Florida governor Ron DeSantis plans to launch his 2024 campaign during a Twitter Spaces interview with Elon Musk on Wednesday night — the latest indication that the social-media site, formerly a hive mind of progressive tastemakers, is increasingly viewed as the platform for prominent right-wingers looking to make an end run around traditional media institutions.
The unconventional campaign announcement will come about two weeks after Tucker Carlson said that he would be taking his show to Twitter after his sudden split with Fox News.
"As of tonight there aren't many platforms left that allow free speech. The last big one remaining in the world is Twitter," Carlson said in a May 9 video message. "Twitter has long served as the place where our national conversation incubates and develops. Twitter is not a partisan site. Everybody's allowed here and we think that's a good thing,"
Yet critics of the unconventional campaign-rollout strategy, Trump allies most prominent among them, have argued that it's an early indication that DeSantis's campaign will be "too online."
Twitter's audience is relatively small, with about 78 million active users in the U.S. By contrast, TikTok has more than 150 million active U.S. users. Globally, most of Twitter's users are between the ages of 25 and 34, an age group that notably excludes the older Americans who historically turn out to vote in the greatest numbers. Just 20.7 percent of users are between 35 and 49, and 17.1 percent are older than 50, according to data from April 2021. However, that year, 55 percent of Americans said they regularly get news from Twitter, making it the most-used social platform for news.
After making news on Twitter, DeSantis has plans to speak to those older votes via traditional media: He is scheduled for a radio interview with The Mark Levin Show and an interview with Trey Gowdy on Fox News at 8 p.m. He will also participate in a tele-townhall with voters across the country.
Musk's participation comes after he said in November that he would support DeSantis in 2024. "My preference for the 2024 presidency is someone sensible and centrist. I had hoped that would be the case for the Biden administration, but have been disappointed so far," Musk said on Twitter at the time.
Sources told NBC News that Musk has privately indicated he doesn't believe former president Donald Trump can win.
New York Times senior political correspondent Maggie Haberman suggested there is a chance that Trump could make his return to Twitter tonight in an attempt to upstage DeSantis's announcement.
"What Trump does to respond is anyone's guess. It's not only that he hasn't been much on Twitter. He hasn't been at all on Twitter," Haberman said during an appearance on CNN on Tuesday night. "His aides have signaled, for a while, he's coming back to Twitter, sooner rather than later. Seems like there's a non-zero chance tomorrow might be that day. But we'll see."
Looking to build excitement around the announcement, a pro-DeSantis PAC released a new ad Wednesday afternoon. The video, "A President for the People," opens with the dour tone Trump ran on in 2016, with a narrator declaring "America has fallen" as a montage of viral crime videos plays.
But the ad, produced by Never Back Down, quickly pivots toward optimism, presenting DeSantis as a restorative leader capable of bringing the approach he's employed to great success in Florida to the entire nation.
"Who will stand? From a family of steelworkers, Ron DeSantis served our nation . . . and stood for what was right," the narrator says before detailing the governor's efforts to fight back against Covid-driven government overreach and the progressive capture of schools and corporations.
After releasing a string of ads in the weeks leading up to DeSantis's announcement, Never Back Down is about to move into the next phase of its operation: building the extensive ground game that campaigns have increasingly begun ceding to outside PACs, which lack the fundraising limits imposed on the campaigns themselves.
The PAC is planning a $100 million voter-outreach push, per the New York Times. That effort will include knocking on the door of every possible DeSantis voter at least four times in New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina and at least five times in Iowa. The group plans to hire more than 2,600 field organizers by Labor Day.
A key part of the efforts, according to the report, is a facility on the outskirts of Des Moines. Nicknamed "Fort Benning," the facility has already put 189 staffers through an eight-day training program.
"No one has ever contemplated the scale of this organization or operation, let alone done it," Never Back Down executive director Chris Jankowski told the outlet. "This has just never even been dreamed up."
The PAC expects to have a budget of at least $200 million.
As his PAC kicks into high gear, DeSantis seems to have shifted his focus in recent days from building up his policy resume during the Florida legislative session toward addressing national issues. He made headlines this week when he underscored the importance of the 2024 race in maintaining a conservative majority on the Supreme Court during remarks before the National Religious Broadcasters Convention.
"I think if you look over the next two presidential terms, there is a good chance that you could be called upon to seek replacements for Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito and the issue with that is, you can't really do better than those two," he said.
"If you replace a Clarence Thomas with someone like a Roberts or somebody like that then you're actually gonna see the court move to the left, and you can't do that," he added. "I also think if you look over those eight years, you very well could be called upon to replace Chief Justice John Roberts, and perhaps even someone like Justice Sotomayor."
He said it's possible there would be an opportunity to "fortify justices Alito and Thomas, as well as actually make improvements with those others, and if you were able to do that then you would have a 7–2 conservative majority on the Supreme Court that would last a quarter century, so this is big stuff."
As DeSantis readies his entry into the race, Nikki Haley is working to paint the Florida governor as "an echo" of Trump with less charm.
Haley released a new ad on Wednesday titled "A choice, not an echo." The ad begins with a quote from Trump saying DeSantis "was totally different. Whatever I want, he wants." It goes on to show DeSantis's "Build the Wall" campaign ad from his 2018 gubernatorial run in which DeSantis told his child to "build the wall" and taught her to say, "Make America Great Again." DeSantis has said the ad was satirical.
The Haley ad also features an attack on DeSantis's stance on Ukraine, underscoring his comments that getting "further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia" is not a "vital national" interest.
