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May 24, 2023 06:41 PM UTC

DeSantis' Campaign Launch An Epic Technical Disaster

  • 9 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

Not even Fox News can spin this one:

A short while later, the headline was updated:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).

Politico reports, and if you were one of the several hundred thousand Americans who tried to tune in this afternoon, a precious half hour or more of your life was thus wasted:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was set to announce his highly-anticipated presidential bid during a Twitter spaces session Wednesday.

Then Twitter broke.

The app repeatedly crashed Wednesday night as thousands of listeners attempted to tune in to hear the Florida governor announce he was entering the race for the GOP presidential nomination. Thirty minutes into the event, DeSantis was finally able to begin speaking.

After over twenty minutes of static, mic feedback, false starts, and some of the weirdest synth hold music we’ve ever heard, the original audience of up to 600,000 viewers tuned in to hear Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ campaign announcement–a tiny fraction of the audience DeSantis would have gotten from cable news–had dwindled to less than 150,000. Patient users who navigated to a second Twitter Spaces live stream posted by Twitter owner Elon Musk were finally able to listen to DeSantis reading his canned announcement speech, followed by an equally stilted Q&A with various right-wing celebrities like the NRA’s Dana Loesch.

A spokesperson for former President Donald Trump responded: “Glitchy. Tech issues. Uncomfortable silences. A complete failure to launch. And that’s just the candidate!”

The spectacle represented a major embarrassment for both DeSantis and Elon Musk, Twitter’s relatively new owner, one that could haunt the former as he embarks on a bid to win the GOP’s nomination and the latter as he tries to position himself as a political kingmaker in the new media landscape.

But it doesn’t matter, because nobody cares what they talked about now. The catastrophic failure of DeSantis’ presidential campaign launch event will be taught for generations to come as a cautionary tale in political science classes. DeSantis abetted by Musk thought they were executing a game-changing end run around the “liberal media,” but instead made themselves the object lesson for why we need old-school media outlets who don’t fire everyone who knows how anything works.

In Colorado, we’re no stranger to the “failure to launch” phenomenon, and if this afternoon’s technical difficulties seem right out of the Heidi Ganahl playbook, you’re not alone! Even that’s not fair since Ganahl successfully made a few podcasts. But these are the early stumbles that tell us as they have so many times before that a campaign is hobbled from the outset. And with DeSantis starting off 20 points behind the presumptive 2024 nominee Donald Trump, this debacle might really be DeSantis’ defining moment.

Or…it can’t get any worse. If you’re a DeSantis optimist, that’s what you’ve got left.

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9 thoughts on “DeSantis’ Campaign Launch An Epic Technical Disaster”

    1. It ain’t the years, the clown’s beclowned himself.

      From 6 months ago:

      As of this writing, Elon Musk is running Twitter into the ground, with much of the company’s staff fired or quitting, outages spiking and everyone on my timeline hurrying to tell the app the things they have been meaning to say before it departs for app heaven (or hell?).

      In tweeting through one of the most extraordinary corporate meltdowns in history, Mr. Musk has been performing a vital public service: shredding the myth of the billionaire genius.

      His particular pretension of benevolence is that his uncontainable genius can solve any challenge. Now he is lavishing his mind and time on electronic money, now on colonizing Mars, now on electric cars and solar panels, now on saving Thai soccer players trapped in a cave, now on liberating speech from its liberal oppressors.

      Mr. Musk’s genius pose has long been undermined by his actual record, which is defined by claiming credit for what others have built and is shot through with complaints of discrimination, mismanagement and fraud.

      But it wasn’t until Mr. Musk took over Twitter that his claim of infinitely transferable genius truly fell apart. That what Mr. Musk has called the global town square can be eviscerated in a time period somewhere between a Scaramucci and a Truss makes one wonder if we should be more skeptical of all the other billionaire geniuses with ideas for our schools, public health systems and politics.

      https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/19/opinion/musk-trump-bezos-bankman-fried-billionaires.html

      This Week, Billionaires Made a Strong Case for Abolishing Themselves

      He’s keeping his string intact.

      Ian Fleming got it wrong, it won’t be an evil genius thats does us all in — it’ll just be some insufficiently taxed schlub, with way, way, way too much disposable cash, who’s convinced himself he’s a genius because of his bank balance.

       

    1. You know who else had a terrible campaign kickoff. Judge Jeanine Pirro in 2006 when she announced she was challenging Hillary for the Senate. 

      She had her campaign kickoff speech printed on paper and sitting on the outdoor podium. By the time she got up to the podium, a gust of wind sent in flying in four different directions. She had the look on her face like the look Dan Quayle had when asked what he would do if he found himself elevated to being president.

      Of course, by the time she dropped out and announced she was running against Andrew Cuomo – talk about the Hobbesian Choice – she found herself a paperweight.

       

  4. Desantis is a weird guy. He did a weird guy thing for a weird guy audience. 

    What's maybe worse was after he went on Fox News with a wider audience. He could have asked for a special and a green room packed with red bull. Rather he went on with Cool Whip™ and low energy vibes. 

     

      1. Perhaps I overestimate the power of the number 2 most favored (at the time) announcement to run. I would think they would want A special with Gutfeld or Watters or name the face at Fox News. 

        You don't want to compete on crowd size with Trump okay:  A fire lit outdoor bs interview on the Florida Governors mansion lawn… the Florida breeze in his 44 year old while male hair. 

        Rather we got fat Blake Masters. A weird sounding guy on a radio (that doesn't work but trust us it's the future).  A low energy politician that struggles even on the thing they totally controlled (till they gave it away to a Rich guy corporate product). 

        In short…WEIRD

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