When I first learned that Florida governor Ron DeSantis was going to launch his presidential campaign on a Twitter Spaces event with Elon Musk, I was skeptical. It was an unconventional move, an effort to break with the standard of releasing an online video commercial and following it up with a large rally the next day, before heading on a tour of early primary states. So I decided to withhold comment until after seeing how it went. Now that the event has ended, it has only served to reinforce why most presidential candidates go with the predictable, tried, and tested route. In short, it was a disaster.
The launch of a campaign is one of the few moments in which a candidate has full control of the medium and message, and broad attention. By agreeing to do the Twitter Spaces launch, DeSantis surrendered control and suffered for it. First, there were the embarrassing technical issues, which caused the audio to cut off several times before things finally kicked off more than 20 minutes after they were supposed to. When the first talking space was shut down, over 600,000 people were listening. But the audience peaked just above 300,000 when it came back.
In theory, one advantage of an unconventional announcement in a Twitter Spaces conversation is its informality — it’s more like a live, interactive podcast. Because one of the knocks on DeSantis is that he’s too rehearsed and calculating, it could have offered DeSantis the opportunity to show his lighter side and in an unscripted environment — to joke and banter with the other participants. Instead, when called on at first, he launched into a standard stump speech. This had me thinking, if he was just going to give a stump speech, what is the point of doing a Twitter Spaces? How is it better to deliver that announcement via audio to silence as opposed to doing so in front of a massive crowd of thousands of supporters against a great backdrop in Florida? Put another way, the event had all of the disadvantages of an informal forum with none of the advantages.
Once it got going, the conversation diverged in many directions that weren’t all about DeSantis and why he should be president, much of which served Musk’s interest in promoting Twitter. It also veered into topics that would be obscure to most voters. For instance, it was likely the first presidential launch that included a discussion of Chevron deference.
Don’t get me wrong; the format is a somewhat interesting way to take a deeper dive into topics. And on the substance, DeSantis obviously had command of what he was saying, and he has a good story to tell. But to the extent that there was any benefit to this, DeSantis could have done it in Week Two of his campaign, or maybe Day Two. But a candidate has only one chance at his announcement. DeSantis enters this race well behind Donald Trump and faces questions about whether he will be able to scale up from being a successful governor to becoming a winning presidential candidate. He doesn’t have much margin for error — and his first action as a candidate was a huge mistake.