Ted Cruz’s 2016 Campaign Crew Is Backing DeSantis Over Trump

As Donald Trump prepared to take the stage to accept the Republican nomination at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s team fought until the bitter end to block him.

Now, many of those same people are gearing up for another attempt at stopping the former president from winning the White House.

Jeff Roe, Cruz’s 2016 campaign manager and one of the GOP’s savviest operators, has signed on to run Never Back Down, a super PAC created to back Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ bid to defeat Trump for the 2024 GOP nomination.

And he’s brought on many top Cruz alumni. The Never Back Down team includes David Polyansky, Cruz’s 2016 Iowa caucus guru and former chief of staff; Chris Wilson, a top Cruz pollster, will run polling and analytics for the group, which was founded by former Virginia Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who was a top Cruz surrogate in 2016.

The news of their joining the organization comes shortly after Texas Rep. Chip Roy, Cruz’s first Senate chief of staff and a close ally, became the first member of Congress to publicly endorse DeSantis for president earlier this month.

“Talent seeks talent,” Roy told VICE News on Tuesday. “I don’t think it should surprise anybody that people that worked hard and were aligned to getting Senator Ted Cruz elected to the Senate or to make a really strong run at the White House would be similarly aligned with a guy like Ron DeSantis: [He’s] smart, conservative, principled, stands up for what he believes in.”

Other influential Cruz 2016 backers appear likely to support DeSantis this time around, too.

Adam Laxalt—DeSantis’ closest friend in politics, his former roommate, and former Nevada Republican attorney general, was a Cruz supporter in 2016—has appeared at private DeSantis events this year after DeSantis helped with his unsuccessful 2022 Senate campaign.

Cruz was the last man standing besides Trump in the ugly 2016 GOP primary, and won some of the few state-level victories anyone scored against Trump that year. He came in first in Iowa’s caucuses, carried three states on Super Tuesday a month later, and picked off wins in four caucus states after that—largely because Roe, Polyansky and the rest of his team out-organized Trump with superior ground game operations in those states. Cruz’s April win in Wisconsin was Trump’s final primary loss.

Facing impossible odds, a group of anti-Trump Republicans composed mostly of Cruz backers nonetheless tried to block Trump’s nomination on the floor of 2016 Republican National Convention that summer.

Utah Sen. Mike Lee, one of Cruz’s top 2016 surrogates, helped Cuccinelli lead that floor fight against Trump’s nomination. Days later, Cruz was booed off the stage when he told delegates to “vote your conscience.”

While he hasn’t endorsed for 2024, Lee attended a recent DeSantis fundraising retreat in Florida. When VICE News asked him to comment for this story, Lee declined to talk on the record.

Cruz hasn’t said who he’ll back in 2024, though he’s stressed that he thinks a competitive primary is a good thing. A Cruz spokesman declined to comment for this story.

Most of those working at the new super PAC have worked with Roe previously.

But they and the others who backed Cruz and are now embracing DeSantis hail from the right wing of the GOP, and their reservations about Trump mostly stemmed from his caustic, selfish personality and lack of ideological grounding. They don’t disagree with Trumpism—it’s Trump himself they take issue with.

Most of them fell in line while Trump was president, though. Cruz himself finally bent to donor pressure and endorsed Trump late in the 2016 primary, and became a loud Trump cheerleader throughout his presidency, right up through his vote to reject President-elect Joe Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021. Cuccinelli went on to serve various appointments under Trump in the Department of Homeland Security. Laxalt chaired Trump’s 2020 campaign in Nevada and pushed conspiracy theories to overturn his loss there. Lee also sought to help Trump overturn his 2020 election loss.

But that doesn’t mean Trump was ever their favorite. Many were frustrated that his selfish insistence on making everything in GOP politics about the lie that the election was stolen from him hurt them badly in the 2022 midterms—and they worry he’ll cost the GOP the White House in 2024, too.

And they see a vibrant new option that doesn’t have Trump’s baggage.

“It's time for a new generation. I’m sick of the Baby Boomers. They've been around for a while and it's time for something different,” Roy said, before touting DeSantis’ landslide victory in 2022.

Alice Stewart worked on the Cruz campaign, and said that rational Republicans “want to see a candidate that espouses the policies of Donald Trump that isn’t the dumpster fire of Donald Trump.”

Stewart said she’d talked to some of DeSantis’ recent hires and had heard them repeat the phrase “the image befitting the president” in describing why they’d embraced him over Trump.

“DeSantis represents the image they want to get behind,” she told VICE News. “They see him as a winning personality not just for the primary but the general election.”

Trump lashed out when he heard the news that Roe was joining DeSantis.

“Ron DeSanctimonious’ Political Consultants are failing to rescue his sinking ship,” he posted on his social media platform Truth Social last Thursday. “He can’t move without them, it takes him forever to make a decision, and they’re charging him and his Globalist Donors a fortune.”

Not everyone from Cruzworld is jumping to DeSantis. Jason Miller, Cruz’s 2016 campaign spokesman, famously jumped to Trump in the general election and has never looked back—he’s a top staffer on Trump’s 2024 campaign. And Cruz’s former Senate chief of staff, Paul Teller, is now working for former Vice President Mike Pence’s pre-campaign operation after working for Pence in the Trump administration.

And as Never Back Down’s team stressed, they’re not all Cruz alumni either. 

“Look around the HQ and it’s full of people from every campaign. Just the best in each area,” one former Cruz staffer who’s involved in the DeSantis super PAC texted VICE News.

Matt Wolking, who’s on Never Back Down’s communications team, was a 2020 Trump campaign spokesman, and worked with Roe to help elect Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin in 2021, and worked for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s Senate office in 2016. Phil Cox, who has been helping DeSantis’ political efforts, worked for former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s super PAC in the 2016 primary.

Never Back Down spokeswoman Errin Perrine worked for Cruz’s Senate office—but only after serving as Trump’s 2020 campaign communications director.

Chris Jankowski, the organization’s executive director, spent most of the last decade running the Republican State Leadership Committee, which focuses on state legislative races. He also helped the Judicial Crisis Network’s advocacy work to help Trump’s first two Supreme Court picks, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, win Senate confirmation.

“Just as Gov. DeSantis built a diverse coalition to win a landslide re-election in 2022, this is a team that brings together diverse campaign, political, grassroots, and Hill experience. The way you win is by bringing the best players available to your team, and that is exactly what Never Back Down is doing,” Jankowski told VICE News in a statement. “2024 is not 2016 – it’s a new day in the Republican Party.”

But it’s clear that many of the conservatives who embraced Cruz over Trump eight years ago because they didn’t trust his conservatism and disliked his personality in 2016 are ready for a rematch.

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