Team Kemp and Team Youngkin have been waiting patiently for DeSantis to implode and to see who Murdoch would replace him with as the top Trump contender. I’m going to guess that Greg Bluestein’s report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution yesterday contains a valuable hint about Murdoch’s intentions: “Gov. Brian Kemp tamped down the prospect of launching a late bid for the White House, saying Wednesday that joining an already crowded field of Republican hopefuls would undercut GOP efforts to defeat President Joe Biden.
Tuesday night Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley plus former Fox News reporter Diana Falzone wrote that the Murdoch’s have soured on their little meatball and no longer believe DeSantis, who they’ve invested heavily in, has what it takes to beat Trump. “They can smell a loser a mile away” and they “are already starting to lose faith” in the electability factor. “But in recent weeks, the Murdochs have grown increasingly displeased with the DeSantis campaign’s perceived stumbles, lackluster polling, and inability to swiftly dethrone Trump.” Rupert thinks its too late for a Meatball comeback.
Sources at Fox told them that “Murdoch has privately winced at DeSantis’ nonstop cultural-grievance strategy, arguing that it is being executed sloppily. In his repeated attempts to outflank the already hard-right Trump on the right, DeSantis and his team have waged an aggressive messaging operation to paint the Florida governor as a much more extreme culture warrior as compared with the former president— most recently via a bizarre, bigoted video lauding the governor for his anti-LGBTQ attacks. This strategy has for months attracted criticism from fellow Republicans for being unsavvy and ‘too online’ to connect with the median voter.
Hints of the Murdoch clan’s displeasure with DeSantis have surfaced in News Corp.’s media properties over the past few weeks. Two sources familiar with the matter stress that this is “not by accident” and “not a coincidence.”
It’s also a marked shift for the Murdoch clan. Until recently, Fox News had been extremely friendly and safe territory for the Florida governor, with softball questions about his culture-war crusades and other matters. Since 2021, the network has been vital in building DeSantis’ national name ID among conservatives, heralding him as a fast-rising political star and touting him as the future of the Trumpified right.
In an interview last week, Fox News host Will Cain praised DeSantis’ record as Florida governor, but wondered “when that job, if ever, begins to resonate in the numbers for you for president.” DeSantis’ campaign, Cain said, is “not yet connecting” with voters as Trump continues to enjoy a commanding lead in polls.
On Sunday, host and Trump ally Maria Bartiromo bluntly asked DeSantis on-air, “What’s going on with your campaign?” as the “optimism” about it has faded with his polling numbers, as a chyron advised viewers: “DeSantis Trails Trump by 34% for GOP Nomination.”
The editorial pages of News Corp.’s newspapers— often important tea leaves for divining the Murdoch family’s political wishes and priorities— also appear to have taken recent jabs at DeSantis. The right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board took aim at Florida’s new restrictionist anti-immigration bill, a key pillar in DeSantis’ attempts to get to the right of the former president. The bill, the board concluded, will “exacerbate the state’s labor shortage while doing nothing to fix Biden’s border failures.”
The New York Post editorial board, which once hailed DeSantis as the candidate who “gives America the chance to move on from its punch-drunk stupor,” has begun to look askance at DeSantis. In its recent roundups of noteworthy commentary from other publications, the board has curated pieces expressing skepticism at “DeSantis’ Odd Choices” to criticize Trump’s Supreme Court picks and to be “too online” in his constant culture-war crusading.
…Fox and the Murdochs “are in a corner. They’ve clearly gone all-in for DeSantis, and now he’s not resonating. And now they have a new [prime-time] lineup launching, so they will be under a microscope.”
But at this point in the Republican primary, the Murdochs aren’t ready to throw DeSantis overboard just yet, the sources say— in part because they likely would have nowhere else to turn except to crawl back to Trump. In the meantime, the media mogul and his lieutenants can keep pressuring Team DeSantis for a course correction that Murdoch is starting to suspect may never materialize.
“Ron DeSantis was built up as the Trump slayer. So, if he’s not immediately leading Trump in the polls, it’s easy to see how that can easily be spun as a letdown,” says Doug Heye, a former communications director at the Republican National Committee. “There are a lot of people who are trying to write the obituary of a well-funded and popular figure in the party before the debates have even started. Ron was the designated dragon slayer— and because he hasn’t slayed the dragon before the debates have begun, he’s being portrayed as a failure. And I think it’s too early for that.”
