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Strategists with Never Back Down have been consulting lawyers and studying precedent to see exactly how far the group can stretch the legal bounds of what tasks it can perform without tripping any legal wires. One overlooked twist in election law is that super PAC advisers can move to the campaign, so it is possible entire departments at Never Back Down could eventually join the DeSantis campaign.
The hand-in-glove efforts were on display during Mr. DeSantis’s recent trip to Iowa. After Mr. Trump canceled a rally near Des Moines, the governor decided he wanted to swoop in for a last-minute event in the area. But it wasn’t the governor’s staff that scrambled to bring people to the location but employees of the super PAC, who, working with Mr. DeSantis’s team, sent a flurry of texts and calls to assemble a crowd at Jethro’s BBQ that evening.
“On like two hours’ notice, at some local pizza joint or barbecue joint, we got like 200 people to show up,” Mr. DeSantis raved to donors on the call, which The New York Times listened to.
Despite Mr. DeSantis’s professed aversion to political consultants, particularly those who work around Washington, and his history of asking questions about what people who work for him are making, his team has anointed one of the Republican Party’s most famous consultants to oversee Never Back Down.
Mr. Roe has emerged as an unusual lightning rod, among DeSantis allies and rivals alike. His aggressive approach to both campaigning and business development was the subject of a recent Washington Post article that detailed his firm’s efforts to vacuum up ever more revenue, including from its political clients.
Mr. Trump himself obsesses over Mr. Roe, who is the only political consultant that he regularly talks about, according to people who have discussed the matter with the former president. Advisers so regularly feed him stories about the money spent on Mr. Roe’s losing campaigns that Mr. Trump has coined a nickname for him: “the kiss of death.”
Never Back Down has already spent more than $10 million on pro-DeSantis television ads this spring. The early spending has been the subject of second-guessing from some DeSantis allies as it coincided with a drop in the polls. But Never Back Down advisers defended the ads as not just propping up Mr. DeSantis before he enters the race but as part of an enormous experiment — including mail, text messaging and control groups — to study what means of communicating works against Mr. Trump.
Officials said voters were surveyed before and after in tens of thousands of interviews to determine the impact.
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