Never Back Down was the primary super PAC supporting Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s 2024 Republican presidential primary campaign — and one of the most analyzed cautionary tales of the post-Citizens United era. The group was launched in early 2023 by former Trump administration official Ken Cuccinelli, who envisioned a $269 million effort to elect DeSantis by outsourcing much of the campaign’s traditional ground operation to the super PAC. Republican strategist Jeff Roe served as chief strategist.
Never Back Down was seeded with an unusually large transfer of approximately $82.5 million from DeSantis’s Florida state political committee, a move the Campaign Legal Center alleged violated federal law. Other major donors included Las Vegas real estate developer Robert Bigelow, who gave more than $20 million before later expressing buyer’s remorse.
The PAC’s collapse during late 2023 became one of the most extensively reported political stories of the cycle. Multiple CEOs cycled through the organization in a matter of weeks. Internal conflicts between Roe’s team and DeSantis loyalists culminated in a near-physical altercation at a Never Back Down board meeting, the firing of Roe’s lieutenants, and the creation of a parallel pro-DeSantis super PAC called Fight Right. By the time DeSantis withdrew from the race in January 2024, the experiment in outsourcing major campaign functions to a super PAC was widely considered a failure. Never Back Down is included in this directory as a defining case study in how super PAC-driven campaigns can — and often do — go wrong.
OpenSecrets profile: Searchable as “Never Back Down” at OpenSecrets