As his group knocks on doors to the north, the founder of a Ron DeSantis-aligned super PAC dropped into Massachusetts on Wednesday to meet with potential donors, offering an early sign of the state’s importance as a checkbook-rich stop for candidates and surrogates alike.
Kenneth Cuccinelli, a former Virginia attorney general who served as a homeland security official in the Trump administration, held court in a Boston Marriott Newton ballroom Wednesday afternoon, simultaneously pitching his PAC, called Never Back Down, and his preferred candidate in DeSantis to more than a dozen conservative activists and businesspeople.
Those in attendance described Cuccinelli as drawing a contrast between the Florida governor and Trump, describing the former president as someone who “was not really specific on getting results. He wasn’t big on getting a lot of things done,” said John MacDonald, a former state Senate candidate and Republican activist who works for Rick Green, an auto parts executive and one-time congressional candidate who organized Wednesday’s event.
“Most of these people had voted for the former president in the past,” said MacDonald, who, like Cuccinelli, declined to identify who else was in the room to hear Cuccinelli’s pitch. “There was a lot of discussion of how viable the former president would be in a general election versus the primary. That was a really dominant part of it.”
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Cuccinelli’s group has foreshadowed plans to actively engage voters in several battleground states, including New Hampshire, which holds the second contest in the GOP presidential nominating process. DeSantis and Trump are each scheduled to appear in the state Tuesday morning — DeSantis in Hollis and Trump at the New Hampshire Federation of Republican Women’s Lilac Luncheon in Concord — offering a split-screen view of two candidates.
The DeSantis super PAC is pushing into activities typically conducted not by a PAC but by a candidate’s own campaign. Cuccinelli touted plans to spend $100 million on the voter-outreach effort that, while he’s technically barred from coordinating with DeSantis, is designed to help bankroll ground organizing, leaving DeSantis campaign free to focus on other aspects of campaigning.
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“That,” Cuccinelli said, “allows the governor to get into a much more retail mode.” The super PAC’s ground game efforts include New Hampshire, one of four early-voting states where Cuccinelli said the super PAC workers have already knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors.
“We’re not anti-Trump, we’re pro-DeSantis,” Cuccinelli told the Globe later of his pitch at Wednesday’s event. “We were pursuing two goals: grassroots and political support, and also introducing the PAC to potential donors of significant size.”
Massachusetts is hardly fertile ground for Republican support in a general election, but it’s long been a fund-raising draw for GOP and Democratic candidates. DeSantis himself raised money on Nantucket last August, while Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, a Republican, swung through for a series of fund-raisers in late May, including one hosted by Green.
Green, too, has donated to Cuccinelli’s group, MacDonald said, though he declined to say how much beyond saying it is likely in the “six figures.”
Matt Stout can be reached at matt.stout@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @mattpstout.