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Federal law limits donors to giving any candidate a maximum of $3,300 per election, where a primary election and a general election are considered two elections. In contrast, donors can give any amount they want to one or more super PACs that support a candidate. However, the law says that super PACs have to operate independently from political campaigns and are not permitted to coordinate with them. For example, it is illegal for a candidate to tell anyone managing a super PAC what kinds of ads on what kinds of subjects he would like. To some extent, this system has sort of worked, mostly because the people running (or funding) super PACs (like, say, Charles Koch) know what they want, run their own polls, and can pretty much operate without adult supervision.
Super PACs have to report their donors, but wealthy people can get around this easily. They can set up a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization. These groups do not have to report their donors but they have to spend half their money on "social welfare" in a general sense. Running ads warning people about the evils of wokeness would qualify as long as no candidates or elections were mentioned. A 501(c)(4) can donate to a super PAC and then the super PAC has to report that it got a donation from "Citizens Opposed to Wokeness" without any information about where that group got its money. The 501(c)(4) can spend the other half of its money on direct political ads. This is how dark money gets funneled.
Historically, the functions of the campaign and the super PACs have been different. The campaign managed the candidate's appearances, travel, contact with the media, staff, and usually the ground war. The super PACs ran ads on television, radio, and the Internet. Ron DeSantis didn't like this arrangement. His first campaign manager, Generra Peck, picked some DeSantis allies and had them set up a super PAC called Never Back Down. Then DeSantis transferred $82 million from his gubernatorial campaign to Never Back Down (because he wasn't allowed to transfer it to the campaign).
As compared to the usual model, however, DeSantis had a very different setup in mind, one that operated on the very outskirts of legality. Both the campaign and super PAC employed the same law firm. The firm and its board were full of close DeSantis allies. So far this is iffy, but legal. If DeSantis called up one of the lawyers to say: "I would like to emphasize how I tried hard in Florida to defund the public schools and use the money to fund private charter and religious schools and would like to do that nationally. Is that legal?" The lawyer might then say: "If Congress passed such a law and you signed it, I think it would be legal if no religion was favored over others." Then the next time that lawyer spoke with the CEO of the super PAC, he might describe the conversation he had with DeSantis. Two weeks later the super PAC's ads about how DeSantis wants to help charter and religious schools might appear. DeSantis would be happy since his message would be getting out and it would all be legal since he hadn't made a single phone call to anyone at the super PAC and was prepared to show his phone records to prove it.
That is edgy enough, but DeSantis went way beyond that. He wanted the super PAC to do many things that campaigns normally did, including paying for events, candidate travel, field offices, and much more. He basically wanted to integrate his campaign and super PAC into a coherent whole, just with different people at the top of each one. The legality of this is extremely iffy, but the FEC is basically toothless.
On Saturday, the whole thing fell apart. Jeff Roe, the main architect of the whole plan, resigned from Never Back Down. His departure was announced 4 hours after The Washington Post article linked to above (which describes all the backbiting going on in DeSantisland) went live. He tweeted that it was the Post's fault he was leaving because it was exposing all of DeSantis' dirty laundry to the world. Roe followed the organization's CEO, president, and chairman of the board, all of whom were dumped 2 weeks ago. The super PAC found a DeSantis ally, Phil Cox, to run the show for the moment, but the chaos over there is complete now. This doesn't happen with happy campaigns that are upbeat and expect to win.
One big donor was furious and said: "The super PAC model of winning a presidential primary, I think, is staggering, if not on the ropes. And if you're going to have a successful presidential primary campaign you need to be able to raise hard dollars." Others said the purge was DeSantis firing the pros so he could replace them with loyalists. When the Post contacted the new chairman of Never Back Down, Scott Wagner, he said: "We don't have time to indulge false narratives from those with ulterior motives." The Post's "ulterior" motive, of course, is reporting on what is actually going on in DeSantisland.
Roe is no DeSantis diehard. He runs a consulting firm, Axiom, that will work for whichever Republican is willing to pay the most. He is a veteran consultant, having worked for dozens of campaigns going back to Rick Perry's ill-fated presidential campaign in 2012. It was definitely not Roe's fault that Perry couldn't remember the names of the three cabinet departments he wanted to abolish. Nor is it Roe's fault that DeSantis is simply not a very good candidate. While having good consultants can help a campaign, in the end, "candidate quality" matters. A lot. (V)