DeSantis Is Already a Presidential Candidate. He Just Hasn’t Said It.

A campaign office is opened. A paid campaign staff is in place. Campaign fundraisers are about to make calls to donors.

For Ron DeSantis, all that remains for his presidential campaign launch is the announcing. 

The Florida governor for more than a year has been positioning himself to run for president, but the effort didn’t reach the official point of no return until Monday, when his staff moved into its new headquarters in Tallahassee, according to an NBC report and three Republicans with knowledge of DeSantis’s operations who spoke to The Messenger on condition of anonymity.

“If he signs a lease for campaign office space and spends more than $5,000 to run for president, DeSantis has to file a statement of candidacy with the [Federal Elections Commission] within 15 days,” said Kenneth Gross, a top election-law attorney.

“You become a candidate once you spend or receive $5,000 for your campaign, even if you haven’t registered yet.”

The deadline to file: May 30.

Five days before, on May 25, campaign fundraisers are being summoned by DeSantis to Miami to make calls from a phone-banking room to solicit campaign contributions from individual donors, according to two of the people with knowledge about the unofficially announced campaign.

Another insider said the unofficially announced campaign is still finalizing plans for an official but anticlimactic event launch after the phone-banking effort.

“If anyone tells you today where and when the launch event is going to be, they’re probably lying to you anyway,” the insider said. “The media cares about this a lot more than voters and you guys look pretty stupid obsessing about it. Newsflash: DeSantis is actually a candidate for president. Duh.”

DeSantis has spent months flying around the country for thinly veiled presidential-type campaign events, many in early states, prompting former President Donald Trump, the frontrunner in the primary, to tell The Messenger that he believes DeSantis is breaking the law, which DeSantis's political staff has denied. 

"I'm not a fan of the way that he's running. First of all, he shouldn't be running right now because he hasn't filed [official paperwork as a candidate]," Trump said. 

DeSantis’s unofficially announced campaign staff would not comment on the event, the move to its campaign office, or the document filing or the fundraising event in Miami. Politico first reported donors were going to Miami, but it didn’t specify the fundraising efforts that were described to The Messenger.

Federal campaign contributions are limited to $3,300 per cycle for each donor. These donations are nicknamed “hard money,” because it’s difficult to get individual contributors to commit that much cash. DeSantis has more than $86 million in a state political committee account — called “Friends of Ron DeSantis” — that’s filled with massive “soft money” checks from companies and big individual donors who have no contribution limits. Friends of Ron DeSantis also has thousands of small-dollar donors; 80 percent of the contributors in 2022 gave $100 or less, the committee’s website shows.

DeSantis formally relinquished control of that committee to a top ally in the Legislature, Blaise Ingoglia, who is expected to roll the money over into a federal political committee called Never Back Down, launched in March and announced it had raised $33 million, nearly all in soft money. Never Back Down has spent millions of dollars on ads, mailers and field staff in the first four early states.