How the 2024 Republican Presidential Race Is Already Different from 2016

By Philip Klein

Thursday, December 22, 2022

 

When evaluating Donald Trump’s chances to capture the Republican nomination in 2024, it’s natural for observers to look back at 2016. Many of us got that primary wrong by underestimating Trump, so there’s an understandable desire to learn from mistakes. But there is also a danger of overcorrecting. 

 

I’ve enjoyed the back and forth between Michael and Rich on the Corner this week about the likelihood of Trump’s winning. Among other things, they debate the group dynamics that played to Trump’s advantage in 2016. MBD laments that “a Republican Party that is split into a field of 20 contenders who are united against Trump, and who are laundering their attacks on other conservative positions through their attacks on Trump, will strengthen Trump.”

 

One thing that’s missing in all of this analysis is a recognition of one important detail that’s already significantly different from 2016. That is, right now, there is one clear favorite among the candidates who aren’t Trump, whereas, in 2016, the field was already extremely fractured before Trump even entered the race. 

 

Looking at the current RealClearPolitics average of national polling on potential candidates for the 2024 Republican nomination, Trump is at 47 percent, Ron DeSantis is at 28.8 percent, Mike Pence is at 7 percent, and everybody else is at 3 percent or lower. The range is understandably large at this point (one poll in the average has DeSantis within five points; another has him down by 23 points). DeSantis also has been winning in some early state polls as well as nationally in a head-to-head matchup. But what is less important at this point is the difference between Trump and DeSantis; what matters is the difference between DeSantis and the third-place candidate. And the story there is that in every poll, it’s Trump and DeSantis — and then everybody else in single digits.

 

Compare that with the RCP average on the same day in 2014 (December 21):

 

Jeb Bush: 15.2 percent

Chris Christie: 10.4 percent

Ben Carson: 9 percent

Rand Paul: 9 percent

Mike Huckabee: 9 percent

Scott Walker: 8.2 percent

Ted Cruz: 6.3 percent

 

What you’ll notice is that single digits separated the first-place candidate from the seventh-place candidate, and the second- through sixth-place candidates were all within two points. 

 

On June 16, 2015 — the day Trump rode down the escalator — some names had changed, but the race was even tighter:

 

Jeb Bush: 10.8 percent

Scott Walker: 10.6 percent

Marco Rubio: 10 percent

Ben Carson: 9.4 percent

Mike Huckabee: 8.6 percent

Rand Paul: 8.2 percent

 

So Trump joined a field in which nobody was polling above 10.8 percent, and the top six candidates were all within the margin of error — effectively, it was a six-way statistical tie. 

 

What I want to emphasize is not the particular numbers or even the specific candidates. The important thing to look at is the structure of the race. And structurally, the races are already different. In 2016, even before Trump appeared on the scene, voters weren’t enthused by any of the candidates and many candidates had a plausible reason to think they could be the nominee. Once Trump entered, it obviously blew things up, but it didn’t change that overall dynamic — all candidates were close enough to each other that they believed that they could emerge as the “non-Trump” alternative, so they were reluctant to drop out. This also created a feedback loop with voters. That is, primary voters make decisions weighing whom they like the most against who they believe has a chance to win. If you really like one candidate, but he or she is way behind and going nowhere, you are more likely to defect. But if you see a lot of candidates bunched up with nobody clearly ahead, you’re more likely to stick with the candidate you prefer anyway. 

 

Right now, however, the emerging Republican race is already a lot different structurally than it was eight years ago. Voters are already showing more willingness to unite around a candidate who isn’t Trump than they were at a similar stage of the 2016 race. Currently, that other candidate is DeSantis, but it’s obviously early enough to change.

 

It’s also important to say that successful presidential candidates find a way of winning in the environment that exists and turning potential vulnerabilities into advantages. Going into the 2008 primary, the conventional wisdom was that the novice Barack Obama couldn’t stand a chance against the more seasoned Hillary Clinton (one joke going around was that it was a race between “Hillzilla” and “Obambi”). Instead, Obama emphasized change, argued for a new and more civil kind of politics, and said that what he lacked in experience he made up for in judgment (having called the Iraq War a “dumb war,” while Clinton voted for it). It was also said that Obama would be hurt by the bitter and protracted primary, but instead, the long primary allowed him to respond to a lot of the criticisms that would resurface in the general, as well as become more battle-tested. 

 

In a similar vein, if he plays his cards right, a crowded field could help DeSantis. While it’s way too early to pick a winner, I am confident in predicting that if the 2024 nominee is somebody other than Trump, it will not be a candidate who runs as an explicitly anti-Trump option, but somebody who makes a positive case for his or her candidacy while being unlike Trump temperamentally.

 

In a head-to-head race in which everybody who is anti-Trump unites around DeSantis, Trump will aim all his fire on DeSantis, and DeSantis is much more likely to be perceived as the choice of the establishment. However, if there is a crowded primary in which candidates such as Chris Christie and Larry Hogan compete to be the anti-Trump choice, it will not only distract Trump by giving him more targets to aim at, but it will allow DeSantis to avoid being seen as the anti-Trump establishment pick (as every day these candidates will be branding DeSantis as a Trump clone). At the same time, it’s more likely that having more candidates in the field (especially centrist and liberal Republicans) will expose DeSantis to the types of attacks he is likely to encounter in a general election.

 

There is always the risk that Trump has a solid bloc of support, and that a load of candidates, absorbing a few points each, make it hard for DeSantis or any other non-Trump candidate to receive a plurality in the early states. But voters who don’t want Trump will also be going into this election remembering what happened in 2016, and if the race remains structurally similar to the way it is now — with one alternative to Trump well ahead of the rest of the pack — they are more likely to consolidate around that alternative than they were in the fractured field that existed when Trump entered presidential politics. 

 

Presidential candidates don’t drop out for altruistic reasons. They do so because voters make them irrelevant. It will be incumbent upon DeSantis — or whoever else emerges as the most viable alternative to Trump — to build up enough of a lead over the other contenders that their voters abandon them.