Ron DeSantis and Kyrsten Sinema don't seem very much alike on the surface, but they have a few things in common: They're both extremely ambitious. They both hate Democrats and the media. And they both have very exalted opinions of themselves.
They're also going through rough patches in their polling: DeSantis is trailing Trump by as much as 46% in recent surveys, while Sinema, now apparently intending to run for reelection as an independent, would finish a distant third in a three-way race, according to one recent poll.
DeSantis could use a lifeline, but because he's alienated most of the media at a time when many reporters need to file stories about him, his coverage is almost universally negative.
Sinema is trying to avoid that fate. She's been in the habit of keeping the press at arm's length, but all of a sudden she's making herself available to select reporters for feature stories. A McKay Coppins profile for The Atlantic was published on Saturday, and now we have Robert Draper's long feature story for The New York Times Magazine. The Coppins piece is far more skeptical, but both reporters present the precise narrative Sinema has spoon-fed to them: She doesn't chat with reporters or engage with critics because she's too busy being effective, negotiating compromises when all the idiots who don't play eleven-dimensional chess the way she does would prefer her to be doing silly things like meeting with constituents who aren't hedge-fund managers, or conferring with colleagues who aren't Republicans. Draper swallows this whole. His profile reads like a long treatment for a feature-length campaign documentary.
If Sinema keeps working the press this way, the good coverage will continue. Maybe it won't get her reelected -- and I'm sure it won't get her elected president, if that's what she's thinking. (Draper seems certain she's planning to run for the Senate again, but allowing reporters to embed with her and then not telling them that she's hoping to join the No Labels presidential ticket seems like just the kind of move Sinema would make. Some reporters have long speculated that the White House is her ultimate goal.)
Now she's positioned herself as a person who doesn't hate all of the media, which will surely inspire some reporters to treat her as hard to get rather than hostile. Maybe I'll be the one who can win her over! That works for Donald Trump, who calls the press "the enemy of the people" while schmoozing with Maggie Haberman and Michael Wolff. It might have worked for DeSantis, but he relied too much on the Murdoch press. He should have alienated most of the mainstream media and then allowed in a select number of non-Murdoch reporters. His day-to-day press would be much better now, and he'd probably be ten points higher in the polls.
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