Monday, July 25, 2022

Trump in 2024 Is No Sure Bet

By Fred Bauer

Monday, July 25, 2022

 

Long-simmering rumors of a Donald Trump 2024 campaign have recently begun to boil. Many in Trump’s orbit seem eager for a run, as do many Democratic strategists. Ever unpredictable, Trump himself has sent signals that he could very well declare a bid for the presidency even before the 2022 midterms. However, changes in the political environment since 2016 may help cement Trump’s legacy as a disrupter while also posing some obstacles to Trump as a 2024 candidate.

 

On a policy level, Trump shattered an already-cracked consensus. Running in 2012 as a hawk on illegal immigration and trade with the People’s Republic of China, Mitt Romney saw where Republican politics were trending, and Trump accelerated that tendency. He pivoted away from austerity talking points on federal entitlements and shredded many of the key premises of the neoliberal policy paradigm.

 

However, Trump as president struggled to formulate a new policy dispensation. On trade (an area where the president’s individual powers are extensive), Trump delivered on some of his central campaign promises. However, he floundered on many domestic areas. The wall was never built, and most of his policy accomplishments on immigration were only executive decisions, quickly washed away by the Biden administration. Before the pandemic, his singular legislative accomplishments were a giant tax bill and the First Step Act, which enacted reforms to the criminal-justice system. Paul Ryan — the polar opposite of Trump in many ways — would gladly have signed both bills had he been president, and indeed Ryan was a major champion of them as speaker of the House.

 

The kind of policy revolution Trump had promised would have been a Herculean undertaking, but Trump as an executive focused more on provocation than on policy. He seems to view politics in terms of ratings, not policy accomplishments or popularity. His presidency was thus full of sound and fury. Polls taken throughout his presidency showed that even many Republicans were frustrated with the constant chaos of the Trump administration. Perhaps one of the biggest elements of his legacy was the polarization of his opponents in the American establishment, pushing them far to the left of where they were in 2015.

 

Trump’s decision to fixate on the 2020 election may hamper a 2024 presidential run. Claiming that 2020 was stolen allows Trump to avoid admitting defeat, but it also sends an implicit message of ineptitude (allowing your own election to be “stolen” from you while president is not exactly the definition of winning). It also sucks up the oxygen for him to talk about other issues. It’s easy for establishment pundits to forget this, but Trump’s primary campaign in 2016 had a policy message front and center: build the wall, leave global trade deals, repeal the Affordable Care Act, and so forth. Republicans could have a host of promising economic and cultural issues to run on in 2024; making the 2024 election about 2020 would squander those political opportunities.

 

The Republican Party has also changed in a way that has made some of Trump’s 2016 positions less distinctive. As the Washington Post’s Jason Willick has observed, the GOP has incorporated many of Trump’s key themes into the party mainstream. In the Senate, Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, Mitt Romney, and Marco Rubio (among others) have trumpeted a pro-worker “realignment” agenda for the Republican Party. Among the nation’s governors, Ron DeSantis has become perhaps the principal lightning rod for populist political controversies. Veterans of Trump’s own administration — including Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, and Nikki Haley — might themselves attempt to lay claim to Trump’s populist mantle.

 

Some Republican potential presidential contenders have pledged that they will not run against Trump, but many others haven’t. So while Trump could dominate the populist, immigration-hawk lane in 2015, that might not necessarily be the case in 2023.

 

The past few years have made clear how often Trump rides a wave instead of driving the bus. Despite the elite-media meme of the GOP as a “Trump cult,” voters in Republican primaries have cheerfully ignored many of Trump’s endorsements while he was president and after he left office. In Georgia, for instance, Brian Kemp crushed Trump-backed David Perdue.

 

In many national polls of prospective Republican-primary voters, Trump has a substantial lead, but he often hovers around 50 percent or less. For a former president who still claims to be the leader of the party, that number could point to limits in Republican enthusiasm for a third Trump run. State polling shows an even more muddled picture. Recent polls of primary voters in New Hampshire and Michigan show Trump virtually tied with Ron DeSantis. If Trump does announce a run for the presidency before the midterms, that would be a glaring admission of weakness — a signal that Trump thinks he needs to act fast in order to keep other 2024 Republicans from gaining traction.

 

President Biden’s growing unpopularity might at first seem to increase Trump’s incentive to run again. However, Hillary Clinton was also very unpopular in 2016, and Trump decisively lost the popular vote to her: If a football stadium’s worth of voters had changed their votes in three states, Trump would also have lost the Electoral College. Trump remains a polarizing and unpopular figure, so even a run against a weakened Biden would be no sure thing.

 

If Biden grows too vulnerable, that might place one of Trump’s key intra-GOP levers of power at risk. Since Trump descended the golden escalator in 2015, Republicans have been terrified that he would go rogue and start a third-party candidacy. However, if Biden remains mired in the low 30s, Republicans might feel less need to defer to Trump. Running to lose as a spoiler if he lost the 2024 GOP nomination would cut against Trump’s political history so far. Though he often toyed with running as a third-party candidate, he never mounted a serious effort until he glimpsed an opening in one of the two major political parties. Trump could encourage his voters to stay home if he’s not the nominee. But a critically unpopular Biden also undermines that threat.

 

Nor is it clear that it would be in Trump’s own interest to act as a spoiler. If the Republican nominee were to win despite Trump’s opposition, voters might see him as irrelevant. If Democrats were to end up winning in November 2024 because of Trump’s effort to burn the GOP down, that could severely damage his political brand among the grassroots voters who constitute his base.

 

While Trump is a master of branding, his political success has been parasitic upon broader institutions. He relied on cable networks to give him a boost in the 2016 primary, Twitter to get his message out, and the Republican Party to provide a political apparatus. He has been unable to re-create those things on his own. Cut off from Twitter, he has been unable to generate the same amount of buzz. His multiple efforts to re-create that platform have stumbled. The “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump” blog lasted less than a month. His “truths” (posts) on Truth Social have not dominated the conversation as the tweets of yore did. Mounting a third-party run for the presidency would be a logistical marathon, requiring a combination of coordination and discipline that has often eluded Trump World. Trump’s clearest avenue to win the Oval Office again would be through the Republican Party, but he might face some new obstacles if he tries to seize the Republican nomination again.

 

To be sure, Trump would enter the 2024 presidential field with many advantages and would no doubt start with higher poll numbers than he did in June 2015. If he does run, many Democrats are likely to try to boost his candidacy, as might the national press corps (which has a symbiotic relationship with him characterized by performative loathing). That would be one continuity from 2016. However, many other things have changed since then. Republican voters looking for a populist set of policies in 2024 could have options other than another season of the Trump show.

No comments: