Jan.18

electoral-vote.com

Dem 51

   

GOP 49

(Never) Meet the Press?

Last week, The New York Times had an interesting item about Gov. Ron DeSantis' (R-FL) 2024 campaign strategy. Essentially, he wants to run the Donald Trump playbook, doing his campaigning through friendly right-wing media outlets, along with social media platforms. The non-right-wing media will be ignored.

This media strategy is certainly... understandable. It has been a very long time since a politician had as much political skill, and yet as little charisma and telegenicity as DeSantis. He's got something of a thuggish vibe, including beady/squinty eyes. He's also got an unpleasant voice. In other words, Ronald Reagan, he is not. In fact, the politician that DeSantis most brings to mind, when it comes to "presence" (and when it comes to certain other things, as well) is former senator Joseph McCarthy. The two men even look a bit alike:

There may be no politician in history for whom television was less friendly than Joseph McCarthy. And DeSantis is not far behind.

That said, we think there are serious problems with DeSantis' strategy, and his plan to run Trump campaign v2.0. Among them:

• Biff Tannen: By the time he ran for president, Donald Trump was nationally famous, and had been for at least 25-30 years. There was The Apprentice, of course, but also the books and the board game and the various (tacky) products. Trump was frequently mentioned in television and radio programming of the 1980s and 1990s and appeared in the lyrics of literally hundreds of rap songs. He was ubiquitous enough that more than a few people realized that Biff Tannen, the antagonist of the Back to the Future films (1985, 1989, 1990) was a thinly veiled version of Trump (particularly the Biff Tannen of the 2015 alternate timeline).
  
  DeSantis, by contrast, does not have that kind of fame. Oh, he's famous in Florida, and in dialed-in right-wing circles. But there are tens of millions of people whose votes he needs who have little to no idea who DeSantis is.
  
  
• The Trumpettes: Trump has a savant-like ability to attract devoted followers willing to do nearly anything for him. Think Kellyanne Conway, Katrina Pierson, Mike Lindell, Donald Trump Jr., Steve Bannon, Diamond and Silk, etc. These folks often served as avatars for The Donald, including on non-right-wing media, allowing him to get his message out there without directly subjecting himself to the withering questioning of, say, Chuck Todd or George Stephanopoulos.
  
  Maybe DeSantis also has this talent. But if so, we have not seen the evidence of it. Can you name one well-known DeSantis lieutenant? We can't, and we write about politics every day. Also, just yesterday Politico had a lengthy profile about DeSantis, and how he is a limp fish who turns people off in one-on-one interactions. We do not foresee an army of DeSantis fanatics (DeSantics? Ronnoids? Blackshirts?)
  
  
• De-Ciphered: When Trump first ran for president, he was a political cipher. Yes, he had a broad political program, mostly centered on building the wall. But, in general, it was not at all clear what kind of president he would be. Would he try to be hands-on, or would he delegate? Would he really build the wall, or was that just talk? Was he really a fire-breathing right-winger, or would the longtime registered Democrat within him re-emerge from its hibernation? This made it possible for voters unhappy with the devil they knew (Hillary Clinton) to persuade themselves that Trump might just surprise everyone and be a better option.
  
  DeSantis is no cipher; everyone knows what his approach is and what kinds of policies he will pursue. And while some of his stunts played well in Florida (though see below), they are likely to be problematic nationally. He is likely to have a need to explain to the voting public why his anti-Disney actions were OK, or how his COVID policy was acceptable. He won't be able to do that if the only outlet he speaks to is Fox.
  
  
• Twitterpated: The first president to really utilize the radio (Franklin D. Roosevelt) got a lot of mileage out of that. The first president to really utilize television advertising (Dwight D. Eisenhower) got a lot of mileage out of that. The first president to really utilize the world wide web for fundraising (Barack Obama) really got a lot of mileage out of that. But for those presidents who followed in their footsteps, the story was invariably diminishing returns.
  
  When Donald Trump became the first presidential candidate to harness the power of Twitter, he got enormous amounts of coverage, in large part due to his propensity for saying outlandish stuff. Undoubtedly, readers of this site remember that well. However, thanks to one Elon Musk, Twitter is not the platform it once was, and may be headed sharply downhill. And even if it isn't, "presidential candidate says crazy stuff on Twitter" largely isn't news anymore. Been there, done that. Oh, and by all indications, DeSantis is very good at deploying the word "woke" as a noun, verb, adjective, adverb and prepositional phrase, but he's otherwise not great at finding new buttons to push and then pushing them. For all these reasons, Twitter isn't going to be the sort of weapon for DeSantis that it was for Trump.
  
  
• Life in the Fast Lane: It's been written a million times, but it's worth writing again: When Trump ran in 2016, he invented his own lane, which he then had to himself. The roughly two dozen other candidates (remember the kids' debates followed by the grown-ups' debates?) were all running as standard Republicans. Trump was running as a fire-breathing right-wing populist. By the time folks like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) saw which way the winds were blowing, it was already too late.
  
  In 2024, the Trump lane is not only well established, it's probably going to be THE lane, crowded with wannabe Trumps, not to mention Trump himself. Even if we imagine that the majority of Republican voters are now MAGA maniacs, it will not be easy to dominate that part of the vote with multiple MAGA candidates in the running.

The executive summary is this: We believe Trump was sui generis, and that nobody will ever get elected running that kind of campaign again. This is not to say that DeSantis can't win in 2024, but he's going to have to develop his own playbook, and one that will work beyond Florida. Thus far, he has not shown that kind of creativity, though the election cycle is still young, we suppose. (Z)