Uthmeier served as a driving force behind the governor’s most high-profile moves, including sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard.
As chief of staff to Ron DeSantis, James Uthmeier served as a driving force behind several of the governor’s most high-profile moves, including when he sent migrants to Martha’s Vineyard and suspended a rogue liberal prosecutor.
In fact, documents show Uthmeier was the DeSantis administration’s point person in the effort to fly almost 50 Venezuelan migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in September 2022. Uthmeier communicated with DeSantis’s public-safety czar, Larry Keefe, via phone and text while Keefe was in Texas helping coordinate the flights.
Keefe told Uthmeier he was “back out here,” and Uthmeier responded, “Very good. You have my full support. Call anytime.” Keefe again updated Uthmeier on the day of the first flight to Martha’s Vineyard letting him know it was “Wheels up.”
Now, after yet another campaign shakeup, Uthmeier will take on a new role as DeSantis’s presidential-campaign manager, replacing Generra Peck, who will stay on as a senior strategist with the campaign.
Scott Ross, a Republican lobbyist and fundraiser in Florida, has called Uthmeier “the most consequential chief of staff and operative that Florida has seen in 20 years.”
Uthmeier has had a hand in advancing several of DeSantis’s political fights, including the governor’s feud with Disney over parental rights and the state’s passage of a six-week abortion ban.
But the appointment has raised eyebrows among those who question Uthmeier’s lack of campaign experience.
Uthmeier, a Georgetown law alum and a member of the Federalist Society, has served as DeSantis’s chief of staff since September 2021.
Before that, he worked in the governor’s office as his general counsel. He had previously spent more than two years at the U.S. Department of Commerce, where he served as a senior adviser to former commerce secretary Wilbur Ross.
A source told Politico that Uthmeier has the “trust” of DeSantis and his wife, Casey, whereas there was “managerial angst” with Peck, who had “lost [the] confidence” of the campaign team. Uthmeier reportedly conducted a review of campaign operations before the change was made.
Uthmeier became one of the top fundraisers for the campaign after its launch, helping to raise at least $423,042 in the hours after DeSantis’s official announcement, NBC reported in June. Uthmeier helped create a political fundraising program where DeSantis administration officials asked lobbyists via text to contribute money to DeSantis’s presidential campaign through a link. That link was associated with Uthmeier’s name, which contributed to making him one of DeSantis’s top early political bundlers, the report explained.
Now, Uthmeier will be on a “leave of absence” from the governor’s office while he leads the campaign.
“James Uthmeier has been one of Governor DeSantis’ top advisers for years and he is needed where it matters most: working hand in hand with Generra Peck and the rest of the team to put the governor in the best possible position to win this primary and defeat Joe Biden,” campaign communications director Andrew Romeo said in a statement.
Uthmeier struck an optimistic tone in his first statement after becoming campaign manager.
“People have written Governor DeSantis’s obituary many times,” Uthmeier wrote in a statement to the Messenger.
“From his race against establishment primary candidate Adam Putnam, to his victory over legacy media-favored candidate Andrew Gillum, to his twenty-point win over Charlie Crist, Governor DeSantis has proven that he knows how to win. He’s breaking records on fundraising and has a supporting super PAC with $100 million in the bank and an incredible ground game. Get ready.”
Meanwhile, longtime Iowa GOP operative David Polyansky will serve as deputy campaign manager, underscoring the importance of the early primary state to the campaign.
Amid the shakeup on Tuesday, the campaign announced nine new endorsements from New Hampshire officials. State representative Jordan Ulery, who is serving his ninth term in the state legislature, endorsed Trump back in April but flipped this week to support DeSantis.
“I am proud to endorse Ron DeSantis for president,” Ulery said.
“He is the conservative candidate our party needs to put the focus back on the issues and unify us with a shared vision of reversing our nation’s decline, which starts with sending Joe Biden back to his basement,” Ulery said. “From limiting government to slaying the bureaucratic state in D.C. to bringing energy prices down for families, Ron DeSantis is the candidate who will get things done for New Hampshire families and the American people.”
Ulery’s flip comes after New Hampshire state representative James Spillane made a similar switch back in June over Trump’s comments about Fox News host and former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
Former state senator Harold French, who was among the nine new endorsers, told me he supported Trump in previous cycles but has since come to find him “obnoxious as hell.”
“I decided not to go with President Trump this time for a number of reasons,” French said. “So I looked at the other candidates and I thought DeSantis is going to be the next standard bearer for the party.”
French said he has chosen not to support Trump again because he’d be a lame-duck president if he won and he’d also be fighting his own personal battles the whole time, rather than fighting for the country.