"We'll stand with our allies from Israel to Ukraine and stand up to our enemies in Iran and Russia," Haley says in the video. "The time has come to renew that spirit and rally our people. Our moment is now, our mission is clear. Let's save our country and secure our future."
The new spot comes one day after Haley's campaign released a letter, written by Haley's campaign manager Betsy Ankney, calling DeSantis "Trump Without the Charm."
The letter suggests that while the DeSantis elevator pitch is that he's "like Trump without the drama," the "glaring difference between the two is DeSantis' inability to interact directly with voters," the letter says.
Readers are then met with a number of scenarios and asked to guess whether they involved DeSantis or Trump, including "Who passed a bill that hides his travel records from public disclosure?" and "Who was rejected for an endorsement by a member of the Florida congressional delegation because he wouldn't return his calls?"
"You'd think these are headlines you might have seen during the Trump administration," Ankney writes.
Trump, meanwhile, has been attacking DeSantis for months now. His super PAC, MAGA Inc., has now spent more money on attack ads targeting the Florida governor than it previously did on supporting Republican candidates in the 2022 midterms.
MAGA Inc. has spent $15.3 million attacking the Republican governor and just $1,500 on supporting Trump. In the 2022 midterms, the PAC spent $15 million to support Republican candidates in the key swing states of Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Ohio, and Nevada. Republicans lost Senate races in four out of those five states, with only Ohio Republican J.D. Vance securing a win.
A spokesperson for DeSantis said the figures make clear that Trump views DeSantis as a threat.
"These are the largest ongoing expenditures against a non-candidate in Republican primary history, and that's all you need to know to draw the obvious conclusion: Governor DeSantis presents the best option for defeating Joe Biden," DeSantis political team press secretary Bryan Griffin told National Review.
Among those attacks was one on DeSantis's position on entitlement reform, including the infamous "pudding fingers" ad.
The Florida governor will join the race just two days after Senator Tim Scott held a campaign kickoff event in North Charleston, in his home state of South Carolina, in which he labeled himself "the candidate the Left fears most."
"Good luck to Senator Tim Scott in entering the Republican Presidential Primary Race," said Trump, who is undoubtedly thrilled to see the GOP primary field expanding. "It is rapidly loading up with lots of people, and Tim is a big step up from Ron DeSanctimonious, who is totally unelectable. I got Opportunity Zones done with Tim, a big deal that has been highly successful. Good luck Tim!"
Musk, who appears set to play a key role in DeSantis's campaign launch, shared a video of Scott speaking about personal responsibility last week and commented, "Great statement by Tim Scott!"
Scott brought in $2 million in the first 24 hours after his announcement. He has around $22 million left over from his Senate reelection campaign last year and even more in Super PAC funds. He had the second-highest fundraising total of any Republican senator running for reelection last year.
The South Carolina Republican will spend $5.5 million on a TV ad buy that will launch Wednesday in Iowa and New Hampshire and run through August, when the first GOP debate is scheduled to take place. Scott will also launch a seven-figure digital ad campaign during that time.
Scott's entry into the race sets up a competition between South Carolina's "favorite son" and "favorite daughter," Haley.
A Winthrop University poll from last month found Trump leading a group of nine possible 2024 contenders among South Carolina Republicans who are registered to vote. Trump received 41 percent of the vote, while DeSantis followed with 20 percent and Haley came in a close third at 18 percent. Scott secured 7 percent. The group also included former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who has since said he will not run for president in 2024, as well as former vice president Mike Pence, New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson (a declared presidential candidate), and Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin.
Winthrop Poll director Scott Huffmon noted at the time that Haley received more than "quadruple her support compared to national polls, but that should be expected on her home turf."
"While DeSantis is viewed as the singular alternative to Trump in national polls, the real story here is that Haley and DeSantis are in a statistical dead heat in what could be a firewall for Haley when voting rolls around," Huffmon said last month.
Chip Felkel, a veteran South Carolina political consultant, told me the word he would use to describe the state of the race in the Palmetto State is "muddled."
The base of the party "still seems to be heavily enamored with" Trump. "DeSantis will get in and you may see some of those people peel off, and then you have the favorite son and favorite daughter that somehow are trying to figure out how in the world they're going to catch lightning in a bottle," he said.
The South Carolina GOP had its convention last week and reelected Drew McKissick for a fourth term as chairman with 51.8 percent of the vote. "So the other way to look at that is 49 percent of the vote were some of these . . . hardcore Trump crowd that don't think Drew McKissick is conservative enough, and so they're angry and they're frustrated."
McKissick said in remarks at the convention that the party has to "actually win," adding, "here in South Carolina we know how to win."
"Do you believe in the Constitution? Do you believe in our platform?" he asked, and was met with a mix of cheers and boos.
Felkel said it remains to be seen how the "strife that's in the party will affect the primary."
"You got to wonder whether Haley and Scott think South Carolina can be turned into a firewall for each of them," he added. "But there's only so many bodies to go around of people who can build that firewall. And they've got to do well in Iowa, New Hampshire, and then in South Carolina. But I still think the more people in the race, the better chance Trump has."
He said the state will be a "good test for whether Trump's got any legs left."
In a RealClearPolitics average of national polling, Trump leads with 56.3 percent support, while DeSantis comes in second at 19.4 percent. Pence is in third at 5.6 percent, followed by Haley at 4.3 percent, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy at 3.6 percent, and Scott at 1.8 percent.
CNN announced Wednesday that Haley will participate in a town hall with the network,moderated by Jake Tapper, on June 4 in Iowa.
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