DeSantis Campaign Announcement on Twitter Stumbles, Sputters and Dies

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ official presidential campaign started not with a bang, and not even with a whimper – but with indistinct chatter, glitchy audio and extended periods of radio silence.

DeSantis was set to announce his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination alongside Twitter CEO Elon Musk at 6 pm Wednesday on the platform’s audio feature. But the feed was beset with technical difficulties from the start, and 20 minutes past the scheduled beginning of the event, there had been nothing but silence and a few broken sentences from tech entrepreneur and DeSantis supporter David Sacks.

Then the feeding ended abruptly.

It was an inauspicious start for a campaign that has stumbled before even being official. DeSantis has slid in the polls in the last two months, ceding ground to opponent and current front-runner for the GOP nomination, former President Donald Trump. The start of his official candidacy was meant to inject the governor’s campaign with much needed momentum – momentum that did not, at least, get off the ground as the audio event sputtered and died.

President Joe Biden, who will take on the GOP nominee in next year’s general election, seized on the flub Wednesday night.

“This link works,” Biden tweeted, linking to his campaign’s fundraising page.

Repeated efforts to re-start the so-called “Space” did not initially work, showing a gray screen with the words “Details not available.”

Before the feed cut first out, Sacks could be heard saying that the audience was “melting the servers.” At the time, roughly 360,000 people were tuning in.

DeSantis is deeply critical of the mainstream media and his decision to announce his candidacy on Twitter alongside Musk – a divisive figure who has espoused a number of controversial opinions on Twitter – are emblematic of a non-official campaign that has so far almost exclusively targeted culture war issues, centering on a resistance to the status quo and what he and other Republicans have described as “woke” culture.