Friday's Fortuitous Absurdities: DeSantis Gets a Haul, Biden Hits a Wall, Dodgers Drop the Ball
Welp, so much for my assessment that Ron DeSantis’s campaign rollout on Twitter fell flat.
Raising $8.2 million in 24 hours after the event is a pretty positive indicator that it was better received than I had thought, at least among the political donor class.
Here’s an excerpt from that story at the New York Times:
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida raised $8.2 million in his first 24 hours as a presidential candidate, his campaign said on Thursday, a huge sum that cements his standing as the leading Republican rival to Donald J. Trump.
Mr. DeSantis’s campaign began on Wednesday evening with a glitch-filled kickoff on Twitter, but that apparently did not slow donor enthusiasm. The campaign said on Wednesday that it had raised $1 million during a single hour.
The $8.2 million figure is more than the $6.3 million that Joseph R. Biden Jr. raised in his first 24 hours as a candidate in 2019, or the $6.1 million raised by former Representative Beto O’Rourke that same year.
…
The sum is roughly double the $4 million that Mr. Trump’s campaign said it had raised in the 24 hours after his criminal indictment earlier this year, though most of that money was raised organically online.
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The $8.2 million brought in by Mr. DeSantis far outpaces how Mr. Trump began his 2024 fund-raising in late 2022. Mr. Trump had raised about $9.5 million in the six weeks after he announced his campaign in mid-November.
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The comparisons to Trump’s recent fundraising may or may not have any real relevance, but they are at least interesting. Polls released Thursday taken within hours of the DeSantis event showed no movement, but it would have been silly to expect they would given the lack of passage of time. Polls being conducted right now and over the weekend will have more relevance, and we can be sure many are underway.