Putting Mr. DeSantis on Twitter: A Novel Campaign Strategy for the Next Decade, or How Many Republicans Have a Chance?
DeSantis’ appearance was a gamble on a novel presidential campaign tactic and a platform not known for its mass appeal to US voters. It ended up pushing Twitter to breaking point both technically and philosophically.
The candidate for the Republican nomination for the next decade will reveal his campaign on Wednesday on the social media platform.
As many as half a dozen others are considering getting in, including former Trump Vice President Mike Pence, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
There are cautionary tales of GOP candidates who have risen and fallen sharply. During the 2016 Republican primary campaign, for example, Jeb Bush, also a former Florida governor and political scion, then-Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and even neurosurgeon Ben Carson had fleeting moments atop the polls.
Because Trump has so much of the GOP’s pie, the larger the field, it’s easier for him to get more votes if other-than- Trump Republican voters don’t coalesce around one alternative.
One day, we might say something like Mr. DeSantis’s candidacy. As with the candidates who ultimately surged back to victory, the strengths that made Mr. DeSantis seem so promising after the midterms are still there today. He is appealing to many people in the Republican Party. His favorability ratings remain strong — stronger than Mr. Trump’s — even though his standing against Mr. Trump has deteriorated in head-to-head polling. His party has broad appeal due to issues like the fight against “woke” and the restrictions on coronaviruses. It might be a strong contender again if it was enough to be a strong contender in January.
Another point that candidates have not made a bigger issue is the fact that Trump is constitutionally limited. He would only have four more years to serve if he were to win.
The brutal attacks of taxes, Social Security and Medicare have shown that Trump is willing to go to great lengths to get what he wants.
That was before the onslaught from Trump and his allies. There have been a lot of unanswered attacks, leaving DeSantis allies wringing their hands.
Trump’s continued lies about the 2020 presidential election he lost, defeats racked up by candidates he backed in swing states and competitive districts, plus the myriad investigations in multiple states was giving Republicans pause about the 76-year-old former president.
After months of speculation, Trump has not waited to begin the attacks. Trump has spent millions of dollars attacking the Florida governor, and his polling numbers have cratered, putting him in a deeper hole than he and his allies anticipated.
His advisers said that Mr. DeSantis raised $1 million in just one hour, but no details about how many individuals gave small contributions were provided.
It’s not an easy task to go from congressman to governor. In the GOP primary, Trump’s endorsement helped us greatly, and we saw that we could win the governorship even after Trump endorsed us.
What Will DeSantis Do If He Can’t Go to the White House? A Memorino from a “Bulk Wall” When Donald Trump was “The Art of the Deal”
He ran an ad that showed him playing with his children, and helping one to “build the wall” by using paper blocks, while reading from Trump’s The Art of the Deal, noting that he enjoys the part where Trump says, “You’re fired.”
He became one of the loudest voices fighting against Dr. Anthony Fauci, shipping migrants to Martha’s Vineyard and other liberal enclaves and cities run by Democrats, as well as attacking the expert guidance of Fauci.
He had a hard time getting along with some of his potential base of Republican supporters who were willing to vote for someone other than Trump. It’s hard to out-Trump Trump, and the people inclined to go a different way than Trump in the primary, tend to be college-educated and wealthier Republicans, according to the February NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.
He walked that back after criticism. He went on to call Russia’s Vladimir Putin a “war criminal,” and added, “It’s just — it’s a messy situation. But Russia did not have a right to go in to Crimea or to go in February of 2022. It should be clear.
Ahead of an expected announcement on the social networking site, the Republican submitted paperwork to run for president.
Why did Ron DeSantis sign a ban on abortions in Florida after six weeks of pregnancy, if he was supposed to be more electable than Donald Trump? It is a liability for the Christian conservatives who are involved in the Republican primaries but it is a disadvantage for the moderates and independents after that point. It steps hard on DeSantis’s argument that he’s the version of Trump who can actually beat President Biden. The pitch is flattened into a pancake.
Twitter Spaces: The Last Days of Donald J. Musk’s Comeback and the Phenomenology of his Voting Career in Rejoinder
Of course, the fact that he could mount a comeback doesn’t mean he will come back. A rare chance to be televised live on multiple networks in favor of a feature, Twitter Spaces, that I don’t even know how to use is missing because of his campaign’s decision to announce his bid onTwitter tonight. Even if the Republican campaign is perfectly run, and Donald J. Trump does not face legal problems, it is not a foregone conclusion that he will lose the election.
