The remarkable part about Ron DeSantis’ self destruction
When it comes to actually winning elections, there’s no less relevant group out there than Donald Trump’s base. It’s simply too small to matter. It always has been. Trump’s base isn’t why he won in 2016 (you can blame James Comey’s letter, Russia’s disinformation, and the media’s ratings-driven complicity in a phony Hillary Clinton email scandal for that). Trump’s base wasn’t able to save him from losing in 2020. Trump’s base won’t be able to magically resurrect his already-deceased political career in 2024 either.
But while Trump’s base is of no use in determining the outcome of elections, his base is of great use when it comes to driving ratings and page views for the media. Trump’s base loves seeing itself get media attention. Everyone else is so horrified by Trump’s base, it can’t look away whenever Trump’s base gets media attention. For years it’s created the perfect storm in which the entire mainstream media – left, right, and center, each for differing reasons – has obsessively treated Trump’s too-small base as if it were the only voting demographic that mattered.
It’s one thing for the media to promote this kind of electoral fantasyland, in which a Trump base that by all statistical accounts consists of no more than 15% to 20% of the American population, somehow determines the outcomes of general elections. You can expect viewers to fall for this fictional narrative, because it’s all they’re being given to work with. What’s remarkable is how many politicians, who have access to actual data and analysts who understand how elections actually work, are instead falling for the media’s fictional portrayal of Trump’s base as somehow being pivotal.
To that end, we’re seeing one would-be 2024 Republican presidential candidate courting Trump’s base in blatant fashion. Ron DeSantis, who ha repeatedly shown that he has a political IQ near zero, seems to be playing into this the most intently of all. Down in Florida he’s now hyping anti-gay legislation, anti-First Amendment legislation, and all kinds of other extremist measures, under the mistaken belief that doing so is somehow going to put him on track for a viable 2024 presidential campaign.
In reality, DeSantis is merely disqualifying himself right out of the gate. He’s handing the Democrats a treasure trove of material that they can and will use to make sure no one in the American middle wants to go anywhere near him in 2024. For that matter, given how much more extremist DeSantis is positioning himself than Trump ever did, even center-right voters won’t want to touch DeSantis in 2024. In fact this all has a good chance of costing DeSantis reelection in Florida in 2022, because he’s making himself incompatible with voters in the middle – and that’s always a recipe for losing in a swing state.
Of course, because the media (left, right, and center) is still 100% married to the ratings-friendly narrative that Donald Trump’s base is what decides elections, the media is naturally playing up Ron DeSantis as some kind of de facto 2024 frontrunner. What’s amusing is that the media seems to be trying to position Trump and DeSantis as the 2024 frontrunner, in alternating segments, in order to squeeze the maximum ratings out of the notion that one of them will win in 2024 and we’re all doomed.
But back in the real world, all that Ron DeSantis is doing is making a mess for himself. He’s always been a world class moron, so naturally he’s stupid enough to think that the bullshit narratives he hears on cable news are somehow real. The good news is that because DeSantis is so arrogantly clueless, he’s derailing his own career with all this ultra-extremism. The bad news is that a lot of people in Florida, including LGBT kids, are getting hurt badly by DeSantis’ self destructive extremism. As is so often the case these days, the media’s fictional ratings-driven landscape is causing more collateral damage than ever.
