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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis joins the 2024 race to the White House.
DeSantis’ 2024 launch plagued by Twitter glitches
We all knew he was going to join the 2024 US presidential race — it was just a matter of how and when. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis answered those questions on Wednesday night, officially throwing his hat in the ring on a Twitter Space hosted by Elon Musk.
But despite months of anticipation and preparation, things did not go smoothly. The social media app repeatedly crashed as listeners tuned in to hear the Florida governor, leaving DeSantis unable to speak for 30 minutes.
Picking Twitter was as strategic as it was unprecedented. By going to Musk ahead of Fox, DeSantis positioned himself as someone outside the political media establishment. He was perhaps trying to associate himself with Musk’s free speech persona, which could appeal to a swath of conservative voters that DeSantis needs. The governor may also believe Musk will be the next Republican kingmaker.
Once things finally started working, DeSantis’ political messaging tracked closely with the concerns of popular conservative social media users and podcast hosts. Complaints about identity politics? Check. Promises to help Bitcoin? Check. Taking aim at the “woke” movement? Check. While most Americans say the economy is their biggest concern ahead of the 2024 vote, DeSantis is clearly playing into America’s culture wars.
Fox News still got the first national TV interview, where DeSantis presented his traditional conservative platform – one we’ve seen play out in the Sunshine State. DeSantis spoke about his feuds with Disney, his crackdown on education and gender politics, and his hardline approach to immigration.
He also spoke favorably about upcoming debates on the campaign trail – an indirect challenge to Donald Trump, who has indicated he may skip the initial debates. But DeSantis lags well behind Trump in the polls and faces strategic challenges that will be hard to overcome as he battles against the former president for the GOP nomination.
Plenty of pundits have guessed which jokes and nicknames Trump might hurl at DeSantis on the campaign trail, and few will be surprised by Trump’s team making light of the Twitter Space snafus. “Glitchy. Tech issues. Uncomfortable silences. A complete failure to launch. And that’s just the candidate,” said a Trump spokesperson.
Will this strategy help or hurt DeSantis in the GOP primary? He'll need to fight the narrative that he's "too online," Eurasia Group's US Managing Director Jon Lieber says on this week's US Politics in 60 Seconds.
DeSantis struggles to connect with reporters and voters, so going to Twitter allows him to bypass the media filter and avoid contact with humans. But the Florida governor lacks Trump's offline and online charisma, not to mention the former president's unique ability to make news and raise money on social media despite the limited reach of his Truth Social account.
Outperforming the most online person ever to hold public office would be a tall order for anyone. But Lieber says it'll be even harder for DeSantis, who's not as prolific as other top Republicans and has yet to learn Trump's magic touch for doling out MAGA red meat and owning the Libs.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis during a press conference at the American Police Hall of Fame & Museum in Titusville.
Is Ron DeSantis ready for Trump?
It’s taken him time to reach the starting line, but Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is now set to make his long-anticipated entrance into the 2024 presidential race — and frontrunner and former President Donald Trump looks ready to welcome him.
Latest polls (here, here, here, and here) suggest Trump, who jumped in the race six months ago, leads DeSantis early by blowout margins. But these numbers are the least of the governor’s worries, because they can be explained away (to some extent) by the frontrunner’s big advantage in name recognition, and he still has many months to make up ground.
But DeSantis has much bigger problems with Trump. The first one is tactical. In 2016, candidate Trump made himself the central character on the Republican stage. Through force of personality and an instinct for manipulating ratings-hungry media, Trump forced his GOP rivals to respond directly to him and the challenge he posed for conventional politicians of all stripes. In the process, he divided the anti-Trump vote among several opponents and cruised to the Republican nomination.
In fact, with just seven winner-take-all states in the Republican primaries of 2016, Trump won just 45% of Republican votes but 63% of Republican delegates. As president, he changed party voting rules to enhance this advantage. In particular, he increased the number of states that hold winner-take-all primary elections from seven to 17, ensuring that one leading candidate takes all those states’ delegates rather than sharing them proportionally with runners-up.
With that advantage now being much larger than in 2016, DeSantis must find a way to keep other candidates from siphoning away too many of his anti-Trump voters and leaving him in second place with zero delegates to show for it.
Second, DeSantis knows he can’t win the Republican nomination without the backing of tens of millions of Trump-friendly voters. That's why he’d much prefer to let other candidates take the punishment that follows any frontal assault on Trump.
But Trump has already attacked DeSantis for everything from threatening social security to eating pudding with his fingers. If DeSantis punches back, he angers the voters he’ll eventually need to win, but if he doesn’t, he looks weak.
There is also the complicated question of what kind of attack he should launch. DeSantis continues to try to boost his bona fides as a social conservative and culture warrior by attacking Trump on ideology. “Those are Democrat attacks,” DeSantis said recently of Trump’s criticism of his stance on entitlements. “Donald Trump himself wrote a book where he was talking about the need to increase the age of eligibility for Social Security to 70.”
Trump’s attacks are simpler and more personal. “He’s got no personality. And I don’t think he’s got a lot of political skill,” said Trump in an interview published Monday. It’s a style that has worked for Trump before.
Finally, DeSantis must contend with Trump’s refusal to accept defeat. The Florida governor knows that, even if he overcomes the former president to win the Republican nomination, Trump is unlikely to concede and quietly leave the stage. DeSantis may well face accusations he cheated to win and charges that he’s a traitor to Trump’s populist movement.
And if Trump costs DeSantis a few key votes in a few key states against President Biden next November — either because Trump urged supporters not to vote or even ran as an independent candidate — DeSantis is likely to lose.
Gov. DeSantis remains enormously popular back home in Florida. But can he pull Trump voters from Trump while withstanding the attacks the former president has already begun to launch?
As a great man once said, it’s a good trick if you can do it.