Boston Globe: Ron DeSantis wants to make his mark online, but is it paying off?

But the media landscape has changed rapidly, said Michael Beach, a Republican consultant who previously worked with Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. Research by his company, Cross Screen Media, found that huge swaths of the Republican primary electorate can no longer be reached with TV ads, including 37 percent of GOP primary voters in Iowa and 20 percent in New Hampshire.

“You’re getting to the point where maybe you could only reach 60 percent of the people with TV, and not all of those people are easy to reach still,” Beach said.

“All of our attention’s fragmented all over the place,” Beach said. “You can have a rule of thumb and that doesn’t work like six months later.”

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WASHINGTON — In person, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida cuts a conventional figure of a presidential candidate, sticking to the script onstage, posing stiffly for selfies, and bantering about ice cream or listening politely as voters tell him about their recent trips to Florida.

His campaign is less inhibited online.

DeSantis launched his presidential campaign on Twitter in a glitchy-but-headline-grabbing appearance with the provocative, increasingly conservative businessman Elon Musk. DeSantis’ campaign has tested thousands of Facebook ads to see what will stick. And he has deployed his “DeSantis War Room” Twitter account to attack his opponents, amplifying anonymous posts by others that favor him, and highlighting content wrought from memes that only voters deeply steeped in the self-referential language of the right-wing Internet could truly understand.

DeSantis’ biggest online salvo so far came late last month, when the campaign shared a now-deleted video that used former president Donald Trump’s previous words of support for gay and transgender people to savage him. It was an eye-catcher and, by ordinary political standards, a head-scratcher, featuring an image of DeSantis with lightning coming out of his eyes, footage of ultra-masculine movie stars, and boasts about DeSantis’ crackdown on transgender people in Florida. It touched off days of negative coverage in which the campaign was roundly condemned for promoting a message that even fellow Republicans saw as antigay, and has come to be seen as a misfire in a campaign struggling to find its footing.

But the episode also showed how, as DeSantis tries to gain momentum in a crowded field, his campaign is attempting to beat Trump online, hoping to out-provoke a master provocateur and win over the corners of the Internet where right-wing conservatives trade incendiary memes — and it’s a strategy that has drawn praise from some Republican strategists.

“They have definitely onboarded the message that you can’t run a conventional campaign against Donald Trump,” said Eric Wilson, a GOP strategist who was the digital director for Senator Marco Rubio during his ill-fated run against Trump in 2016. “You shouldn’t be afraid of people criticizing you or acting negative — you should be afraid of people ignoring you.”

The need to out-Trump Trump online, as well as the massive and rapid shifts in the number and nature of platforms available and the way people use them, means candidates have every incentive to be as online as possible, often with provocative content that games the platforms’ algorithms, appeals to influencers, and earns them the media coverage they crave.

“I’m calling it the [expletive]-posting primary,” said Kyle Tharp, who writes a newsletter about digital politics trends called FWIW. Tharp tracks digital ad spending, and said DeSantis and his allied super PACs have spent $1.7 million on digital ads on Facebook, Instagram, Google, and YouTube this year, while Trump has spent $955,000. (President Biden, meanwhile, has spent $3.5 million, according to Tharp.)

Last Thursday, the DeSantis campaign pounced on a television interview given by Disney CEO Bob Iger, in which he sought to defend the company against DeSantis’ allies claims that the company has tried to “sexualize” children. The campaign posted a video to Twitter that featured excerpts from that interview as well as footage, first released on Twitter last year by a conservative blogger, of Disney executives and employees talking about the importance of addressing the concerns and priorities of LGTBQ+ audiences.

The campaign did not respond to detailed questions about its online strategy but posts like these come as the campaign is looking to attract more attention. An internal memo from the DeSantis campaign, obtained last Thursday by NBC News, said the campaign would be working “aggressively” to generate more earned media, or coverage by news outlets.

Other candidates in the crowded field and their supporters have worked overtime to seize online attention, like the super PAC supporting Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami, which launched an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, where a user can ask a question and get an answer from an animated figure who looks like Suarez himself. The little-known businessman Vivek Ramaswamy has parlayed his “anti-woke” appearances in snappy online videos and his own podcast into gradually growing affection from the GOP base.

“A lot of the Republicans — grass-roots conservatives especially — they don’t trust the traditional media, they’re doing a lot of their own exploration and research. I don’t have data to back this up but it seems like they’re pretty online,” said Tricia McLaughlin, a senior advisor to Ramaswamy.

McLaughlin said the Ramaswamy campaign has a communications structure that is built for speed, including an in-house podcasting studio and a setup allowing them to fire off videos for the Web in minutes.

“He’ll have an idea, our videographer Brandon puts on the camera, he shoots it, the videographer airdrops it to me, and we just put it out,” McLaughlin said. She added, however, that Ramaswamy is “not a meme guy.”

The Trump campaign has long been comfortable online. In 2016, the former president cannonballed himself into the center of the Republican primary with his freewheeling tweets, building a massive online following that stuck with him long after he was kicked off the service — and then reinstated by Musk. When Trump was president, his advisers often seemed to take cues from the warren of pro-Trump message boards and online communities.

But the media landscape has changed rapidly, said Michael Beach, a Republican consultant who previously worked with Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. Research by his company, Cross Screen Media, found that huge swaths of the Republican primary electorate can no longer be reached with TV ads, including 37 percent of GOP primary voters in Iowa and 20 percent in New Hampshire.

“You’re getting to the point where maybe you could only reach 60 percent of the people with TV, and not all of those people are easy to reach still,” Beach said.

That makes digital strategy all the more important. The dominance of major platforms like Twitter and Facebook has given way to a more fractured landscape, with smaller networks like Telegram or Trump’s own TruthSocial and behemoths like TikTok commanding their own followings.

“All of our attention’s fragmented all over the place,” Beach said. “You can have a rule of thumb and that doesn’t work like six months later.”

Another key change is shaping the kind of content candidates are posting. In 2016, the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed the extent to which users’ private data was being exploited for microtargeting of political ads, prompting significant public backlash. The removal of some Facebook targeting tools has encouraged producers of political content to make ads and other videos that they hope will go viral and get boosted by the sites’ algorithms, said Tyler Brown, a GOP media consultant.

“There’s an incentive to have your content recommended to users, and so it encourages more outlandish and humorous content, heavily influenced by memes,” said Brown.

It all creates an incentive for campaigns to post content that appeals to voters on the online fringe — which might be why the DeSantis campaign highlighted that outside-the-box video on July 30. Many viewers wouldn’t know it but the video draws on something called the GigaChad meme — an idealized image of manliness that first popped up on the anonymous online forum 4chan — as well as another meme called Yes Chad that originated in these same sorts of online spaces.

“There’s this weird Internet subculture of right-wing meme accounts and right-wing political influencers and those folks are constantly sharing weird troll content, things that are incredibly offensive and inappropriate,” said Tharp.

Democrats have long sought to ignite their own messages online.

And the Biden campaign has been quick to embrace the “Dark Brandon” meme, in which the president is depicted as a kind of superhero, sometimes with lasers for eyes.

Some analysts warn that Republicans’ efforts to make heavy use of online spaces where antidemocratic or antigay messages flourish could turn their rhetoric into a race to the bottom.

“Anti-LGBTQ, antitrans messaging has been around for some time. What you see here is the full-on promotion of some of these types of messages as a way to engage activists, as a way to get attention to the campaign,” said Joshua Scacco, associate professor and associate chair of the department of communications at the University of South Florida. “You see in a lot of ways the adoption of the clickbait, outrage kind of approach. You need to make sure Donald Trump is not crowding out that space.”