Okay, folks. Here's the skinny. First of all, let's talk about context and background before we get into what happened tonight and why the spin from supporters is particularly amusing.
"Influencers" and "surrogates" have argued for two months as DeSantis has collapsed that something would change when he entered the race. "Wait until he announces" and "DeSantis hasn't even announced yet" were daily responses to his declining poll numbers, refusing to acknowledge that a distrust starting with his flipflop and inauthentic answers on Ukraine started by Tucker planted a deep seed of distrust among voters.
Putting aside the technical issues tonight, the campaign has repeatedly put off this overly built-up announcement for weeks, changing expected dates and pretending it was strategic. The truth is that there were doubts and concerns amid donors' and straight campaign incompetence.
The linked article brings me to my second point. The scrapping of his announcement in his "tiny Tampa hometown suburb" was not strategic, it was a failure that led to a tone deaf decision to change the venue to the VERY POPULIST "Four Seasons" for mega donors' comforts. In lieu of that tiny suburb where he grew up, he would instead turn to the Biden supporting Elon Musk to lend him the power of Twitter to amplify his announcement and message.
That brings us to the finale of this total disaster of an "announcement", which was supposed to be so powerful and persuasive it would change the trajectory of the race. It was plagued by technical issues and crashed in Twitter Spaces. Team DeSantis and Twitter "Influencers" immediately tried to spin it into him being so popular he crashed Twitter.
Ugh, folks.
Aside from the crowd protesting outside being larger than the supporters inside, it's a ludicrous claim. Twitter is one of the most trafficked sites on the Internet and has never crashed without some algorithm issue resulting in overloaded PHP/JavaScript calls, etc.
And if that doesn't make sense to you, consider DeSantis was actually booted from his own Twitter Space. Traffic doesn't do that, folks. Incompetence does. I'd NOT be shocked if we learn an artificial attempt to amplify his announcement resulted in the overload and crash, not popularity. It's also entirely possible the staff at Twitter did not appreciate the potential of being indicted for campaign finance violations like in-kinds and crashed it themselves.
Either way, the "DeSantis Broke Twitter Bruh!" mantra is for sycophants, not a sophisticated analysis of how this event might have met or failed to meet expectations. The entire point of an announcement is to reach as many people as possible, to appeal and inspire them, and to do it so effectively it causes a shakeup in the race.
On all these measures, Team DeSantis not only failed spectacularly, they might have actually hurt themselves in the long run. This was the most overhyped political disaster in modern memory, and anyone claiming otherwise, is lying.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/24/politics/hometown-desantis-campaign/index.html
I feel like tearing off my clothes and dancing in the rain (snow on Tuesday). Ofc I'm entirely too old to do that. But...
We were SO right.
Here's Snoop, who rapped "F--K Donald Trump" in 2017, now performing at a Trump supporting inauguration party.
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Like I said in the video this morning, I was thinking that I'd very much like to do a fairly large study on political violence as quickly as possible, perhaps even this weekend.
It may fail miserably, but we all know there are deeply concerning, large swathes of the population who believe that using political violence is justified.
We should be adding to this discussion in a positive way before this moment passes and it was all for nothing. I truly feel that we gave this issue a pass after Butler, in part because of the election and in part because President Donald Trump survived that assassination attempt.
It was a grave error I'll regret, forever.
When I get back, I'll go over some proposed changes to make it look better and do a media round if possible to promote it. But for now, please like, share and contribute to the campaign. Let's get it as funded as we can and get it done.
P.S. It can also be found on the Public Polling Project's main page, but this will be the main url....
Excellent SubStack read.
“If Charlie Kirk’s horrific assassination hit you in a deeply personal way, maybe in part it was because he was doing what you are too afraid to do but knew you should. Maybe you’ve been cowering when you could be more courageous, and you know you are enabling the very tyranny that intimidates you. No system reforms when those who wish for change hold their breath and hide. Maybe it’s time that you stop whisper-shouting behind your keyboard and put your money where your mouth is while you still have a voice.
Before it’s a war.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/theradicalcenter/p/are-you-cowering-behind-the-courageous?r=eldow&utm_medium=ios
Watching people attempt to "unskew" polls conducted by all walks of this industry—ranging from Nate Cohn at The New York Times to Spencer Kimball at Emerson College to Tim Malloy at Quinnipiac—all to deny Donald Trump's gains against Joe Biden with various voting blocs, is more than a little sad.
The slew of recent polls over two weeks—to include no less than four today alone—have simply confirmed prior findings published from other pollsters who have previously been "unskewed". That includes your's truly and our work at BIG DATA POLL, Mark Penn at Harvard University, Patrick Ruffini at Echelon Insights, and many others.
I'm temped to equate this with an Occam's razor-like situation. But this debate is more about likelihood than simplicity.
Here's the Presidential Vote Preference Trend for Biden v. Trump going back to August 2020. The Public Polling Project did not begin asking the Rematch Question for 2024 until September 2021. However, we can still make some pretty important and interesting observations.