SFor months, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been considered Donald Trump’s most promising challenger for the Republican Party’s nomination in next year’s presidential election. Unlike the former president, who announced in November that he would run again, DeSantis has taken his time to officially throw his hat in the ring.
Now the time has come: On Wednesday he declared his candidacy and submitted the relevant documents to the American electoral authorities. He had also scheduled a high-profile launch event on Twitter, which began with an embarrassing glitch. He spoke to Elon Musk, who has owned the online service for a good six months. Twitter’s Spaces audio platform, on which the conversation took place, failed repeatedly at the beginning, Musk attributed this to overloading the Twitter server after more than 650,000 users had dialed in at times.
The conversation began almost half an hour late, and DeSantis first took the floor with an apparently pre-formulated speech. “Our country is going in the wrong direction,” he said. He repeatedly attacked US President Joe Biden and showed himself confident that he could beat him. If he is nominated, you can set your watch to January 2025 when he takes the oath of office.
The – albeit unsuccessful – campaign start with Musk should bring DeSantis a lot of attention – and at the same time make the new Twitter owner, who is also CEO of the electric car manufacturer Tesla and the space company SpaceX, even more of a political figure than before. Musk used the event to promote Twitter.
It is no coincidence that Musk is taking on such a prominent role in the election campaign and doing so with DeSantis. The multi-billionaire has recently taken an increasing political stance, showing sympathy for the Republicans and sometimes serving up conspiracy theories from the ultra-right political camp. Before the congressional elections in the United States last year, he called for the election of Republicans on Twitter. He has said the Democrats have become a “party of division and hatred.”
Entrepreneur’s sympathies for Trump’s competitor
Musk has also been very supportive of DeSantis. Last November, he answered yes to a question on Twitter about whether he would support the governor in the 2024 presidential election. He claimed DeSantis would “win easily” if he ran against Biden — “he doesn’t even have to campaign.”
Musk and DeSantis are aligned in many ways. Both have loudly complained about corona restrictions. Musk called them “fascist”, DeSantis has fought against mandatory vaccinations in Florida. Both also see themselves as fighters against “woke” worldviews, by which they mean things that they consider politically too progressive. Musk has said he’s becoming more politically active right now because the “woke virus” needs to be stopped before it “destroys civilization.” DeSantis said Wednesday Biden had his cues whispered to him by a “woken mob.”
According to Musk, he still voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. However, the relationship between him and the President is very cold. This can also be seen from the fact that as president, Biden often surrounds himself with managers from other automakers than Tesla. A possible explanation for this is that Tesla is not unionized and Musk has often spoken out vehemently against it. Biden, on the other hand, positions himself as a great friend of unions and was strongly supported by them in his election campaign.
Musk’s decisions resonate with the Republican camp
As a Twitter owner, Musk has repeatedly made decisions that resonate well with the Republican camp. The most spectacular of these was lifting the Twitter ban on Donald Trump, imposed shortly after the Capitol storm in January 2021. Trump hasn’t tweeted since then, focusing instead on his own platform, Truth Social. However, it is considered quite possible that he will become active again on Twitter in the course of the election campaign.
Ron DeSantis is considered Trump’s greatest rival, but has recently lost significant ground again. He did well after the midterm elections in November, when he was re-elected as Florida’s governor by a large majority, while some of the Trump-backed candidates for political office failed. Many observers took this as an indication that DeSantis could have better chances against Biden in 2024 than Trump.
Trump has recently pulled away again in polls. In the most recent Morning Consult poll, 58 percent of respondents said they want to vote for Trump in the Republican primary. DeSantis was 20 percent, in December he was at times well over 30 percent. But he is still the clear number two.
It is not yet clear whether Musk is fully on the side of DeSantis, despite the high-profile Twitter appearance on Wednesday. A few days ago, he also tweeted a video of Tim Scott, a South Carolina senator, who has just announced his candidacy for president and will be a competitor to DeSantis. Musk told the Wall Street Journal this week that he does not yet want to officially endorse any candidate. He wants a president who is “reasonably normal.”
