidate who can’t beat Trump, we’re wasting no time in taking the fight directly to Haley on her home turf.”

In reality, the DeSantis campaign is in uncharted waters, led by a defiant candidate who insists there is still a path to victory though his team can’t identify an upcoming state he can win. His political operation is shrinking and his campaign coffers are stressed just before the primary battle becomes a more expensive, cross-country fight.

By comparison, Haley is well financed thanks to the support of the deep-pocketed Koch family operation, Americans for Prosperity Action and other wealthy backers. Far from receding, her supportive super PAC has effectively capitalized on the turmoil around DeSantis to paint his campaign as a “dumpster fire” on the airwaves.

Even if he is successful in taking out Haley, it would likely lead to Trump exiting the first five states undefeated and all the momentum that comes with that.

Trump’s candidacy, though, faces an unprecedented spring and summer leading up the GOP’s convention in Milwaukee as the cases against him potentially move into their next phases. The outcome of those trials could test whether Republican voters would indeed nominate a convicted felon, and DeSantis intends to stick around the race to find out.

DeSantis warned on Tuesday that Trump’s legal issues would be a liability during his New Hampshire town hall with CNN.

“If Donald Trump is the nominee, the election will revolve around all these legal issues, his trials, perhaps convictions if he goes to trials and loses there and about things like January 6,” DeSantis said. “We’re going to lose if voters are making a decision based on that. We don’t want it to be a referendum on those issues. We want it to be a referendum on the country going in the wrong direction and a candidate like me being a president that can reverse the decline.”

Inside DeSantis’ political orbit, skeptics of this strategy remain, with some hoping the governor comes to realize his political future would be best served by finding an off ramp to exit the race.

“What is the survival plan for four months while you’re waiting for him to get convicted? Whose giving money as you wait,” one person close to his political operation said. “Is the plan to hang in the race, go back to Tallahassee and campaign sporadically?”

“What happens when you do that and then the primary comes to Florida and Trump kicks the sh*t out of you there? Can you ever recover from that?”

Adjusting to the current financial picture, Never Back Down – which once plotted an expansive 18-state operation before pulling back – is reassessing its footprint yet again. A source close to the group told CNN it had laid off the organization’s Super Tuesday operation, some key senior staff and the team focused on Nevada. The source indicated staffers were unaware the layoffs were coming.

Another official familiar with the super PAC’s plans said the organization “is evaluating and paring down several third-party consultants, vendors, and some staff who had been focused on different efforts to ensure our core mission continues to be executed over the long haul.”

In a statement to CNN, Never Back Down CEO Scott Wagner said the super PAC would continue to host events for DeSantis in early nominating states and the organization had “mobilized several members of our robust Iowa team over to the other early primary states to help in these efforts.” Never Back Down will hold three events in New Hampshire on Friday featuring DeSantis.

Still, after watching DeSantis’ event in Hampton, Osbourne said he didn’t see any sign that DeSantis was giving up on the race.

“I get the distinct vibe that he does love being the underdog,” Osborne said. “If you go to the sportsbook, they’re not putting odds in his favor. But I think he sees the opportunity and he knows he’s the only guy who can do it.”

CNN’s Kit Maher, Jeff Zeleny, Jessica Dean and Boris Sanchez contributed to this story.

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