Enthusiasm among wealthy DeSantis donors is quickly crumbling. They find a range of issues alarming, according to an online group chat that Rolling Stone reviewed. One of them was his absence when a rain of 'Biblical proportions' slammed into his state.
Via Rolling Stone:
"What the fuck is wrong with RD?" one participant wrote after Desantis did not curtail his out-of-state publicity tour to return home amid massive flooding in the Fort Lauderdale area.
Another participant demanded to know who in the group could get in contact with Desantis most quickly to complain.
Republican mega-donor Thomas Peterffy told the Financial Times that he, and a "bunch of friends," are pausing plans to fund DeSantis'a potential 2024 presidential campaign because of the Florida Governor's stance on abortion and his enthusiasm for banning books in classrooms.
And then there are DeSantis's comments about Russia's bloody invasion of Ukraine.
And it's not just skittish donors like Richard Uihlein or Thomas Peterffy, who went public with his complaints last week. Several other top donors to DeSantis were livid about the governor referring to the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine as a "territorial dispute," with at least one major donor calling DeSantis to urge a walk-back, a source with knowledge of the outreach and another person briefed on it say. "My understanding is that the message was: 'If we wanted a fucking MAGA candidate, we would donate to Donald Trump,'" the second source says.
Many of DeSantis's fans think he can take on Donald Trump, but his donors want him to stop being such a "damn wimp" with the former President's attacks.
And the collective unease is spilling out into the public. "Of course it's not a secret…I don't even know if I'd call it an open secret anymore. It's just something everybody knows about," one longtime Republican moneyman and donor to DeSantis described to Rolling Stone, citing fresh "nervousness" and "panic" within the elite communities of DeSantis mega-donors and high-profile backers.
Maybe, just maybe, voters don't care about DeSantis's attack on wokeism, which is the weirdest platform ever for a serious candidate to run on.
