Ron DeSantis put nearly all his eggs in the basket of a ‘war on woke’

Ron DeSantis at a Never Back Down campaign event in Newton, Iowa, on 2 December 2023. Photograph: Vincent Alban/Reuters

It began in a glitch-filled disaster on Twitter. It ended with a misattributed quotation on X. Just like Elon Musk’s social media platform, efforts to rebrand Ron DeSantis’s US presidential election campaign could not mask its fundamental flaws.

When in May the Florida governor announced his run during a chat with Musk on Twitter Spaces, the platform’s audio streaming feature, there were technical breakdowns that drew comparisons with one of Musk’s space rockets blowing up on the launchpad.