DeSantis to meet campaign donors in Miami after announcing $15 million summer cash haul
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is set to attend a high-dollar fundraiser in Miami on Thursday night during a campaign swing through his home state.
The Miami fundraiser starts at $3,300 per person, with tickets to a VIP roundtable going for $11,600 a head, according to a copy of the invitation obtained by the Miami Herald. The gathering will be hosted by several Florida Republican luminaries, including Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuñez, former state House Speaker José Oliva, Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, Jr. and DeSantis’ campaign manager James Uthmeier.
The roundtable is slated to start at 7 p.m. on Thursday, with the general reception scheduled to begin an hour later. The invitation doesn’t make clear the exact location of the fundraiser.
A spokesperson for DeSantis’ campaign declined to comment.
Earlier in the day, DeSantis is set to hold a campaign event in Tampa, veering from his usual schedule which has focused heavily on early primary and caucus states like Iowa and South Carolina.
DeSantis’ support in his home state runs deep. While most of Florida’s Republican congressional delegation has endorsed the governor’s chief GOP rival, former President Donald Trump, for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination, DeSantis has the support of top state officials and the vast majority of Republicans in the state Legislature.
The Miami fundraiser also comes as DeSantis’ campaign touts what it says was a $15 million fundraising haul in the third quarter of the year — a cash infusion that campaign officials say has helped stabilize DeSantis’ presidential operation after early financial red flags.
Despite raising roughly $20 million in the first six weeks of his presidential bid, the Florida governor burned through cash at a rapid clip between late May and the end of June, according to his federal filings.
Since then, DeSantis has taken a number of steps to correct course; he fired roughly a third of his campaign staff and replaced his former campaign manager Generra Peck with Uthmeier, a trusted advisor from the Florida governor’s office.
DeSantis is also betting big on Iowa, the first-in-the-nation caucus state, believing that an early win there will show Republican voters that Trump is beatable. In announcing the $15 million fundraising haul, DeSantis’s campaign said that it would relocate a significant portion of its staff from Tallahassee to Iowa, The New York Times reported.
Still, DeSantis has a lot of ground to make up if he hopes to defeat Trump in the 2024 Republican presidential primary. The former president is leading DeSantis by more than 30 percentage points in Iowa, according to an average kept by the poll-watcher RealClearPolitics.
DeSantis and several of his Republican rivals are also expected to be in Florida again next month. The third GOP presidential debate is scheduled to take place in Miami on Nov. 8 and a handful of White House hopefuls — including Trump, DeSantis and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley — are slated to speak at the Florida Freedom Summit in Kissimmee on Nov. 4.
