Ron DeSantis just pocketed nearly $1 million from an industry he helped

Florida in Five: Five stories to read from the past week in Florida politics.

Jun 01, 2025

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Welcome to another installment of Florida in Five: Five* stories you need to read from the past week in Florida politics.

In mid-April, amid a rapidly escalating feud with Republicans in the state House of Representatives, Ron DeSantis flew to central Florida to make a surprise appearance at the Ocala Breeders’ Sales Company’s annual spring auction of two-year-old racehorses.

The Florida governor used the event to criticize legislation pushed by House GOP leaders that would have allowed Florida’s two main thoroughbred tracks — Gulfstream Park in south Florida and Tampa Bay Downs — to end all live horseracing without losing their licenses to run other lucrative gambling operations like slot machines and poker rooms.

It’s a concept known in the gambling business as “decoupling.” And it is fiercely opposed by the horseracing industry, which fears venues would abandon races entirely and turn themselves into casinos.

Speaking from the auctioneer’s podium, DeSantis assured the assembled crowd that he was on their side on “this issue with the horses.”

“You can count me as one that is not going to look favorably on legislation that’s going to decimate any of our industries,” the governor added — a comment that industry boosters interpreted as a pledge to veto a decoupling bill should the Legislature pass one.

An excerpt from House Bill 105, which failed to pass this session.

DeSantis’ appearance in Ocala was organized in part by Mike Repole, a billionaire who made his fortune selling beverages like Vitaminwater and Bodyarmor sports drinks and who now owns a thoroughbred racing stable that has produced more than $57 million in lifetime earnings.

Repole was triumphant after the visit. “I know the governor very well,” the billionaire said, according to the Thoroughbred Daily News. “I feel pretty confident saying decoupling ended today.”

But the governor had reason to feel good, too: Just one week later, records show, DeSantis’ personal political committee cashed a $300,000 check from one of Repole’s companies.

That’s not all. Three days later, DeSantis deposited a $100,000 donation from Mandy Pope, the sister of a Republican megadonor who owns more than 100 horses herself, and a combined $50,000 from former Churchill Downs Chairman Will Farish and his wife.

Pope and Farish also helped get the governor to Ocala that day.

That’s still not all. Around the same time, DeSantis’ political committee took $100,000 each from the Thoroughbred Racing Initiative LLC, an industry group fighting the decoupling legislation; Victoriam Farm, a new racing stable founded by Gainesville apartment developer and DeSantis fundraiser Kelly Mahoney; and Spendthrift Farm, a stallion farm in Kentucky that has produced Kentucky Derby and Breeders Cup winners.

Altogether, records show that Ron DeSantis raised at least $877,500 from racing industry interests in the roughly two weeks around his appearance at the horse auction in Ocala — and his decision to put his thumb on the scale for the industry in Tallahassee. That helped to doom the decoupling legislation, which ultimately failed to pass this spring.

To be sure, there are rich donors on the other side of this debate, too. Records show that Gulfstream Park — the Hallandale Beach racetrack owned by a Canadian gambling conglomerate that lobbied hard for the decoupling legislation — showered at least $100,000 on key lawmakers just before this year’s session began.

But this is also part of a longer and larger pattern with Ron DeSantis, who was caught auctioning himself off to the highest bidder — or to anyone willing to pay $25,000 for a 10-minute meeting or $100,000 for a round of golf — almost from the moment he first moved into the Governor’s Mansion six years ago.

Just one recent example: Earlier this year, his administration handed a multimillion-dollar tax break to Philip Morris International after the Big Tobacco company contributed $500,000 to the governor’s political committee.

But perhaps more than anything else, DeSantis’ decision to help the horseracing industry on an issue he didn’t seem all that interested in himself — “this issue with the horses,” he called it — calls to mind a similar situation last spring, when Florida’s anti-drug governor chose to veto a bill that would have imposed strict regulations on the sale of high-inducing hemp products.

Immediately after killing that bill, DeSantis and the Republican Party of Florida raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars from hemp industry investors and businesses who had been lobbying against the legislation.

In that case, leaked text messages obtained by CBS News Miami later revealed a seemingly explicit quid pro quo. “Our lobby team made promises to rally some serious funding to stand with him on this,” a hemp industry representative wrote in one of the messages. “We have to pay $5 million to keep our end of the veto,” a hemp executive wrote in another message.

This transactional history is something to keep in mind in the coming weeks now that DeSantis has issued yet another veto sought by deep-pocketed special interests.

The governor last week spiked House Bill 6017, which would have repealed Florida’s notorious “Free Kill” law. It’s a kind of loophole in the state’s medical malpractice laws that limits the ability of parents of adult children — or adult children of single parents — to win monetary damages from doctors and hospitals whose negligence leads to the death of a loved one.

The bill that would have finally ended Florida’s Free Kill law passed the Legislature by overwhelming margins: 104-6 in the state House and 33-4 in the senate.

But the governor vetoed it anyway — siding instead with Big Business lobbying groups like the Florida Chamber of Commerce and Associated Industries of Florida, whose top funders include insurance companies such as State Farm and healthcare corporations like HCA Healthcare.

The question now becomes, will Ron DeSantis cash in on this veto, too?

*To paraphrase Barbossa, five is more what you’d call a guideline than an actual rule.

Excellent investigative reporting Jason. Linking donations to positions is the way to do it. Quid Pro Quo is not in the interest of the public, regardless of the party.

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Sydney Solis

Jun 1Edited

It's a vice economy--from colonialist horse racing to "lucrative gambling operations like slot machines and poker rooms." The origin of the word lucrative is profit, gain, advantage, love of gain, avarice, wealth, plunder, catch. Corruption is DeSantis's middle name, bereft of any shred of ethics but a member of the morally bankrupt Golden Calf Club du Worship the wealthy are all members of with hearts of darkness. You just know his next role will be to legalized prostitution, as DeSantis sets precedent so well. Lucifer loves filthy lucre too!

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