Ron DeSantis now thinks maybe icing out mainstream press was a bad move

For some time, Republican antagonism had led politicians from that party to sideline, disparage or even ignore traditional media outlets. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, seeking reelection, was among them. Then he won, easily, and prepared to run for president.

And then the floor fell out.

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One problem was that DeSantis’s victory, while robust, was not necessarily the mandate that he has suggested it was. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) was on the ballot, too, and his 16-point margin of victory wasn’t that much smaller than DeSantis’s 19-point one.

Another was that another Republican candidate had explicitly aimed to goose Republican and conservative turnout the same year by overtly rejecting media coverage he viewed as hostile. That was Doug Mastriano, running for governor in Pennsylvania, and he lost by 15 points.

Of course, those were general-election fights, not primaries, so perhaps any lessons they offered could be set aside. DeSantis came into 2023 trailing Trump only slightly and with an obvious approach moving forward: focusing on right-wing media, not traditional media or media overall. After all, his campaign team had enormous experience, gleaned from the 2022 race, in pushing back on the media on social media (generating support and glee from the broader right, particularly online). Moving forward from a position of strength — and avoiding direct criticism — might have seemed quite appealing, particularly because he had just won reelection using much the same approach.

Semafor’s Benjy Sarlin on Thursday surfaced a social media post from March 2023 that predicted what came next.

“Ron DeSantis hasn’t been vetted in a national media environment. Worse for him: he thinks he has,” American Bridge’s Pat Dennis wrote. “So he’s not prepared.”

Sarlin pointed back at the post in response to an interview DeSantis granted (conservative) radio host Hugh Hewitt.

Hewitt asked DeSantis what adjustments he planned to make as the end looms.

“I came in not really doing as much media. I should have just been blanketing. I should have gone on all the corporate shows,” DeSantis replied, using “corporate” in lieu of “mainstream” or “traditional.” “I should have gone on everything. I started doing that as we got into the end of the summer, and we did it. But we had an opportunity, I think, to come out of the gate and do that and reach a much broader folk.”

This was particularly true because he was initially positioned as the candidate who could serve as a Trump alternative — and Republicans looking for such an alternative are less likely to be immersed solely in right-wing media. Whether this would have made any difference is debatable, certainly, given that DeSantis’s governance in his home state was heavily focused on responding to issues permeating right-wing television and social media. He presumably launched his campaign on the social media platform that was then called Twitter to reinforce what he perceived as a strength and because 2022 had indicated that this plan might work.

It didn’t. As Trump rose, the former president’s vocal supporters on Twitter, now known as X, came back into the fold and often attacked DeSantis as viciously as they had Trump’s other opponents in the past. (See: Bootgate.) This made it trickier to rely on right-wing media alone, because there were incentives for hosts and influencers in that space to similarly side with Trump. It was not friendly terrain.

In early January of last year, the New York Times published a story looking at how DeSantis planned to shut out traditional media. By July, Vanity Fair was reporting on his new embrace of outlets such as CNN.

Between those two stories, DeSantis’s average in national polls compiled by 538 dropped from 34 percent to 20 percent, a 14-point decline. Trump’s lead over him grew from 11 points to 30.

Since the beginning of August, he’s fallen only four additional points.

This is a case of correlation — polling drop intersecting with his media grayout (because he was still doing some interviews with friendly interviewers) — not necessarily equaling causation. After all, part of what happened in the first few months of 2023 was that Trump reengaged actively in campaigning, benefiting from a visit to Ohio after a train derailment and, more significantly, gaining headlines following his indictment in New York.

DeSantis, too, rose in prominence as the heir apparent to the nomination — emphasis on “apparent.” That meant he was getting vetting from the national media that included both analysis and simply exposing his campaign style to the broader public. It was not flattering, especially with the once-useful right-wing social-media universe happy to help depict him as floundering, goofy or robotic.

Speaking to supporters last week, DeSantis expressed frustration at this shift.

“He’s got basically a Praetorian Guard of the conservative media — Fox News, the websites, all this stuff,” DeSantis said. “They just don’t hold him accountable, because they’re worried about losing viewers and they don’t want to have the ratings go down. And that’s just the reality.”

Sure. 100 percent. DeSantis’s real issue is less that this exists, though, than that it benefited Trump over the past 12 months while it had largely benefited DeSantis the year before. (Notice that, speaking to a conservative host, DeSantis didn’t attack that “Praetorian Guard.”)

His team was slow to realize that traditional media interviews might help him combat the now heavily hostile right-wing media world. In July, alongside a major staff overhaul and other signs of impending doom, they changed gears. In the months after, the slide slowed — but losing ground more slowly isn’t gaining ground.

The inevitable autopsy on DeSantis’s presidential bid will need to consider how he approached the media and may center on his team’s erroneous belief that he could parlay his 2022 strategy into 2024.

Its ultimate conclusion, though, will probably be that Trump was too powerful with Republicans for much of anything to have derailed his candidacy. The aberration in polling isn’t that Trump has fared so well in recent months but that, in the weeks after the 2022 election, DeSantis did.