OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced he was running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination on Wednesday, but it was a glitchy affair that was not widely viewed.
DeSantis took to Twitter Spaces in an event co-hosted by the platform’s former CEO, Elon Musk, to make his announcement, which was certainly unique and had its own kind of appeal.
But according to data reviewed this week, it wasn’t nearly as big of a splash as was former President Donald Trump’s televised announcement at his Mar-a-Lago estate in November.
“DeSantis said his glitch-ridden Twitter Space, or a recording of it, had been watched by ‘probably over 10 million people.’ There’s no evidence of this. In fact, the Space managed only just over 300,000 concurrent listeners, with Twitter showing a currently tally of 3.9 million people tuning in,” The National Pulse reported on Friday.
Despite limited coverage by several news networks, Trump’s announcement garnered a substantial number of concurrent viewers. Fox News alone attracted over 5.16 million viewers during the time slot, while CNN added another 2.43 million viewers to the tally, the outlet reported.
Determining the exact number of viewers after the fact is challenging, but it’s possible to gain some insight into the level of interest in Trump’s announcement by examining the streaming numbers on YouTube.
Fox News accumulated 1.2 million views, while Fox Business attracted an additional 826,000 views, and CNBC garnered 612,000 views, among others. These figures provide an indication of the considerable viewership for Trump’s announcement on various streaming platforms, the outlet noted further.
“Video of the full speech uploaded to the site by CNN adds 660,800 viewers, ABC Action News another 923,000, with hundreds of thousands more spread out across channels for relatively obscure broadcasters, with uploads of the speech by the likes of Fox 2 Detroit, for example, boasting 117,000 views,” the outlet continued.
“Video streaming platform Rumble showed a further 2.05 million views on the official account of Donald J. Trump alone, while the Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN) announced that it hit more than 3.8 million viewers for the speech.”
Trump, in April 2023, gave a major speech following his indictment in New York that was reportedly viewed by 6.6 million viewers on Fox alone, with another 2.125 million watching on CNN – “far higher than the network ha[d] seen in prime time in months,” Forbes reported.
After months of speculation, the Florida governor officially jumped into the race on Wednesday and, despite the glitchy Twitter Spaces launch, nevertheless made the rounds on several cable news and other streaming outlets.
In a post-announcement interview on Fox News hosted by his former congressional colleague Trey Gowdy, for example, DeSantis laid out his day-one agenda should he manage to win the presidency.
“The border, there’s a lot you can do, ripping out [President Joe] Biden’s anti-American energy policies,” DeSantis began. “You probably could do most of the executive, you’ll probably need to do some of that legislative as well.
Continuing, he said a priority is “re-constitutionalizing the administrative state.”
“We have a bureaucracy that’s totally out of control. You need to be willing to use Article 2 power to bring the administrative state to heel,” he added. “I will do that.”
“I think Congress also has a role in reigning in the abuses through both the power of the purse and through making sure that they are legislating through clear and defined laws that aren’t delegating huge swaths of power to unelected bureaucrats,” DeSantis said.
He also added: “One thing I think we can do legislatively is national school choice. We’ve done it in Florida, it’s made a huge difference for low-income families.”
Fox News added that DeSantis’ announcement coincided with a meeting he had this week in Miami with top financial backers.
DeSantis now faces a battle with the party’s current frontrunner — Trump.
