TUCKERED OUT — From his perch atop the conservative media food chain, Tucker Carlson has played a singular role in shaping the Republican political ecosystem. His popular 8 p.m. Fox News show defined — or redefined — the parameters of political debate. It launched, elevated and crushed GOP campaigns. Now, the void left by his departure, announced today, stands to reconfigure the GOP presidential primary. Carlson’s influence was such that many speculated that he would make a formidable presidential candidate himself — possibly one who could inherit former President Donald Trump’s populist MAGA movement. Night after night, Carlson arguably spoke to the largest number of Republicans in the country. “Tucker Carlson Tonight” topped all cable news programs with an average of 3.25 million viewers per-night in the first quarter of 2023 — his show still holds the record for the highest quarter of viewership for a cable news show of all time, with a 4.33 million average in the second quarter of 2020. Online, videos of Carlson’s segments regularly top one million views on YouTube. And once Fox announced its split with Carlson this morning, its stock tumbled, losing hundreds of millions of dollars in valuation. He’s insisted that he’s not running this cycle — and probably won’t run ever — but his fingerprints are already all over the burgeoning 2024 Republican primary. In a mutually beneficial arrangement, Trump chose Carlson for his first post-arraignment interview and Carlson devoted his entire program to it, despite the personal contempt with which Carlson apparently views him. So far, two candidates, Vivek Ramaswamy and Larry Elder, declared that they would be running for president on Carlson’s now-canceled show — a platform of incalculable value to long shot candidates like them who are desperate for attention. Their prospects for shaking up the race are immediately downgraded without access to Carlson’s megaphone. One obvious winner is former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. Carlson hosted Ramaswamy and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on his program dozens of times. Haley got no such exposure. She was introduced to Carlson’s audience as “fundamentally indistinguishable from the neoliberal donor base of the Democratic Party.” "Nikki Haley believes in collective racial guilt,” he said not long after Haley’s campaign launch. “She believes identity politics is our future. ‘Vote for me because I’m a woman,’ she says. That’s her pitch.” Carlson, who built a devoted audience in part by breaking cable news shibboleths, played more than a kingmaking role. His views influenced both the tone and direction of debates on the right and continue to resonate in the 2024 primary. For years, Carlson has echoed a version of Great Replacement Theory — the idea that white populations are being replaced by a class of immigrants who, in turn, are more sympathetic (or “obedient” to Democrats). “The Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World,” Carlson said in 2021. Immigrants are making the country “poorer, and dirtier, and more divided,” he argued in 2018, leading to an advertiser boycott. That rhetoric, more extreme than his fellow Fox News hosts, helped fuel the intensity surrounding the immigration policy debate and shifted the Overton window for candidates. More recently, on the issue of Ukraine, Carlson has broken even further from the party mainstream. He’s called Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy a dictator and asked “why shouldn’t I root for Russia?” (though later argued he was joking). Carlson regularly featured analysis on the war in Ukraine (and why the U.S. shouldn’t be involved) near the top of his hour. But he also went one step beyond by getting Republican candidates for president on the record about it. In March, he sent a questionnaire to every potential GOP candidate about the war, discussed their answers on his show and published their full responses on Twitter. Those who didn’t respond were listed on his 6.1-million-strong followers account. DeSantis’ politically damaging response — that Russia’s war on Ukraine was a “territorial dispute” — was first rolled out in a statement on Carlson’s show. Carlson’s ultimate replacement may in time find an audience that’s just as loyal and a megaphone just as loud. In the immediate future, though, no one will be able to shape the 2024 race like Carlson could every night at Fox, a fact that even fellow conservative media influencers are readily admitting today. “Tucker was the mainstay of the populist voice over at Fox,” said Steve Bannon. “With his departure, I don’t know why anybody needs to watch anything on the Murdoch empire.” “It changes things permanently,” Donald Trump Jr. told conservative activist Charlie Kirk on his daily radio show. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s authors at cmahtesian@politico.com and cmchugh@politico.com or on Twitter at @PoliticoCharlie and @calder_mchugh.
| 
No comments:
Post a Comment