Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, once seen as the great hope for conservatives who had grown tired of former President Donald Trump, is now limping into the Iowa caucuses significantly trailing the man he'd once hoped to unseat as leader of the Republican Party.
Nick Catoggio, a conservative who has long been a critic of Trump, writes in The Dispatch that "we've now entered the cope stage" for DeSantis backers who had hoped that he would finally break Trump's grip on the Republican base.
Unlike some of his fellow anti-Trump conservatives, however, Catoggio pins much of the blame for DeSantis' fall on the Florida governor himself rather than the mainstream news media.
"From the glitchy announcement on Elon Musk’s platform to staff turmoil to months of anemic polling to the recent implosion of his super PAC, there’s no avoiding the fact that DeSantis has grossly underperformed expectations," he argues. "What was America’s political media supposed to say to put a cheery spin on all of that for undecided Republican voters?"
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In addition to this, Catoggio faults DeSantis for adopting an early campaign strategy of only agreeing to talk to right-wing news outlets in an effort to show his conservative bonafides to Republican voters.
What DeSantis missed, however, is that right-wing media content is primarily shaped by telling its viewers what they want to hear rather than trying to mold their opinions.
"America’s most 'influential' right-wing news outlet is surely Fox News," he notes. "Yet when push came to shove, Fox preferred to spend three-quarters of a billion dollars in defamation damages than risk trying to “influence” its viewers by telling them the truth about the 2020 election. Reflecting the views of the audience was still the shrewder business move, even at a cost as immense as that."
