Florida Governor Ron DeSantis presidential announcement on Wednesday a

faltering transmission

live

broadcast

on Twitter was the latest example of the Republican candidates’ all-out effort to woo most of his party’s online activists.

The governor likes to hang onto obsessions of online conservatives, niche or otherwise.

Wednesday’s announcement, like

his speeches,

what are

load with attacks on acronyms like

like it

ESG, DEI

and CRT,

that only the most affiliated partisans can quickly identify as environmental, social and governance and diversity, equity and inclusion targets for businesses and organizations

and “Critical Race Theory” taught on some college campuses.

Most high school students don’t even take one Advanced Placement exam, but DeSantis was up to the challenge

this year

with the College Board about its AP African American history curriculum. And while nearly every Floridian owns an electric stove, DeSantis suggested a tax break

recently

on gas appliances after conservative media figures expressed outrage at efforts by some liberal jurisdictions to ban new gas connections.

These calls to the GOP grassroots have helped DeSantis build a brand and may well earn him the nomination after all, if he can overcome former President Trump’s current hold on the party.

But relying on the support of extreme online is also a risk.

Wednesday’s announcement proved to be the main obstacle: W if the technology fails, the candidate can look like he’s trying too hard and ill-prepared. The broadcast got off to a rocky start when the website appeared to crash several times and the hosts, Twitter owner Elon Musk and tech investor David Sacks, Sachs, could be heard discussing the bandwidth issues and deliberating on how to move forward. By the time it started about 20 minutes late, several of the hand-picked activists on the Twitter broadcast were spending time praising Musk for restoring their online access after taking ownership of the platform, which had previously had several drawn conservative accounts for violating policies on spreading disinformation or hate speech. They asked DeSantis about pet issues like Bitcoin and “Dogecoin” rules, and got him into a long talk about breaking up the college’s “accreditation cartels.”

Most Americans are not on Twitter, and previous presidential candidates who were best known for their appeal to their parties’ online bases have not been nominated. Most Republican voters tell pollsters their biggest concerns are the economy and immigration, not gas stoves,

other

Corporate Social Responsibility

or cryptocurrency named after a rare dog breed.

DeSanti’s political coverage echoes the concerns of conservative social media users and podcast hosts, said Tim Miller, a former Republican operative who worked on Jeb Bush’s 2016 campaign before leaving the party in 2020.

These are usually highly educated men who are angry about what is happening in the culture, gender norms, etc. They have a specific point of view. It’s not like there aren’t any of them. There are enough to support a successful podcast, Miller added. But it’s a different set of concerns than ordinary voters. It’s secluded. His niche. It’s a bubble of its own kind.

President Biden’s allies argued that he was taking advantage of a similar strategic divide in 2020, when his main rivals, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, tapped into the party’s online base of white liberals as they cut contact with the party. lost.

African American black

and Latino voters who fueled Biden’s victory in the Democratic primary. Ron DeSantis has an Elizabeth Warren problem, Miller recently warned in an article for The Bulwark, an online anti-Trump conservative publication.

According to a 2022 Pew poll, just under a quarter of social media users post about political or social issues. Those who engage in online politics tend to be on the extreme ends of both parties, with 26% identifying themselves as conservative Republicans and 29% identifying as liberal Democrats, according to the poll.

Although a small group, they are often active and passionate about the issues, showing up for candidates as volunteers and donating small amounts online in large numbers.

Democrats using Twitter were much more liberal and more likely to support Warren and Sanders, according to a 2020 Pew poll, which also found they were less likely to agree with Republicans, even if it means giving up some of the things the Democrats want.

Warren was so popular with left-wing online activists that she raised millions of dollars for her first Senate campaign in 2012 before most Americans knew who she was. She was harassed at Netroots Nation conferences, gathering hordes of progressive activists.

That energy helped propel her 2020 presidential campaign. But she failed to win over the majority of the party, in part because she felt compelled to take the most liberal positions on issues like universal Medicare to avoid losing ground to Sanders, her fellow leftist. populist.

DeSantis has already had similar struggles, upsetting donors and many mainstream Republicans when he took Trump’s stance on the Russian invasion of Ukraine by calling it a territorial dispute, before trying to reverse those comments.

back.

He also courted his party’s rank and file by signing one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country, then went a step further than other governors by signing a bill to require public school teachers to use the pronouns for speaking. gender that students are. assigned at birth. His ongoing war with Disney over the company’s backlash against its LGBTQ policies, which resulted in the loss of more than 2,000 high-paying jobs in the state this month, threatens to alienate his party’s business-friendly and libertarian factions.

To win a nomination, you have to be able to pool energy with grassroots donors and activists and then you have to grow that coalition over time, said Dan Geldon, a top Warren campaign aide.

At this point, DeSantis is quite untested on both his ability to scale the base and his ability to build a broader coalition, Geldon added.

But like others, Geldon doesn’t count

out

DeSantis.

out.

Trump has a big lead though

at polls

many Republicans remain concerned about his attempt to overturn the 2020 election and the fact that he faces at least one criminal charge.

His job is to consolidate the people who voted for Trump twice but are skeptical that Trump can win in 2024 and think he carries too much baggage for a general election, said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster.

Trump leans even harder on the online base in many ways, often mentioning obscure grievances and stories that travel the internet, verified or not, in his raucous rallies. But he also defined himself for a wider audience through his years of reality TV stardom and the perception of his business acumen that began in the 1980s with his book The Art of the Deal. And he distinguished himself from the rest of the Republican primary field by pledging not to cut Social Security or Medicare.

DeSantis still introduces himself to many Republicans. And like others in the field, he’s trying to figure out which groups he’s courting.

If there’s a way to assemble an anti-Trump coalition within the Republican Party and I think the numbers are out there, I don’t know if you’ll do it on Twitter, said Seth Masket, director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver.

Alice Stewart, who worked on five Republican presidential campaigns, believes DeSantis and his campaign recognize the potential problem and are working to broaden his message.

What he went through with and won in Florida is based more on cultural issues, Stewart said. But he knows, and the campaign knows, that voters in Central America and general elections and independent voters want more of a message about leadership, about winning, about the economy, about crime.