Starting in the weeks after he took office as Florida governor in 2019, Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis undertook a fundraising plan that allowed donors and lobbyists to pay tens of thousands of dollars to his fundraising operations to spend hours with the public official on golf courses and at sporting events in a literal “pay to play” operation, the Washington Post reports.
“I could sell golf for $50k this morning,” DeSantis’s primary fundraiser in the 2018 campaign, Heather Barker, wrote weeks after DeSantis was inaugurated as the team circulated a list of nine high-dollar prospects and their clients. The list included the sources for the fund that the targets could approach, from influential Florida residents to business owners to major corporations. One of the targets on the list was Disney, which DeSantis has targeted for state government retribution for opposing his “Don’t Say Gay” dictum.
“METHODS FOR FIRMS TO DELIVER SUPPORT: Golf, lunch, meetings, dinner, tours, events, etc. — Each have a threshold (ex. Golf $25k per person, which is a deal),” the document outlined, noting the ways wealthy donors could get in personal discussions with DeSantis to influence his policies.