It almost snared Democrats in 2020, and now it’s come for the right.
Ron DeSantis is the governor of one of the most scenic states in America. Reelected by eye-popping margins in 2022, he does not lack for superfans. And yet, instead of launching his presidential campaign in front of palm trees and adoring crowds, he did so last night on Twitter, in an awkward audio-only exchange with Elon Musk that took place only after 25 minutes of excruciating technical difficulties.
It might seem strange for a presidential candidate who is arguing that Republicans should not tie their fortunes to an impulsive, internet-poisoned millionaire to announce his campaign by wedding it to an impulsive, internet-poisoned billionaire. But DeSantis’s choice of venue makes sense in context: It is the latest in a series of appeals to his party’s most online activists, who idolize individuals such as Musk and monopolize Twitter, the social-media site that Musk owns. Cultivating the base and wealthy donors is smart politics, and DeSantis is a better politician than both his progressive and pro-Trump critics admit. But as the Twitter-launch fiasco demonstrated, his obsession with the online could seriously hamper his prospects offline. Campaigns that mistake social-media virality for electoral reality tend to end poorly.
One of the many misguided lessons that politicians learned from Donald Trump’s 2016 success was that Twitter wins elections.
