Trump is still a threat to Republican chances if he isn’t the nominee
Trump is still a threat to Republican chances if he isn’t the nominee
"It’s kind of hard to prevent people from running that have different opinions."
Good afternoon and welcome to Press Pass. Spring is around the corner, and that means a bunch of people who believe they can be the next president, senator, or other kind of high-profile public servant are meticulously crafting their campaign rollouts for 2024. Today, I’d like to look at an often-overlooked role in the American political script that could turn out to be a showstopper in the next election: the spoiler candidate.
Today The Bulwark released our first poll, conducted with North Star Opinion Research. Regarding the 2024 race, there are two key findings that stuck out to me:
A race between Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, and “another candidate,” DeSantis received 44 percent, Trump received 28 percent, and the generic “another candidate” got 10 percent, with an additional 17 percent undecided.
A full 28 percent of Trump supporters would follow him out of the Republican Party entirely to support him if he decides to run on an independent ticket.
There is a lot more worth digging into in the polling data to gain a better understanding of how 2024 is shaping up. If you want to have a closer look at the poll’s crosstabs and more technical details, take a look here. There’s a lot of information to digest, so if you want a summary of the most important findings, my colleague Sarah Longwell has an excellent writeup that you can read here.
Something to look for when the Republican field begins to take shape
Remember how, in the 2016 election cycle, one of the earliest points of contention in the Republican primary was the question of whether each candidate would commit to backing the eventual GOP nominee?
Because Trump had been winking about running as an independent if he didn't win the nomination, the loyalty issue was posed in the very first question at the first Republican primary debate in August 2015—and sure enough, Trump was the only person on stage unwilling to commit to supporting the nominee unless it was him. He reached a deal in September with then-RNC Chair Reince Priebus to sign a loyalty pledge, but reneged on it in the spring of 2016 after the giant initial field had narrowed to three candidates and he felt a bit threatened. (Ted Cruz and John Kasich, the two other GOP candidates still staggering along at that point, also suggested they might not abide by their own pledges that month, with Cruz saying, “I don't make a habit out of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my family.” He sure picked up that habit later.)
The spoiler threat that Trump leveraged during the 2016 primary could become more than a threat in 2024. His grip on the Republican base, his ego, and his tired, lackluster performance in the new cycle have combined to give his new campaign a very different spin from the one he launched almost eight years ago. While voters know him, they’re also tiring of him; they increasingly see him as stuck in the past, which leaves him in a vulnerable position in relation to the aggressive and forward-looking Ron DeSantis.
But would Trump accept losing and putting his support behind DeSantis for the sake of the party’s electoral prospects? Even if more than a quarter of Republicans are willing to follow him no matter what? Avoiding the disaster of an independent Trump candidacy in 2024 is one of the GOP’s most urgent problems to solve as the primary season starts to take shape.
I caught up with two of the people who were onstage with Trump when he declined to commit to supporting the GOP nominee in 2015, and asked for their take on the loyalty question and the significance of the current Republican frontrunner being a proven sore loser. What I heard surprised me—not least because their responses were fairly indifferent:
Rand Paul: “I remember challenging Trump on it because Trump said he wouldn’t necessarily support the candidate. I think it’s a good question to ask. I don’t think it has to be a rule—I don’t think it’s ever been a rule that you can’t run [as an independent]. It’s kind of hard to prevent people from running that have different opinions. I’m not for making it a rule, but it’s a reasonable question to ask.”
Marco Rubio: “[Supporting the nominee] was my view of it at the time. But I can’t impose that on anybody else.”
This is especially curious in Rubio’s case given that he appears to be preparing for another White House bid. The question of party loyalty might strike him differently should his prospects of securing the Republican nomination significantly improve.
So what can the Republican party do to prevent a renegade breakaway candidate from pulling a chunk of the base away from the party’s nominee? One Republican operative I spoke with suggested there could be another pledge. But given that Trump broke his own pledge while he was still the favorite to win the party’s nomination, it’s hard to imagine him sticking to it with more challenging prospects.
Right now, it seems as though the best bet for Republicans who want a nominee other than Trump is for them to pray that he bows out quietly. (Don’t hold your breath.)
Do you have other ideas for how the GOP might avoid sleepwalking into a Trump disaster in 2024? Let me know in a comment.
And for more insights into how Republican voters are starting to think about the next election, you can hear them tomorrow! Sarah Longwell and Whit Ayers of North Star Opinion Research will kick off a new season of The Focus Group podcast tomorrow. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
The GOP, whether it realizes it yet or no, is in the position of helpless hostage to its bolshevik vanguard faction (the Bannonist wing of MAGA) whose program is to institute a permanent authoritarian minority regime. This wing may be relatively small in numbers, and includes in its membership a large proportion of foolish useful true-believer tools, but it alone has a mission and a plan. The rest of the party is mesmerized into servile compliance by its grifter entertainment wing. This group is not so much a faction as an ad hoc mob of opportunists, narcissists, con artists; they really have no common program or goal other than aggrandizing themselves, so they are fine with the bolshevik program as long as it assures them scope for looting, pillaging, and making spectacles of themselves. Probably the most astute among them understand that a Bannonist/MAGAist gangster regime will yield up more road kill than a real democracy, so they are more than happy to travel along. The rest of the grift brigade, if they devote any time to thought at all, participate on the Willie Sutton principal: rob the banks, because that's where the big money is.
There remains no GOP center capable of charting and pursuing any other course. Those inclined to try have had the encouragement knocked out of them by the incontrovertibly instructive examples set up for their edification by the bolsheviks. The center remnant has abandoned hope, and become inert, powerless spectators. So if the GOP prevails, whatever individual figure actually becomes President, no matter if it be Trump himself, or a DeSantis or Lake, or Yehudi -- he/she will be either a leader or a tool of the bolsheviks.
Hence either way, win or lose, the future of the party will require following its ruling program to its logical conclusion; having crossed its Rubicon, it cannot afford to stop short of ensuring permanent dominance in a nation where it is actually a minority. The party calling itself the GOP is irrevocably committed to attempting a Trumpian authoritarian takeover -- purging the military, stacking the DOJ with stooges, vitiating or eliminating the civil service, controlling the media and the courts, rewarding its servants and crushing its foes. Having once attained supremacy, no minority authoritarian regime can afford to relinquish it, even a little. Ask the Shah. Ask Gorbachev. There can only be one direction: forward, straight to hell.
So frankly, there is no hope whatever of preventing a GOP disaster. It is hard to see how even a massive electoral defeat -- which would be a true black swan event -- could deflect the GOP from its trajectory. The bolshies are not in it to win elections; they are in it it to wipe away the ancien regime. Electoral defeat would be a setback only, and so long as the electoral system ensures they will have another try and another after that, their indominable will to prevail will only strengthen. The only thing defeat would accomplish is hardening their belief that electoral democracy is incompatible with the world they want to bring into being, hence true electoral democracy must be eliminated. A close election loss would teach that the prize is almost in their grasp, and persistence will push them over the top to final victory. It's a one-way ratchet.
Either the bolshies will prevail or they will fail in 2024; either way, a disaster -- for the party and the nation. If they fail, they will try again, with even more ruthless determination. If they win, they will finish the job. What will not happen is the monster that once was the GOP ever again becoming a partner in a free electoral republic of law. That star is no longer in their firmament.
The best thing that could happen to the republican party and our democracy is for t**** to take his MAGA and leave. One can hope it would split republicans right down to the local level and perhaps break some of their tyrannies of the minority to allow a return to real democracy.