It’s been a slog in Jacksonville. Last week, the DeSantis campaign revealed that it had defenestrated nearly a dozen staffers from its bloated Tallahassee operation after burning through most of the $20 million it raised last quarter, primarily from donors who have already maxed out. As I recently reported, the insular Ron-and-Casey family office likely wasted millions of dollars by overspending on in-house campaign infrastructure that should have been outsourced to third parties. But they clearly erred by over-hiring, too, among other sins. 

By Tuesday, nearly a third of the campaign’s 90-ish-person staff had been let go. It’s the sort of highly-visible, impossible-to-ignore early-stage setback that has confirmed the fears and frustrations of Republican donors and operatives, alike, that DeSantis was untested nationally or naive or over confident or quasi-human. It’s also inflamed the sort of media feeding frenzy that campaigns strive to avoid: the time-honored, knives-are-coming-out news cycle, where everyone blames everyone else (anonymously, of course!) for the failures of the principal.