When Ron DeSantis launched his presidential campaign in a Twitter Spaces chat with Elon Musk and David Sacks on May 24, the event really put the saying that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” to the test.
It’s only one poll, but a new national Yahoo News/YouGov survey suggests that actually there is such a thing as bad publicity in politics. In mid May, Trump led DeSantis 48 percent to 28 percent, according to YouGov, but the same pollster finds Trump’s lead growing by eight points — 53 percent to 25 percent — in a survey conducted over the course of five days immediately after the DeSantis launch.
The Twitter Spaces event was marred by technical difficulties that delayed the announcement and kept hundreds of thousands of people from listening. The discussion itself sounded more like a podcast in which DeSantis was just one guest among many. And listeners needed to be informed conservative activists in order to understand what Elon Musk meant when he was talking about the “sacred cows of woke ideology” or when DeSantis talked about “Chevron deference,” which “most people might assume is a premium gasoline,” as Matthew Continetti observed last week.