Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign has raked in $8.2 million in the first 24 hours since it launched, The Hill has learned.
The governor’s campaign team confirmed a New York Times report detailing the dollar amount, which includes $1 million raised during a single hour.
After months of moves that hinted at a possible White House bid, DeSantis joined the race on Wednesday with a glitchy discussion alongside Twitter CEO Elon Musk on the platform’s live-audio feature “Twitter Spaces.”
DeSantis blamed the technology shortfalls on the large volume of listeners who joined the event, claiming during an interview with Fox News that the audience was “the biggest they’d ever had.”
“If you make a donation, maybe we can break that part of the internet as well,” he later added.
The Florida governor has long polled as a top possible candidate behind frontrunner former President Trump, who he now joins in the growing GOP primary race.
The Times reports Trump, by comparison, raised about $9.5 million in the six weeks after he announced his 2024 campaign just after the November midterms.
The millions DeSantis has raised so far are contributions gleaned online and from fundraising calls made by the governor’s supporters at a “Ron-o-Rama” event at the Four Seasons in Miami, according to the report.
It was not clear how many donors had contributed, and the 24-hour figure reportedly doesn’t include funds from the pro-DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down.