Tucker Carlson may no longer have his prime-time spot on Fox News to reach millions of Republican voters, but that hasn’t stopped him from playing a burgeoning role in the race for the GOP‘s presidential nomination.
Carlson sat down with several 2024 Republican candidates at the Family Leadership Summit in Des Moines, Iowa, on Friday, although the most high-profile candidate, former President Donald Trump, wasn’t there. Instead, Trump’s rivals Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, former Vice President Mike Pence, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) attended and took the stage with Carlson.
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The summit and the group, led by Bob Vander Plaats, convenes evangelical conservatives in the Hawkeye State, which will begin the 2024 nominating race with its first-in-the-nation caucuses on Jan. 15. And it could help Carlson reemerge as a dominant conservative kingmaker in the race.
“Bob Vander Plaats and Tucker Carlson are generating mutually reinforcing legitimacy,” Scott Huffmon, political scientist and founder of the Center for Public Opinion & Policy Research at Winthrop University, told the Washington Examiner. “Vander Plaats has the ear of Iowa evangelicals and Carlson still carries the imprimatur of the seasoned culture warrior.”
Huffmon pointed to Carlson’s focus on social issues as an example of his relevancy to conservatives. “He was going on rants about wokeness before Ron DeSantis learned the word woke,” he said. “He is still kind of seen in certain corners as giving the nod to these are the issues that people like us should care about.”
Fox News ousted Carlson from his prime-time perch in April after the network settled a $787.5 million lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems. Ahead of the settlement, unflattering text messages from Carlson denigrating Trump were released. “I hate him passionately,” Carlson wrote in one private text about Trump.
Yet Carlson quickly rebounded from his ouster, launching a show that broadcast on Twitter in June. But the Twitter show, which had 26 million views in its initial launch and more than 120 million total views, doesn’t appear to have had the same reach that his show on Fox News had. The show has lost 86% of its views since it launched. This week Carlson, who is reportedly raising funds to launch a new media venture, also faced blowback for a more than 2 1/2-hour interview he conducted with social media influencer and alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate.
“I think it’s pretty clear his platforms and his influence have decreased,” said GOP consultant Matt Mackowiak. “That said, he maintains a lot of credibility on the Right as someone who is seen as a straight shooter and is willing to tell you exactly what he thinks and why he thinks it.”
“He’s a good get for this organization. It’s going to bring more attention to the event. The conversations will probably be better,” he added.
Carlson is also a headline speaker at the Turning Point Action Conference, another conservative gathering, this weekend in West Palm Beach, Florida. “Tucker Carlson is, and remains, the most powerful and influential voice in all of media, regardless of the medium,” Charlie Kirk, founder and president of Turning Point Action, said in a statement when Carlson’s appearance was announced. “Many have wondered if Tucker’s voice and reach would be limited ahead of 2024, but there won’t be a bigger stage anywhere in the country than ACTCON 2023 in West Palm Beach, and the world will get to hear directly from one of the most important thought leaders of a generation. We’re honored to host him.”
Timothy Head, executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, said his organization held conversations with Carlson to appear at their Road to Majority Policy Conference last month, but ultimately scheduling issues prevented Carlson from attending. Yet Head said his group may still partner with Carlson in the future.
“We would certainly be more than happy to work with him and partner with him on a future event, and as a matter of fact, we were having preliminary conversations to that effect for either late this fall or possibly an event early spring kind of leading up to either caucuses or Super Tuesday,” Head said.
At the Road to Majority Policy Conference, every 2024 GOP hopeful spoke on the stage, but Trump remained the undisputed favorite among the crowd of evangelicals. Carlson’s appearances could lead him to hold more interviews with the Republican candidates, assuming his contract with Fox News doesn’t block him. The organization notified Carlson’s lawyers that his Twitter show was in breach of his contract and could lead to legal action in the future.
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Head, however, told the Washington Examiner that Carlson’s actions would likely be a part of the assessment of how conservative media adapts to the 2024 race given Fox News’s battles to remain relevant as competitors such as Newsmax and OAN gain more viewership.
“This is a very interesting phenomenon to watch, and I think frankly, a bunch of campaigns are watching this process pretty carefully,” he said. “I think in the next year we’ll learn a lot about kind of news or information consumption for conservatives that we really haven’t seen in a number of years.”
