Ron DeSantis’s unorthodox campaign launch, on Twitter in a group chat hosted by owner Elon Musk, was a disaster but the Florida governor remains a potent political force, a policy polymath, and the only Republican candidate capable of beating Donald Trump next year.
Mr DeSantis would have been fuming on Wednesday evening in Miami as he logged into the Twitter chatroom to speak to Mr Musk, as Twitter’s computers struggled to accommodate the many hundreds of thousands of listeners who had tuned into listen to his online launch around the world.
“MSM is going to s*it on this,” someone mumbled into the chat, as social media lit up with mockery, including those mainstream media journalists Mr DeSantis loves to hate, at what could only be called a shambles of a launch.
Mr Trump’s campaign team likened it to one of Mr Musk’s exploding rockets. The hashtag #DeSaster began to trend on social media. The White House began issuing tweets poking fun at Mr DeSantis: “This link works,” the President’s account tweeted, with a link to his own campaign for re-election.
“We have some scaling issues specifically related to my account,” Mr Musk said, evincing considerable understatement after the platform had crashed at least three times.
But after the technology started to work about 20 minutes after the 6pm Tuesday (8am AEST Wednesday) start time, Mr DeSantis reminded listeners why he had decided to run for the White House, even in the face of polls that put his former mentor Donald Trump, who helped the former congressman win his first term as governor, well ahead.
“He did 75+ minutes on pure policy. Trump could never do that,” said Mick Mulvaney, Mr Trump’s former acting chief of staff in the White House, soon after the event finished.
Indeed, there’s no other candidate on either side of politics who can speak so knowledgeably about US policy, from pandemic restrictions to the corporate ESG regulations Mr DeSantis has become famous for hating, to immigration rules he says encourage illegal immigration to the higher crime rates of other states.
“I think this whole ESG movement is really trying to do through the financial sector, what they could never achieve through the ballot box,” the governor said, blasting Disney along the way for “injecting gender ideology in elementary schools”.
“I think it’s very inappropriate to have sexually explicit material in a fifth grade library,’ he added, parading his move to remove certain books from Florida primary schools – which the Left has hysterically termed “book banning”.
Even more than Mr Trump, who prefers to dwell on the past and speak in generalities, Mr DeSantis is a culture-war warrior.
For him, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion stands for Discrimination, Exclusion and Indoctrination. “Florida is where woke goes to die” is one of his favourite slogans.
How this aggressive brand of cultural politics translates to the broader US economy remains to be seen, however well it has worked in Florida, where in November he won almost 60 per cent of the primary vote – a landslide.
The average of polls of Republican voters put Mr Trump on around 55 per cent, and Mr DeSantis on less than half of that, a far worse showing for the popular Florida governor, according to RealClearPolitics.
Betting markets reflect the same: Mr Trump has a 58 per cent chance of winning the GOP nomination next year, compared with 33 per cent for Mr DeSantis, according to PredictIt.
But polls mean very little so far out from a primary race that doesn’t kick off until early next year, in Iowa and New Hampshire, the two states that host the first votes for the Republican candidates.
And it’s those polls that matter: not only of Republican voters in those states, but of all voters in those states. It’s the “swing states’’ that the Republican candidate, whoever it turns out to be, must win, and Mr Trump lost them in 2020.
The polls will tighten and he remains streets ahead of the growing GOP field of hopefuls, including Nikki Haley and Tim Scott, who have mustered only single-digit support thus far.
DeSantis has not only the Democratic party up against him, but much of the fourth and also the “fifth estate’’ – the US intelligence agencies.
“These agencies are totally out of control. There‘s no accountability,” he said, suggesting he might strip the FBI, the CIA, two agencies very much in Republican crosshairs for allegedly supporting Democrat candidates overtly and covertly in recent years, of their funding.
What would a DeSantis presidency mean for Australia? It’s hard to say, but Mr DeSantis has followed Mr Trump’s isolationist rhetoric.
He was also highly critical of Australia during the Covid-19 pandemic: “Is Australia freer than communist China right now? I don’t know. The fact that’s even a question tells you something’s gone dramatically off the rails” he said in September 2021.
Mr DeSantis loathes much of the US mainstream media, which he believes, with some justification, unfairly attacked him throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, when he refused to enforce mask and vaccine mandates.
The postmortem suggests he was right but he won’t be getting an apology.
But his desire to help a supporter, Mr Musk, by depriving the big cable networks of a prime-time launch, backfired, at least in the short term.
“It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish,” said David Sachs, one of Mr Musk’s tech entrepreneur friends, who was co-hosting the event, towards the end of the 75-minute interview – a sentiment the 44-year-old governor would have certainly shared.
A comment on that in a Trump campaign social media post:
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