On George Will’s Bold Prediction

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, July 14, 2023

 

In the Post, George Will predicts that neither Donald Trump nor Ron DeSantis will be the Republican presidential nominee in 2024. Inter alia, Will bases this on what he considers to be voters’ inevitable “rebellion against inevitability”:

 

Voters, however, become contrary when told that the game’s outcome is known in the top of the first inning. Hence what G.K. Chesterton called the game of “Cheat the Prophet”: People listen politely to explanations of what is inevitable, then make something else happen.

 

As a rule, there’s a lot to this. Americans did not like being told in 2007 that the next election would “inevitably” be between Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton, so they ensured that it was not. In 2016, they did not like being told that the “inevitable” Republican nominee in 2016 was Jeb Bush, so they rejected him. And, as Will notes, they did not like it in 1980 when Ronald Reagan took Iowa for granted:

 

In the 1980 campaign, Ronald Reagan, who was not considered the inevitable GOP nominee, made only eight Iowa campaign appearances, spending a total of 49 hours in the state (according to Steven F. Hayward’s “The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980”). And Reagan skipped the Des Moines Register’s Jan. 5 debate, which 58 percent of Iowa voters watched. Voters do not dislike inevitabilities more than they dislike politicians who seem to feel entitled to special dispensations. Reagan’s post-debate support plummeted from 50 percent in November to 26 percent a week before the caucuses, which he lost to George H.W. Bush.

 

The thing is, though, Reagan still won the primary in 1980. And, if he hadn’t, he’d have lost it to the guy who won Iowa: George H. W. Bush. There is a big difference between observing that, as a general matter, voters do not like to be told what is bound to happen, and contending, long after polling has started in earnest, that both of the frontrunners are destined to disappear. Will advances a host of criticisms of Trump and DeSantis — many of which I agree with. He does not explain what, beyond the public’s generalized disdain for shoo-ins, could cause someone else to rise. Donald Trump was the most recent Republican president. Ron DeSantis has been the most famous Republican governor in America for years — and still is. It’s tough to imagine them as flashes in the pan.

 

Personally, I would have no problem at all if the Republican electorate chose someone else next year. I consider Donald Trump to have disqualified himself from the presidency, and, while I think Ron DeSantis has been a terrific governor of Florida, I am not wedded to his candidacy for president except as a potential means by which to rid the Republican Party of Donald Trump and to rid the country of Joe Biden. If Republicans choose, say, Tim Scott (for whom Will’s wife works, as he discloses), that’d be absolutely fine with me. But what I want — or what George Will wants — isn’t especially relevant. What matters is whether the sentiments that led the Republican Party toward Donald Trump in the first place are stronger or weaker than voters’ distaste for coronations. Since the summer of 2015, I have seen nothing in the behavior of its voters that suggests that it is.