Ron DeSantis’s long-awaited entry into the presidential race showed some potential strengths as a Republican candidate, after an embarrassing start on Twitter.
Gov. Ron DeSantis’s glitch-marred 2024 debut on Twitter was a distraction from his chance to introduce himself as a serious contender to take down former President Donald J. Trump.
It was a much-anticipated moment for the Florida governor to reset after months of dropping in the polls, which made the painfully long 20-plus minutes of Twitter malfunctions on Wednesday all the more disappointing to his supporters.
For all the media attention on the Twitter fiasco — The Daily Mail called it a “De-Saster,” Fox News a “disaster,” Breitbart News a “DeBacle” — Mr. DeSantis appeared to have later found his footing on the familiar airwaves of Fox News, a far more traditional — and effective — method of communicating to primary voters. His appearance there was the first time he laid out a substantive case for what a DeSantis presidency would look like.
Still, it was a night his team will be eager to put behind them. And it highlighted both Mr. DeSantis’s potential successes as a candidate but also a campaign still in formation while under intense attack from a dominant Republican front-runner.
Here are five takeaways.Taking risks on Twitter backfired
The delay was longer than some campaign speeches.
For more than 25 minutes, Twitter wheezed its way through what was supposed to be Mr. DeSantis’s grand pronouncement of his 2024 candidacy, with long stretches of dead air interrupted by frantic, hot-mic whispers before they pulled the plug and started over.
A presidential announcement is the rarest of opportunities. It is the moment when a candidate can draw all the attention on themselves and their vision. Instead, Mr. DeSantis wound up almost as a panelist at his own event, sharing the stage with Elon Musk and his malfunctioning social media site.
Fox News splashed a banner headline at one point on its website that featured a photo of Mr. Musk, not Mr. DeSantis. “Want to actually see and hear Ron DeSantis?” read a breaking news alert on the site. “Tune into Fox News.”
Even in advance, the decision to begin his campaign on Twitter with Mr. Musk had drawn mixed reviews. It was innovative, yes — and a chance to reach a potentially huge online audience — but also risky.
The technically challenged result obscured some of Mr. DeSantis’s arguments and sapped him of listeners, and potential donors. For a candidate whose promise of competence is a Republican selling point, it was a less-than-ideal first impression. Mr. Trump and President Biden both mercilessly mocked the rollout.
His aides said Mr. DeSantis raised $1 million in an hour, a sizable amount but far from the record for a presidential kickoff, with no details provided about how many individual donors gave small contributions.
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.”The candidate of educated right-wingers
The DeSantis-Musk discussion on Twitter meandered at times into a cul-de-sac of the hyper-online right.
