Into The Echo
The first Republican Presidential Debate will be on two Republican-forward outlets. Is that wise?
The first Republican Presidential Debate has been announced. And it won’t surprise you where it is gonna be:
The Republican National Committee (RNC) announced Wednesday that Fox News will host the first GOP presidential primary debate in the 2024 cycle.
The debate, titled the "Fox News Republican Primary Debate with partners Young America’s Foundation and Rumble," will take place during the month of August in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which is the host city for the 2024 Republican National Convention.
"I am excited to announce that our first debate in Milwaukee will be in partnership with Fox News, Young America’s Foundation, and Rumble," RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in a statement first shared with Fox News on Wednesday.
McDaniel emphasized that "the next President of the United States will be on our debate stage, and we look forward to hosting a fair and transparent platform for our great candidates to debate and share our winning Republican message with voters across the country."
If one thing is clear from the announcement is that the RNC has not learned from the troubles that have plagued Republicans in the last two elections.
One of the reasons that Republicans floundered in the 2020 and 2022 elections (besides the specter of Donald Trump looming over everything and nominating a lot of awful candidates) is the fact that Republican candidates have been speaking largely to the Republican base and not to the undecided and crossover voters who actually decide elections.
In choosing their first debate partners as Fox News and Rumble, Ronna Romney McDaniel is merely doubling down on the idea that only hardcore Republicans should learn about the Republican candidates.
Fox News is, primarily, a Republican network. While the hardest of hardcore Trumpies have abandoned the network, your regular member of the Republican base watches Fox News pretty regularly. There are not a whole lot of people who watch Fox News by accident. Fox News is not going to attract the average viewer checking the news or flipping through the channels; it will merely attract Republican voters who would otherwise vote for the Republican candidate 99 times out of 100.
Rumble is even more of a bubble among Republican users than Fox News is. Everybody can tell you what YouTube is. But Rumble, an video streaming alternative that allows a lot of far-right stuff that would otherwise be banned from sites like YouTube, is practically Siberia. Most Fox News viewers and most Republican voters probably aren’t consumers of Rumble. So why would the RNC choose them as a media partner for the debate if they were interested in appealing to the voters the Republican candidate will need to win in November?
And that doesn’t even get into Rumble being the favored choice of Russian State Media.
I understand, to a point, why Fox News chose these two platforms for the debate. They are media outlets that market toward and program for Republicans. The moderators and panelists from the organizations will be, at least outwardly, more sympathetic to the Republican viewpoint (whatever that is these days) than a CNN or CBS News would be. There is certainly a lower likelihood of liberal media tropes and “gotcha” questions from a left-wing point of view on these providers than on a more mainstream provider.
McDaniel and the RNC have chosen an echo instead of a broad blast.
But of what benefit is it to the potential Republican nominees if they remain unknown to the electorate at large?
Will it work? Will it not? Time will tell, but in a world where most people know Donald Trump but don’t know Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, or Tim Scott, it is an uneasy strategy if Republicans actually want to win.