Talk:Ron DeSantis 2024 presidential campaign

Important: "too harsh" quote is misattributed

This is not how DeSantis described his own abortion ban. This is how Trump described it. Zachlbeer (talk) 05:00, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Lede second and third paragraphs wording

@ElijahPepe — you take issue with “passive” phrasing in the lede, preferring instead for it to be “bold”. Why?

I see no apparent reason to mention the papers’ owner, but I feel less strongly about this than the other changes.

”Plagued” sounds to me like editorialised and sensationalised language; not one we should be using. To further allege that it in fact “overshadowed his message” is blatant editorialising. It’s an editor’s interpretation which is not backed up by any of the sources in the body. To allege that it “overshadowed” — which is an inherently vague term to use here — his presidential campaign announcement? Absurd.

All of this is summarised in the body of the article in far more neutral language, albeit using a single analysis as its source. Asperthrow (talk) 21:53, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

I said there were passive voice issues. Your edit changed the sentence to The discussion was affected by technical issues; when using grammar like was affected, you're changing the noun-action relationship. The better wording would be Technical issues affected the discussion. There are eleven sources that point to it overshadowing the message and that wording is used in a CNN video. If you believe that there is bias here, the sentence can be changed, but note that by neutralizing the technical issues, you're downplaying them. As for bolding the lede, see the points that I raised above. I'm not sure why this article has to be one way or the other, I think that bolding it is fine and not bolding it is also fine. I'm not fine with exclusively enforcing that or trying to undo that repeatedly.

About the papers' owner—since this will take some explanation—Rupert Murdoch owning these papers gives a stronger relationship between them. Murdoch owning these organs of American conservative media does change the discourse. Omitting that doesn't give the reader context. This is not the same situation as David Zaslav owning Warner Bros. Discovery and thus CNN because there's not a branch of liberal media that he owns. In other words, Murdoch's waning support for Trump changes the narrative of the conservative media that he owns, which is explained in the second paragraph of the "Early speculation" section. There's an article from The New York Times that roughly goes over the opposite effect and DeSantis' campaign. To quote the article: "Rupert Murdoch’s news outlets are less determinative of outcomes in Republican politics than they once were, but they remain influential." elijahpepe@wikipedia (he/him) 22:03, 16 July 2023 (UTC)

193 words about pudding?

Ahead of a potential presidential bid, reports of DeSantis's aloof personality began to form. In the most notable of these instances The Daily Beast reported in March 2023 that—during a private plane trip in March 2019 from Tallahassee to Washington, D.C.—DeSantis ate a "chocolate pudding dessert" using three fingers, according to two sources. A former staffer told the publication that DeSantis would eat "like a starving animal who has never eaten before" as part of a section about his tenuous social skills. Although he denied the story to Fox Nation's Piers Morgan in an interview that was later put on Jesse Watters Primetime,[66] the incident quickly garnered DeSantis attention.[67] A political action committee (PAC) aligned with Trump ran a political message in April titled "Pudding Fingers" and featuring claims DeSantis had made across a backdrop of a man eating pudding with three fingers. The message was reportedly prompted by Morgan's interview.[68] Slate's Shirin Ali compared the pudding incident to reports that Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar had eaten salad with a comb and a series of images depicting former South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg eating cinnamon rolls as if they were chicken wings.[69]

This is an extremely long paragraph — 193 words. It's about... an incident in which he ate pudding in a goofy way. Not just that, but an alleged incident. The entire article is about 5,000 words, so 200 words is about 4% of it. I guess I am not a big politics editor, so maybe this is normal for presidential campaigns, but it seems very silly to me. jp×g 20:35, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

I agree, and think it could be cut down to a line: Ahead of a potential presidential bid, reports of DeSantis's aloof personality began to form. In March 2023, The Daily Beast published reports that on a private plane trip, DeSantis ate a "chocolate pudding dessert" with his fingers, leading a Trump-aligned political action committee (PAC) to target DeSantis with a political message titled "Pudding Fingers". Cheers! BD2412 T 22:22, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

"Pudding fingers" is a notable part of the pre-campaign history that is still referenced, including with DeSantis's interview with Jake Tapper (The Independent). To an editor who strays away from this type of politics, yes, it's silly, but DeSantis dominates the first page of Google for "pudding fingers". elijahpepe@wikipedia (he/him) 00:31, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

My proposed distillation mentions the phrase. I think that's sufficient. BD2412 T 00:51, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

I would be fine with omitting the sentence about Slate, but going in-depth here is okay. elijahpepe@wikipedia (he/him) 04:15, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

I just trimmed a paragraph which was about 2-3x the length of this one (eyeballing it). Nothing wrong with having some depth, but excessive detail isn't just extraneous, it's detrimental. Most of our readers are on mobile, and 1/3 of them read nothing but article leads; if a paragraph looks like a wall of text on my laptop screen, it'll definitely seem unreadable on a phone screen. We write for our readers, and should keep in mind that if we overwhelm them, they won't keep reading. DFlhb (talk) 20:59, 15 August 2023 (UTC)