So much for Ron DeSantis
Of all the problems we’re facing in 2021, one of the biggest – and most poorly understood – is that the political media has seen its ratings and page views drop across the board. Why is this a problem for you? If the news outlets can’t hit their ratings marks honestly, they’ll often resort to whatever false narratives necessary in order to keep the lights on. And the more dishonest the media gets, the harder it is to achieve any sort of positive outcome in the political world.
Take, for instance, how the media spent the first half of 2021 bending over backward to try to overhype and prop up Ron DeSantis. Not only was he widely portrayed as the 2024 frontrunner for President, he was also portrayed as being a lock for reelection in Florida in 2022. Of course the facts never came close to supporting either of these narratives. But DeSantis is precisely the kind of sneering corrupt Republican extremist who can be used to scare mainstream Americans into staying tuned in, and so his (fictional) rise in 2021 has been good for ratings.
But at some point a narrative can derail so badly that even the most opportunistic of news outlets end up having to give up on it. This weekend Politico, which has behaved like little more than a clearing house for Trump-world propaganda of late, finally admitted that Floridians are turning against Desantis and that he is in trouble in 2022. Of course this came even as the New York Times ran a bizarre work of fiction which falsely claimed that DeSantis made a good faith effort to get his state vaccinated, and painted Florida’s COVID Delta crisis as some kind of big mystery.
So the media is still hedging its bets as to whether it wants to salvage some credibility by admitting DeSantis is vulnerable, or whether it wants to keep trying milk the “DeSantis is inevitable” narrative for ratings. But even as this debate plays out in corporate media backrooms, in the real world there’s no denying that DeSantis is a sinking ship.
Ron DeSantis keeps doubling down against school mask mandates, even though polling shows that his state strongly opposes him on this. Worse, the courts are ruling against him on masks, meaning he’s picked a battle on a losing issue and he’s actually losing the battle. And now DeSantis has lost his Chief of Staff and his Surgeon General within a matter of days, raising questions about whether this portends a broader staff exodus.
Of course none of this means that Ron DeSantis is finished. He has a little more than a year until he faces reelection, and while he’ll surely do nothing to help his own prospects, elections can shift in fickle fashion. The bottom line is that any political activist who wants DeSantis ousted in 2022 will have to put in the usual work required to finish him off. It’ll be a grind, just as defeating Donald Trump in 2020 was a grind.
But the reality at this point is that Ron DeSantis has done so much damage to himself, even the media is no longer sure it’s a good idea to try to keep hyping him for the sake of ratings. Palmer Report did predict months ago that DeSantis wouldn’t benefit from the spotlight he was being given, and that he would instead wilt under it. Sure enough, that’s already happening.
