Ron DeSantis’s campaign has been predicated on his competence. Unlike the undisciplined Donald Trump, he won’t lash out on Twitter, get consumed by petty grudges, or even inspire an unruly mob to attack the US Capitol. Instead, DeSantis is running as the candidate who gets things done. He touts that he fights “the war on woke” and wins as he transformed the swing state of Florida into a Republican bastion.
Then, on Wednesday night, he announced his presidential candidacy on Twitter Spaces with Elon Musk and billionaire David Sacks.
To put it mildly, it was a disaster. The audio feed cut in and out, users were continually kicked off the app, and, for the first 20 minutes, all anyone could hear was feedback, wait music, and occasional crosstalk as Sacks and Musk tried to figure out just what was going on. It was chaos and anarchy.
Eventually, the Twitter Space was relaunched, and it eventually drew roughly 300,000 listeners at its peak as DeSantis largely read off a stump speech before engaging in a rather stilted conversation with Musk and Sacks that was interspersed with interjections from DeSantis supporters — like Steve Deace, a conservative personality, who was asked “Do you have a comment or question?” before receiving a reminder to unmute himself. Deace, like most of the handpicked guests on the Twitter Space, had both a comment and a question. During the event, Musk received almost as much praise as DeSantis as the conversation eventually drifted into Twitter-friendly topics like Bitcoin and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), a phrase that was never spelled out for those who had logged on but were not chronically online enough to get the reference.
Without any glitches, launching the campaign on a Twitter Space would have been bizarre. It was a medium where DeSantis was able to combine all the cliches of a conventional campaign speech with the visual appeal of a conference call. It attracted a cumulative audience that was smaller…
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