Well, Wednesday morning, a report from Maggie Haberman and Nick Nehamas offered an alternative to crawling back to Trump or sticking with DeSantis as he goes down the drain… Youngkin. They agree that “the signs of skepticism from previously friendly conservative megaphones suggest that Murdoch’s media empire might now be reassessing him as the early shine comes off his campaign… The media mogul likes to watch political races play out… Murdoch has privately told people that he would still like to see Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia enter the race, according to a person with knowledge of the remarks. And he has made clear in private discussions over the last two years that he thinks Trump, despite his popularity with Fox News viewers, is unhealthy for the Republican Party.”
Phil Bump crowed yesterday that Fox may be stuck with Trump no matter what Murdoch and other GOP kingmakers want… “stuck with the monster he created… In May 2020, Monmouth University asked Republicans who they trusted more, Fox or Trump. They chose the president, by a wide margin. After Trump lost the 2020 election, Fox News slowly started to move away from Trump— only to see their worst fears realized. He lashed out, demanding that the network echo his false claims about election fraud. His base demanded the same, turning to other, further-right cable-news channels for that content. Fox hosts tried appeasement once again, giving oxygen to the disinformation. It ended up costing Fox three-quarters of a billion dollars.”
So far this year, Trump has consistently attracted more attention than DeSantis on Fox News’s airwaves. On average, he is mentioned four times as often in a month as the Florida governor. Even in the month when DeSantis announced, Trump still beat him by almost 2 to 1.
And that was the peak of Fox’s attention for DeSantis. In the past two months, Fox News has mentioned the name Biden in the context of the president’s son Hunter more often than it has mentioned DeSantis.
(Youngkin barely registers in Fox’s coverage.)
Trump is now doing better in primary polling than he ever did in 2015 or 2016. His position with Republican voters— and, by extension, Fox News viewers— is better than it was the last time he was in a contested primary fight.
One key reason for that is that Murdoch and his media empire decided it was better to strengthen his position and retain his base as viewers than to challenge him even on the most obvious issues. They still do it.
Murdoch is reportedly frustrated with DeSantis and wants someone else who can challenge Trump. Few people bear more blame for his current position than Rupert Murdoch.
I bet DeSantis hopes the malaria pre-epidemic his neglect is responsible for causing in Florida doesn’t spread to Iowa. Newsweek: “The discovery of the malaria infections marks the first time in two decades that the disease, caused by a parasite, has been locally acquired in the U.S., as opposed to being linked to international travel. It comes after NBC News reported that Florida's Bureau of Epidemiology, which is tasked with tracking and preventing communicable diseases, had been without a chief since last month. An administrator position for its surveillance program has been vacant since March… Dr. Aileen Marty, a professor in infectious disease at Florida International University, told NBC the roles were ‘critical public-health functions… There has, unfortunately, been recent politicization of the use of vaccines and health services for refugees and other immigrants, which may explain the challenges in filling this vital position,’ Marty, who advised the then Miami-Dade mayor during the coronavirus pandemic, told NBC.” There’s a widespread feeling in Florida that DeSantis spends all his time and energy on his campaign and that the state is getting the short end of the straw. In fact, recent polling of Republican voters in Florida shows that Trump would kick DeSantis’ ass there— 50% to 30%.
The Financial Times’ Edward Luce referred to the Meatball campaign as the The Great Ron DeSantis Train Wreck and noted that when DeSantis walks into a room “even those who want to support him feel that he harbors a special dislike for them. Being a black hole in terms of charisma is not automatically fatal to a candidate’s prospects. When your target is the diabolically charismatic Donald Trump, however, you are working at a big disadvantage. The story of how DeSantis went from being the favorite, or near-favorite, Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential race to America’s most rapidly falling meteor in years, tells us a lot about the mindset of US conservatism.”
Meantime, Youngkin is urging Republicans to avail themselves of early voting regulations, something that Trump foolishly made into a GOP bête noire. ABC News reported that “The pro-early voting message from Youngkin and Virginia Republicans is drastically different from the false narrative of fraud that Trump has spread about people casting early ballots. Some conservatives say such rhetoric harmed them, politically.” Youngkin: “Your vote matters and we're going to need engagement from everyone interested in moving Virginia forward to be successful. We can't go into Election Day down thousands of votes, so I'm thrilled to have such strong partners coming alongside us in this effort. We fundamentally believe Secure Your Vote Virginia is how, together, we can win in 2023 and beyond.”
