(Trends Wide) – The Russian invasion of Ukraine, unsurprisingly, remains the top story this week. That is likely to be the case as war and devastation continue.
Still, there are stories on the home front that have also been making waves, both from a statistical angle and for their political implications.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis Positions Himself For 2024 Race Against Donald Trump
If we’ve learned anything from the last two presidential cycles, it’s that free media means a lot in presidential primaries. Trump garnered a historic amount of free media attention in 2016, and now-President Joe Biden led the pack of free media on the Democratic side during the 2020 primary season.
DeSantis appears to be the next big beneficiary of “free media.” One of the few non-Ukrainian news stories to emerge in recent weeks was the outcry over new Florida legislation that critics have called “Don’t Say Gay.” (My colleague Zach Wolf has a solid article on what is actually in the bill and what it means.)
In fact, DeSantis continues to outperform non-Trump 2024 candidates in Fox Cable mentions. In roughly the past six months, “DeSantis” has been mentioned 920 to 950 times (depending on what day you start counting from), according to the Internet Archive’s Archive of Television News. “[Mike] Pence” y “[Ted] Cruz” have been mentioned about 900 times combined.
The same thing happened nearly a year ago when I wrote “How the Numbers Show Ron DeSantis Stock Is Rising.” It doesn’t hurt DeSantis that the bill recently passed in Florida is popular with Republicans, both in the state and nationally, and that he is a heavy favorite for re-election as governor this year.
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