Ron DeSantis, continuing to struggle despite a month-long reboot of his 2024 presidential campaign, has replaced his longtime campaign manager with his Florida governor’s office chief of staff, a conservative attorney and former Trump administration official who has been behind DeSantis’ most extreme policy initiatives. The DeSantis campaign and DeSantis’ governor’s office have been revolving doors for several top aides moving between the two entities.
“In his third staff shakeup in less than a month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis replaced his embattled presidential campaign manager with one of his most trusted, and most conservative, advisers: his gubernatorial office’s chief of staff, James Uthmeier,” The Messenger first reported. “Outgoing campaign manager Generra Peck will remain as chief strategist on the campaign as part of the restructuring.”
The Messenger also reports that before making the switch Governor DeSantis used his chief of staff to help him “diagnose problems with the campaign and see if he could fix them. Ultimately, it led the governor to ask Uthmeier to take the job.” Uthmeier “took time off from his government job” to work on the campaign issues. “DeSantis’s policy director, Chris Spencer, also took time off in a volunteer capacity and reviewed the finances of the campaign.”
Uthmeier, The Messenger notes, is a member of the right-wing Federalist Society, and “has had a key role in nearly every conservative and controversial policy that built the DeSantis brand with conservatives.”
Those issues include: “DeSantis’s legal efforts to prohibit local government mask mandates, ban private business vaccine passports and reopen schools quickly in response to COVID,” “the controversial effort by DeSantis to redraw Florida’s congressional maps and eliminate a Black-held congressional seat. He also helped recruit legislative and school board candidates favorable to DeSantis’s conservative pro-business tax-cutting agenda.”
Also, “Uthmeier helped ensure that the ‘heartbeat bill’ 6-week abortion ban made it through the legislature.”
Uthmeier headed the attack against Disney during DeSantis’ push for his “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
But Uthmeier has a history of working on far-right efforts before joining DeSantis’ administration.
He was an attorney in the Trump administration’s Commerce Department, working under Secretary Wilbur Ross, and was part of the administration’s effort to add a citizenship question to the U.S. Census.
“Uthmeier wrote the memo at the request of Earl Comstock, another Trump appointee who was under pressure from Ross to figure out how to get a citizenship question onto the 2020 census forms,” NPR reported.
Later, in 2019, at the direction of Commerce Dept. attorneys as Politico reported, Uthmeier “refused to answer more than 100 questions during an interview with the House Oversight and Reform Committee that centered on the Trump administration’s controversial decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.”