Musk has decided to cut back on the personnel needed to keep Twitter glitch free. “He has a reckless management style and it would be fitting that he would bite him because many are tuning in,” said Benavidez with Free Press.
Just as the big news was being delivered, Spaces buckled under the weight of Musk’s enthusiasm about the event.
After mass layoffs and hundreds of other people quitting, it’s staff has been reduced to 10% of what it was before Musk acquired it. Outages have become far more common. Overall system bugginess has also become the norm for many users.
During the discussion, Sacks claimed the audience on the Spaces was one of the platform’s largest, but Earnest Wilkins, a former Twitter employee who helped produced Spaces, said: “Lol this isn’t in the top 150 spaces by size in the history of the product.”
A few minutes later, Musk promoted a new Spaces that seemed to be working, but much of the audience did not seem to make the leap. The first Spaces appeared to have more than 500,000 attendees at its peak, while the second seemed to hover around 150,000.
At another point, as Sacks attempted to speak, an echo reverberated his words back to him. “It just keeps crashing?” Musk and his team worked to fix the problem as a speaker was heard saying.
It took a few minutes for the broadcast to start but it ended up cutting out twice. David Sacks could be heard in the background saying “the server are melting” while he was supposed to introduce the event.
Ron DeSantis could have made his presidential campaign announcement in an idyllic seaside park where he could mingle with the children of wholesome families. He did it in an audio feed with a socially awkward billionaire. Even if the Twitter rollout had worked smoothly — which it definitely did not — it would have been a debacle.
Both DeSantis and Musk have painted people with progressive positions on issues like LGBTQ+ rights as members of an existential “woke mob” intent on corrupting conservative tradition. During an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Musk said that he had not planned to endorse a candidate for president but he had made his intentions known.
When asked Wednesday if he’d sign a bill to ban government officials from colluding with social media companies, the Florida congressman said he’d do it soon.
Musk claimed that he was making social media a place for authentic exchanges of diverse opinions. The platform does not just have canned speeches and teleprompters, he boasted, just minutes after Ron DeSantis had finished his speech, which echoed lines from his campaign video.
“Man, I think we melted the internet there,” Sacks said in a separate Space he created with his account after the first one shuttered. When you combine a half million users in a room with 100 million followers on an account, it creates a level of scalability that was never before seen. But with my meager followership it seems to be working much better.”
It is not known what went wrong but Musk said the problem was caused by overloading of the server. More than 600,000 users were tuned in a few minutes before the Musk-hosted room ended.
The technological failures are, understandably, dominating the headlines. The campaign looked amateurish and made everyone cringe, as they undermined Musk’s claims that the firing of work force has not impaired the platform. But behind these unforced errors lie deeper failures of political judgment by DeSantis, ones that speak to a blinkered and — for all his cultural populism — elitist worldview. You have a campaign kick off where you talk more about crytpo regulation than inflation.
Mr. Biden’s campaign was also seeking to capitalize, buying Google ads to show Biden donation pages for those searching for terms like “DeSantis disaster” and “DeSantis flop.”
What is wrong with Twitter? What does it make for the future of the digital floor? A brief history of the #DeSaster and the current status of Twitter
“Some of the problems with the university and the ideological capture — that didn’t happen by accident, you can trace back all the way to the accreditation cartels. Well, guess what? To become an accreditor, how do you do that? You have to get approved by the U.S. Department of Education. If you do D.E.I., you will get accredited instead of being told by your accreditor that you will not.
The conversation talked about the horrors of The Atlantic and Vanity Fair magazines, and about the de-banking of politically incorrect businesses.
The guests include libertarian-leaning congressman Thomas Massie, conservative talk show host Steve Deace, conservative activist Christopher Rufo and former National Rifle Association spokeswoman DanaLoesch.
Musk wishes that people with differing political views could mingle on the micro- networking site. He said that some minds might be changed one way or the other. The questions that came from the digital floor were from a who’s who of right wing thought leadership, including David Sacks, who cohosted the event.
The #DeSaster does not bode well for Musk’s ambitions to expand and stabilize the platform, which he has said will one day attract 1 billion users a month. The entrepreneur has repeatedly talked of turning Twitter into an “everything app” similar to the multifunctional Chinese app WeChat. Twitter is set to host a new show by right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson following his ouster from Fox News, where it regularly drew more than 3 million viewers.