Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Twitter announcement for president was slammed by critics Thursday not just for its technical glitches but also as an awkward, wonky way to introduce the governor to the country.
“DeSantis is off to a disastrous start,” longtime political consultant Mac Stipanovich said, calling the Twitter Spaces meltdown a serious misfire. “You only get one chance to make a first impression, and it was not one of confidence and competence that he was trying to project.”
DeSantis defended the event, telling radio host Hugh Hewitt it started a “buzz” and was “the biggest story in the world yesterday.” His campaign also claimed it raised $1 million in the first hour afterward.
But a new poll released Thursday shows former President Donald Trump’s lead over DeSantis was only growing.
“He is obviously not the front-runner,” said J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “With this launch, he needed things to go basically about as perfectly as they could. I don’t think that was the case.”
Anyone familiar with Twitter Spaces knows how clunky it is, Coleman said.
“I assume (DeSantis is) fairly popular with Republicans,” he said. “I don’t think it would have been that hard for him to fill up a room for a traditional announcement.”
A rumored kickoff event in DeSantis’ hometown of Dunedin, however, was reportedly canceled. His in-person campaign will instead begin in Iowa on Tuesday, where a new Emerson College poll showed him with a 42 percentage point deficit to Trump.
The DeSantis campaign did not return a request for comment.
Even if everything had gone off as planned, however, an audio-only event was an unusual choice to kick off a presidential run.
Kevin Cate, a campaign adviser to Democratic candidates including Nikki Fried, Jane Castor and Barack Obama, said the one thing you want to have control over in any launch is the visuals.
“To put it in the understatement of the year, his voice is not his biggest asset,” Cate said of DeSantis. “Not only did he catastrophically fail at Twitter, he left out half the electorate at home.”
Stipanovich said an argument could be made that the concept was more innovative and up-to-date than a traditional broadcast news rollout and was a way to make DeSantis look more exciting. But it ultimately failed, he said.
Stipanovich added he also didn’t understand what the thinking was behind DeSantis sharing airtime with Twitter owner Elon Musk, as well as why a three-minute video released afterward jumped between images of DeSantis and Musk.
“I would want the entire event to be about my candidate,” he said.
Once the conversation finally started, its esoteric tone also was a surprising choice, experts said.
The event included participants such as Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University professor and participant in DeSantis’ COVID panels who openly called for herd immunity through natural infection, and Chris Rufo, the conservative anti-critical race theory activist who the governor appointed to the board of New College in Sarasota.
It also featured repeated praise of Musk and Twitter, a discussion of the “Chevron deference” legal theory that a court should defer to an agency’s interpretation of laws, and ended on a lengthy discussion of cryptocurrency, including BitCoin and DogeCoin.
DeSantis and others also repeatedly referenced DEI and ESG without much explaining what they are. DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives and ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Governance frameworks for businesses, both of which DeSantis vociferously opposes.
“It certainly feeds into Trump’s criticism that DeSantis, his campaign and his followers are too online right now,” Coleman said.
Cate said he blames the way his handlers have isolated DeSantis from real people.
“He’s been in a padded echo chamber since 2019, and it shows,” Cate said.
His followups to the event on Thursday didn’t do much to change that perception, including answering a Fox News question on Ukraine by talking about gender ideology and telling radio host Clay Travis he would be “aggressive in issuing pardons” to convicted Jan. 6 rioters he believed were “politically targeted.”
The glitches, though, will continue to be the biggest legacy of the rollout if DeSantis’ campaign isn’t successful.
The much-hyped Twitter Spaces event with Musk was scheduled to start at 6 p.m., but it began late and quickly devolved into dead air interspersed with voices cutting in and out. “It’s just going to keep crashing, huh?” one voice said.
Musk ended the Space, entitled “Preparing to Launch…” after 21 minutes. It restarted eventually on businessman David Sacks’ account but continued to cut out occasionally.
The number of listeners dropped as the Space switched over, with less than half of the 600,000 who had been waiting at the beginning ultimately tuning in.
Musk blamed the “massive amount of people online” for the outage, claiming the “servers are straining.”
But other online events have brought in much more participants without crashing. Examples cited in reports include the 2017 live-streamed birth of April the Giraffe, which saw more than 1 million views, to Fortnite video game concerts and weekly Dungeons & Dragons discussions.
Both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump were quick to mock Wednesday’s announcement online.
Biden linked to his fundraising website, writing, “This link works,” while Trump wrote on his Truth Social media site, “Wow! The DeSanctus TWITTER launch is a DISASTER! His whole campaign will be a disaster. WATCH!”
Trump later questioned whether DeSantis’ launch was “fatal,” and reposted videos of a rocket labeled “DeSantis” collapsing and a faux Twitter Spaces gathering of DeSantis, Hitler, the Devil, and Dick Cheney.
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