May 24, 2023 06:41 PM UTC

DeSantis' Campaign Launch An Epic Technical Disaster

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• by: Colorado Pols

Not even Fox News can spin this one:

A short while later, the headline was updated:

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.