Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has defended the decision to announce his 2024 Republican presidential campaign on a non-traditional platform like Twitter Spaces after things got off to a rocky start yesterday.
In an interview with radio host Erick Erickson, DeSantis claimed he wanted to do something different than the traditional in-person announcement in his home state, and take the message to where those most interested in his statements were.
“I think at the end of the day, there will be time to do a lot of those speeches and we’ve done a lot of speeches in front of a lot of people and we’ll have time to do more,” DeSantis admitted. “We thought doing something with Elon — given his notoriety and cachet — and then given the fact that Twitter is now viewed as the place where you can speak your mind as opposed to a lot of these other places that it was an interesting opportunity.
“I had never done one of these Twitter Spaces before. I don’t even have Twitter myself, but the accounts we do are manage by our folks, so I wasn’t even sure how it worked. Twitter said they were locked and ready to go, but they just had so many people that swarmed it that it basically melted the system,” continued DeSantis. “They were able to get that worked out. It was an interesting format. I think that these things live on, so that recording is, I guess, available.”
DeSantis then said the schedule would obviously allow for more traditional campaign rally stops throughout the primary season, but the said the chance to do something on a platform like Twitter was too good to pass up.
“We will be doing a bunch of rallies. We’ll be doing all of that. I think it was a unique opportunity, and I was glad we did it. I definitely think we got more buzz and I think we got more interest as a result. Obviously, I know, as someone who’s an elected official, that most Republican primary voters — even a small percentage — probably aren’t on Twitter, there’s a very small portion that actually are on Twitter.
“We understood that but felt like there would be a lot of buzz about it, and I think there has been. I think it was probably the biggest story in the world yesterday. So, hopefully, we’ll get some people interested in our campaign who may not have been otherwise.
