We get it. Not everyone is a people person. Some folks—like Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and war criminal-cum-cat painter George W. Bush—have a natural talent for glad-handing politics, while others, um … don’t. But not only is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis not a people person, he’s not even really a mammal’s mammal. Or a sentient being’s sentient being, for that matter. And it doesn’t help that he perpetually looks as if Chuck Grassley just offered to wax his undercarriage in exchange for a reach-around and a bag of Ruffles.
But DeSantis’ campaign—which increasingly looks like that time Kevin Malone brought his famous chili in to work for the whole office to enjoy—isn’t about to fold just because its candidate has the personality of a ChatGPT bot that’s been singularly programmed to write white nationalist potato salad recipes. In fact, they’ve spent $100 million on an army of pro-Ron canvassers who are paid above minimum wage to pretend to like him. And as The Washington Post recently discovered, that money hasn’t always been well spent.
With his foot on a front porch of a stately home in Charleston, S.C., a canvasser for a $100 million field effort supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) vented on July 7 about a homeowner who he said had told him to get off his lawn.
Speaking on his phone while wearing a T-shirt with “DESANTIS” in big letters and a lanyard representing the Never Back Down super PAC, he used lewd remarks to describe what he would tell the homeowner to do to him. “And I’m a little stoned, so I don’t even care,” he added, holding materials and appearing to wait for another homeowner to come to the door.
The outburst — seen on a Ring doorbell video recording that was shared with The Washington Post — led to the canvasser’s dismissal this week, according to an official from Never Back Down. It highlighted a potential risk of the unprecedented effort by DeSantis donors to flood early primary states with thousands of paid door knockers armed with high-tech tools to win support one conversation at a time.
Oh, my, that’s sad. And The Post’s story dropped around the same time DeSantis’ campaign announced it was 86-ing several staffers in a cost-cutting move—and as the candidate himself counters his campaign’s canvassing efforts by turning off Iowa voters one awkward encounter at at time.
The Post notes that Never Back Down, in contrast with more traditional campaign field efforts, is staffed with paid workers instead of volunteers. The jobs are advertised at $20 to $22 an hour and new hires are trained in Iowa over a period of eight days. The canvassers are “coached not to speak to reporters, to move on from homes with die-hard Trump supporters, to respect ‘No Trespassing’ signs and to pay little mind to ‘No Soliciting’ signs.”
One former canvasser who spoke to The Post on condition of anonymity—because Never Back Down had “threatened to go after us if we talked to the media after we left the organization”—said many of the folks who trained for the work were there only for a paycheck. (The employee had previously been fired for not being in the right location during the workday.)
“They told us not to say that we are here for the money but we are here because we love Ron DeSantis,” said the person.
Hmm, right. Well, pretty much every actor in the country is on strike right now. They could supplement their incomes during these uncertain times by pretending to love Ron DeSantis, too! Just imagine next year’s Academy Awards if all of Hollywood takes advantage. They’ll be handing out honorary Oscars like Tic Tacs.
To be fair, Never Back Down officials say their campaign has been a big success. According to the group, its canvassers have conducted 163,704 conversations at 713,732 doors and have collected 7,246 “Commit to Caucus” cards for DeSantis in Iowa.
“By the end of the month our canvassers will have knocked on more than 1 million doors,” stated Kristin Davison, COO for Never Back Down. “Every day these canvassers have thousands of conversations, identifying supporters who we’ll later mobilize, as well as identifying undecided voters who get specific follow up based on the conversation at the door.”
But when your supposed “grassroots” campaigners are literally on grass while campaigning—and you’ve already begun burnishing a reputation as an inauthentic candidate who eats pudding with his fingers and laughs like an alien replicant—there’s undoubtedly some danger in outsourcing your outreach efforts to a phalanx of clockwatchers who couldn’t care less about your campaign.
“They’re just hiring people who don’t even support the candidate. They don’t believe in the candidate,” said Barbara Comstock, a former GOP congresswoman who’s used paid canvassers in her campaigns. “Particularly when you’re in a competitive primary, you want someone who is local and knows the state and knows the politics of the state, knows the people, knows who is who. You want people who can speak credibly about a candidate.”
Or people who at least, you know, don’t do this:
UPDATE: Here’s video of the “I’m a little stoned” dude doing his thing. [h/t Merlin196360]
Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.
