So what? That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing a President DeSantis can do that will affect the amount of attention Trump gets.
I guess it depends on how well Trump can communicate with his base if he doesn’t have Fox and the rest of the right-wing media repeating everything he says. Is issuing orders via his stupid social media platform enough to do it? Does the over 65 crowd, which represent the age group most likely to vote (and who are more conservative than liberal) in general have the skills and desire to continuously monitor their smartphones for Trumps next pile of dookie that gives their lives meaning? I doubt it. They switch on Fox news in the morning and go about their day while the hate flows into the ether and over time the poison seeps into their head through osmosis. If DeSantis is the Fox’s chosen messiah then he is the one that big chunk of Trump’s base will be hearing about 24/7.
Without right-wing media covering his every utterance Trump has no voice.
I agree with this. And, if Carlson and Hannity throw their weight behind DeSantis (assuming he beats Trump in the primaries), then that’s who the MAGA crowd will vote for.
Without Trump’s nattering Fox has no (or at least a much reduced )audience. Fox doesn’t primarily support the GOP for ideological reasons they support the GOP because that’s what their niche set of viewers wants. An out and out brawl between DeSantis and Trump would be bad for the GOP but it would be great for ratings.
Disagree (on the first part, anyway). Fox wasn’t some two-bit player before Trump came along. Fox has been the king of right-wing media since the end of the Clinton years. Even now, with NewsMax and OAN and Breitbart and all the rest fighting Fox for bandwidth, Fox reigns supreme. If Fox abandons Trump and endorses DeSantis their viewers will follow along like they always have.
I do agree with the second part of your statement and I think their treatment of Liz Cheney is example A of this. Cheney is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative and was an extremely powerful member of congress. if you, generic American conservative voter, actually cared about conservative causes and supported the passage of conservative legislation and wanted to see conservative values enshrined into US law, then Cheney was the person you wanted. But she went against King Trump, and for that Fox vilified her to the point that not only did she lose support of the voters, she lost the support of her own party. If Fox supported conservative values for ideological reasons they never would have let her be crucified like they did. Hell, they supplied the hammer and the nails and the cross. Their viewers bought into it hook, line, and sinker because they always buy into whatever message Fox is spewing.
Which goes back to my original point. Fox News, and to a larger extent right-wing media in general, has an enormous amount of power to shape conservative – and by extension, US – politics. If they decide that DeSantis resonates with more of their viewers than Trump does they’ll drop Trump like a hot potato, just like they did with Bush and Rubio in 2015-2016. That in turn will increase DeSantis’ exposure even more and soon Trump’s base will be sucking up to DeSantis.
But that’s just it. On the one hand Fox has the power to lead their viewers but on the other hand, Fox is also slave to their viewers. There have a been a couple of times in the last 4 years where Fox made tentative steps away from Trump, but then got slapped down as being too leftist mainstream and got back with the program. Fox will stop covering Trump when Trump stops being interesting, and if there is one thing that Trump has always excelled at it’s being interesting.
True but previously they didn’t have anything new and shiny to hitch their wagon to. If DeSantis proves popular with voters – especially if he starts racking up primary wins – they can transition to him pretty seamlessly. That’s what they did with Trump in 2016.
Wait a minute. They can do that?
I don’t know if they can or can’t. But last time around they decided who needs a platform and said the party was for whatever DJT says. Suppose the honchos decide there’s no need for primaries? What could anyone do about it?
Some states did it in 2020
I expect DeSantis, 43, to play the age card extremely aggressively against the septuagenarian and octogenarian Trump and Biden.
I just had a (non-serious) thought about how DeSantis can use Trump’s stop the steal nonsense against him. DeSantis fully acknowledges what every Red blooded American knows, namely that Trump was elected president in 2020 but that Biden stole the office out from under him. DeSantis would love a return to the glory days of a Trump white house but unfortunately he swore an oath to the constitution divinely inspired by god and according to the 22 amendment.
“No person shall be ‘elected’ to the office of the President more than twice,”
So even though, due to the Biden steal, he wasn’t able to serve as president, the fact that he was elected in 2016 and 2020 means he can’t run again. 
One indicator of DeSantis’ intentions – he is raising an ungodly amount of money for his gubernatorial reelection campaign, more than he would need even to campaign in an expensive state like Florida. Could he bank excess state campaign funds for a federal campaign? That would be ideal for him.
Right now, he can hit up Republican megadonors for big bucks without them having to “choose” between Trump and DeSantis. If he can raise $200 million and bank half that for a Presidential campaign, he’d be on a par with where Trump’s SuperPAC is now.
The FEC deadlocked on this question in a similar situation, and you know what they say about forgiveness and permission.
Sing and dance. The party higher ups should be the ones to decide who represents the party best in an election, not Joe Sixpack. I have been opposed to primaries for decades. There is no legal nor logical reason for them. Especially in states where voters don’t have to register for a specific party and in states that have open primaries which can skew results of the general election. Allowing the public at large to determine who a parties candidate is makes no more sense than allowing non stock holders to decide who the president of GM is. If you don’t have a vested stake it’s not your decision to make.
Things would be a lot different for the better if primaries were eliminated across the board.
That’s not true. The logical reason for a primary is that it effectively serves as a focus group. You want to elect someone who can win, and a good way to weed out a person great on paper who voters won’t actually elect is to see who wins a pre-election.
It’s not perfect. You do run the risk of people nominating someone you don’t want to lead the party. It’s probably not even the best way to do it, though I also don’t think that a handful of people hand-picking their favorite is the best way either. But you can’t say there’s no logical reason to have them, that’s just silly.
No, the primary system is silly. Individuals that have no vested stake in a major organization have no business deciding who should represent that major organization. If you own no stock in Ford Motor Company nor own any of their products, do you think you should have a say as to who is chairman of the board there? It’s about the same thing.
My state has open primaries. Meaning a person can help decide who will be a candidate in the general election for a party they have no intent on voting for in the general election. That’s insane. It’s a system set up to actually allow the opposition to skew results and determine who they will run against. Don’t tell me you actually think that is a good thing.
I thought open primaries were intended to limit the power of our two-party system, by forcing each party to face the whole electorate prior to a general, and thus weeding-out extreme candidates early. Sure, some voters may game the system, but I guess another question would be if the most popular candidate ultimately wins the general?
The system doesn’t just get games by voters, it gets gamed by candidates and the parties themselves get gamed.
For example, in my county a Republican is not going to get elected Sheriff. Ain’t gonna happen, cousin. So any candidate that intends on winning has to run as a Democrat.
So David Clarke continually ran and won as a Democrat even though he’s as far away from one as can be. And Republicans, when there wasn’t a serious primary on the R ticket, crossed over to vote for him in the primary. And whomever won the Democratic primary would win the general for sure. So we had a Republican sheriff with a (D) after his name. Clarke refused to run for reelection last time because there were several serious Republican contests in the primary and he knew without those cross over votes he’d lose.
The entire thing is a farce!
Wasn’t that the point of Democratic Superdelegates? They were party insiders who could tip the scales if the popular vote went awry. I recall it being heavily criticized when Clinton won the nomination, but it seems that it was a feature designed to ensure that the Trump version of a Democrat (I.e. a rogue extremist) did not emerge from the primaries.
Who decides who gets to be the “party higher ups”?