The $17 million Hail Mary DeSantis hopes will finally bury Trump

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has faced wave after wave of bad news, as his campaign receives negative press and his polling continues to languish well below that of former President Donald Trump. But his super PAC is hedging its bets on a new strategy his camp is hoping can turn all of that around, according to Politico – a texting campaign.

According to the report, Never Back Down PAC's latest tactic is part of a series of aggressively placed advertisements known as the "surge" hitting voters in early states like Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada, with voters in some of these areas receiving text message links to the ads — at a $17 million cost.

The group says it's mined data to identify which of millions of phone numbers are owned by Republican primary voters, and it's targeting just them.

“Sifting through 330 million consumers to find 34.7 million Republican primary voters is a Herculean task,” Never Back Down top strategist Jeff Roe told Politico.

“You can only do that with a deep commitment to data. And you can’t do that without understanding exactly how to apply that directly to voters when you can no longer do it in the simplest and easiest way possible in the past.”

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This data is being used to launch an even bigger campaign that will also employ texting, and is intended to directly reach voters in ways that their previous campaigns have not. And meanwhile, the super PAC is monitoring survey results to try to tease out which of the messages they're sending shift public opinion.

“Dedicating 5-10 percent of a campaign’s voter-contact budget to testing would pay exponential dividends in how the remaining 90-95 percent is spent. If used properly, it can certainly be an edge a campaign needs to claw out a win,” said Scott Tranter, who previously ran Florida Sen. Marco Rubio's 2016 presidential campaign.

This comes after a series of setbacks for the DeSantis.

Recently, the DeSantis campaign came under fire for defending a vehemently anti-LGBTQ attack ad against Trump, and for manhandling a 15-year-old in New Hampshire who had critical questions for the candidate.