DeSantis allies urge him to defend Trump at Republican debate
By Gram Slattery
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis should defend former President Donald Trump at the first Republican primary debate on Wednesday and go on the attack against campaign rival Vivek Ramaswamy, the main outside spending group supporting his candidacy wrote in a series of memos.
The memos, commissioned by pro-DeSantis group Never Back Down, were posted on the website of Axiom Strategies, a major political consultancy, over the last several days. Their existence was first reported by The New York Times.
Outside spending groups, known as super PACs, are generally not permitted to discuss strategy with the campaigns they support, so publicly posting or otherwise leaking memos are a way for Never Back Down to communicate with the DeSantis campaign.
The DeSantis campaign, Never Back Down and Axiom did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Axiom Strategies is closely linked to Never Back Down, and much of the firm's top brass plays a role at the super PAC.
«Vivek’s job on Aug 23 is to introduce himself and his vision to the American people. These boring, canned attack lines from a robotic candidate doesn’t change that,» Ramaswamy's campaign said in a statement.
In addition to a memorandum suggesting strategies for the upcoming debate, which DeSantis allies see as vital for jump-starting his stalled campaign, Never Back Down posted hundreds of pages of detailed polling data from Iowa and New Hampshire, which play an outsized role in the Republican nominating process as they are the first and second states to vote, respectively.
One of the memos suggests DeSantis should attack Democratic President Joe Biden three to five times and that he should take a «sledge-hammer» to
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