By Noah Rothman
Monday, August 21, 2023
After weeks of will-he-won’t-he speculation, Donald
Trump has confirmed that he will not attend the upcoming Republican
presidential-primary “debates.” Instead of appearing on stage with the other
candidates in Milwaukee on Wednesday, the former president reportedly plans to
instead pre-tape an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the release of
which will presumably be intended to divert Republican voters’ attention. But
if the interview is released online and on-demand, it is unlikely to overshadow
the first live GOP presidential debate of the 2024 cycle. And that isn’t the
only advantage available to the Trump alternatives in the presidential race.
The latest Quinnipiac
University survey indicates that Trump is taking a real risk by backing
out of Wednesday’s debate. It finds that most GOP primary voters — 57 percent
of them — say it’s “very important” for candidates that qualify for the debate
to participate. Another 27 percent say it’s “somewhat important.” Just 15
percent say it’s either not especially important or not important at all. Since
only one qualified candidate is avoiding Milwaukee on Wednesday, we can safely
deduce that only about 15 percent of the Republican primary electorate supports
Trump’s decision — at least, in a vacuum, before they are primed by pollsters
to treat this question, like every other question, as a rough proxy designed to
gauge their general affinity for Trump.
There is a risk in advocating an affirmative strategy for
the Republicans who are ostensibly seeking to engineer the historic polling
collapse Trump will need to suffer if any of his competitors are to emerge
victorious. Such strategies often don’t work, and no one wants to be held to
account for a bad idea. But if the non-Trump candidates are actually running
for the presidency rather than a spot in Trump’s next cabinet, they have to try
to use whatever advantages are on hand. This Quinnipiac poll is evidence of a
nascent fissure inside the GOP’s pro-Trump ranks that could be skillfully
exploited.
That doesn’t mean a repeat of how Republicans navigated
Trump’s absence from the debate stage in January 2016, when the field treated the
frontrunner in the race as a distraction to be summarily dismissed. In that
debate, Fox News opened by peppering the candidates with questions about
Trump’s failure to attend. Senator Ted Cruz briefly mocked Trump’s penchant for
issuing ad hominem insults before thanking Trump for the “enthusiasm” he
brought to the race. Senator Marco Rubio called him “an entertaining guy,” only
to turn into a belabored denunciation of the outgoing two-term Democratic
president. “I kinda miss the guy,” Jeb Bush said dryly. He touted his own
willingness to confront Trump, but only to strike a favorable contrast against
the other non-Trump candidates in the race.
By the time the moderators got around to Chris Christie,
the sharpness of the question had been diluted in the soup of intra-party
politics, and the candidates on stage all began bickering amongst themselves.
Voters spent the rest of the evening watching a bucket full of crabs making
their own doomed and, collectively, self-defeating attempts to escape being
cooked. The Milwaukee debate will proceed along a similar trajectory unless the
field of 2024 aspirants rejects the temptation to which the 2016 field
succumbed.
There is plenty of evidence — both in public polling and
in the data leaked to the press from rival campaigns — that Republican voters
do not evaluate the former president like they would any other politician.
Direct attacks on Trump are likely to redound to the benefit of the
frontrunner, in part because voters appear to regard those attacks on
Trump as attacks on themselves and their judgment. But Trump
himself has warned the GOP that this is one of what will
be many absences from high-impact campaign events.
The various Trump alternatives in the race might need to
tailor this message slightly differently, with some including some rote
throat-clearing about how he was an effective president or adopting a
more-in-sorrow tone. But if voters disapprove of Trump’s absence from the
stage, Trump’s opponents should stress that this is only the beginning.
The former president will become consumed by his legal
challenges, as anyone in his position would. Republican voters seem convinced
that Trump’s state- and federal-level indictments are an injustice. Unjust or
not, they will still take him away from the campaign trail for extended
periods. What else will he miss? What other opportunities will he be forced to
forego? How will he rein in obsessive and politicized functionaries in the
bureaucracy if he can’t even discuss the claims against him much less be
present for a grueling national campaign?
More ambitious Republicans might even be inclined to
road-test the message that rank-and-file GOP donors shouldn’t be on the hook
for the legal expenses incurred by someone whose whole schtick is that he is
fabulously wealthy. Perhaps bad-faith Trump supporters could twist that into an
attack on voters’ judgment, but it is a point that can be made implicitly if
the objective is to make Republican voters aware that Trump will be far less
accessible in the weeks and months ahead.
That tactic might bear fruit, but it will fail if it is
pursued as part of a strategy that assumes the first task before the candidates
vying to replace Trump at the top of the Republican ticket is to break the
former president’s coalition. The objective before the anti-Trump candidates in
the race is not to peel off a percent here and there but to assemble the
largest possible pool of Trump-skeptical voters — a minority coalition, for
sure, but one that looks large enough on paper to present a plausibly credible
threat to Trump’s gigantic base of support.
July’s New York Times/Sienna survey indicates that,
among the 54 percent of GOP primary voters backing Trump, only roughly half of
them refuse to consider other candidates in the field. Among the 46 percent of
Republicans not currently backing Trump, 55 percent told pollsters they are not
inclined to support him at all. The candidate that corners this market will
obviously enjoy considerable advantages against Trump, which is why this race
(like 2016) is rapidly devolving into a no-holds-barred contest for second
place. But most of the 2024 field — the notable exception is Christie, whose
hammer-and-tongs approach is not designed to win the GOP nomination — has so
far sought the anti-Trump mantle by gingerly avoiding even the appearance of
directly questioning Trump’s commitment to his voters.
There is a middle way. It’s a message that will be effectively
illustrated by Trump’s failure to attend Wednesday’s debate: Unfair and
undesirable though it may be, Donald Trump is not here for you because he cannot be
here for you. Yes, he has avoided this stage in part because the polls have
convinced him that he can take your votes for granted. But the former president
is going to have to spend most of the next year of his life devoting his
attention to things other than the future of our party and our country. Get
used to it.
Trump is the man to beat, and waiting around for some
exogenous event to finally prove his undoing is a fool’s wager. Political
observers may look back on Trump’s decision to skip the first debate as a real
error, but only if his Republican opponents force the issue.
No comments:
Post a Comment