He said he is unfazed by all of the recent tumult in the DeSantis camp. “It is very early in the race,” he said, and he thinks the campaign will “settle in fine.”
“He’s getting the right people in this area, in New Hampshire,” he said.
Former New Hampshire state representative Bill Ohm told me he voted for Trump in the last two elections and still really likes him, but has chosen to support DeSantis because he believes he has a better shot at being elected.
He is drawn to DeSantis’s track record as governor, whereas Trump’s status as a “very polarizing figure” has made supporting him more difficult.
“I presently think he was a great president as a businessman,” Ohm said of Trump. “He ran the government like a business and he ran it quite well, so I give him high marks. But I think . . . the kind of insulting approach to different people I think is causing some unforced errors.”
He underscored how finicky New Hampshire voters can be, and said even one day after endorsing DeSantis, he attended a Zoom meeting with Asa Hutchinson, whom he found to be a “very impressive” candidate. Ohm sent the former Arkansas governor a $10 donation because he wants to see him on the primary ballot, though he was clear that he still supports DeSantis.
With just five months remaining until the Iowa caucuses, several of the candidates will return to the Hawkeye State this weekend to participate in “Fair-Side” chats with governor Kim Reynolds. DeSantis plans to participate, while Trump does not.
Nikki Haley is also among the candidates who will appear at the state fair this weekend. In recent days she has come out swinging, saying she’s over Trump’s drama in the wake of his third indictment.
She also took aim at Senator Tommy Tuberville’s Pentagon nomination blockade, despite saying she agrees with his criticism of the Department of Defense’s abortion policy.
“Have we gotten so low that this is how we have to go about stopping it?” Haley told Hugh Hewitt. “I just think it shouldn’t get to this point.”
Around NR
• Rich Lowry writes about the largely unrecognized honor of Mike Pence, who did the “honorable and constitutionally correct thing” on January 6 but has been rewarded by Trump’s inveighing against him and declining approval ratings in the party. The row with Trump, unless the dynamic of the 2024 race changes, will further push Pence into the minority non-Trump wing of the party:
This probably won’t work out for him in 2024. But at a time when Republicans are putting a high value — at least in their rhetoric — on speaking the truth and showing courage, Pence is really doing it.
• Dan McLaughlin offers an argument against the suggestion that DeSantis must say the 2020 election was rigged in order to win the GOP nomination:
If DeSantis runs a campaign built around the 2020 election, it won’t matter if he wins the nomination or not — Joe Biden will be reelected. DeSantis has his own message about why he thinks the 2020 election was poorly managed in other states by contrast to how Florida runs elections, but by giving answers intended to disarm the issue and pivot to other topics, he’s showing that he does know what time it is — specifically, what year it is. It’s not 2020 anymore, and you can’t win elections by pretending that it is.
• After DeSantis offered a “surprisingly direct and adversarial” response to a question about the legitimacy of Trump’s claims about the 2020 election and then later drew attention to his work as governor, rather than getting bogged down in Trump legal drama, Noah Rothman suggests the governor would do well to exhibit more of that behavior:
It may be premature at this stage of the race to remind Republican voters in no uncertain terms that he lost fair and square, but it had to happen eventually. None of Trump’s challengers will succeed the former president as leader of the Republican Party by arguing that Trump is effectively the GOP’s incumbent. If Republican primary voters are going to reject alternatives to Trump because they failed to properly endorse the idea that he was cheated out of his rightful victory in 2020, they might as well hang it up now.
• In the case of indictments for Trump, three is probably better than one, for the purposes of the former president’s GOP primary ambitions, that is. Judson Berger writes:
But in the context of the primary race, whether the latest charges hold up or not, the pile-on achieves the effect Trump aims for whenever controversy surrounds him — a cloud so swollen with allegations and counterclaims that the blot can confirm whatever voters already think about this world-historical martyr or felon. The needle doesn’t move.
• Noah Rothman calls out a misleading New York Times poll that “set out to establish a false binary” by asking Republican voters if they were more likely to support a candidate who “focuses on defeating radical ‘woke’ ideology in our schools, media, and culture” versus a candidate who “focuses on restoring law and order in our streets and at the border”:
It’s hardly surprising that Republicans gravitated toward the hypothetical candidate who devoted his energies to ensuring that voters would not be mugged, raped, or killed — the candidate who prioritized keeping America’s social services from becoming overtaxed by non-citizens over the one who emphasized culture-war battles. In the real world, there is no tension between these two imperatives. Every Republican candidate is committed to doing both. The distinctions between the GOP’s candidates are matters of degree and emphasis.
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