By Nick Catoggio
Thursday, May 18, 2023
Lately certain Trump-skeptical conservatives have worried
that the “vibe” of the Republican presidential primary is beginning
to look concerningly 2016-ish.
To which I say: I wish.
Have you seen the polls? Here’s what the RealClearPolitics average
looks like as I write this.
Trump is at 56 percent, his highest mark to date, and
holds his biggest lead yet over Ron DeSantis. In his first run for president
Trump didn’t consistently top 30 percent in primary polling until
December 2015 and didn’t establish himself as a clear favorite for the
nomination until he won South Carolina. As late as November of that year, he
trailed Ben Carson in polling.
I long for the days when he was that vulnerable.
In context, dismissing DeSantis’ candidacy as “Cruz 2.0”
is an insult to Ted Cruz, who remained within single digits of Trump all the
way to April 2016. DeSantis might never get that close, let alone defeat Trump
in multiple primaries.
Having said all that, I understand why Trump skeptics are
having flashbacks.
He’s dominating early
media coverage of the primary.
He has a base of diehard support that’s as solid as
granite, beyond the power of reason or morality to crack.
He’ll benefit if no-hoper candidates keep piling into the
field, splintering the anti-Trump vote among them. Some aspirants are delusional,
unable to accept their unpopularity with Republican voters; some are obvious “break
glass in case DeSantis tanks” options; some are so
obscure that they’d need millennia of free TV time for them to raise
their name ID meaningfully. But they can all lure handfuls of voters away from
DeSantis, making the task of catching Trump that much harder.
Oh, and should Trump win the nomination, he’s likely to
face one of the few Democrats in America who’s as miserably unpopular as he is,
giving him a real chance of winning.
There are parallels to 2016 in all of that. But the
nature of that primary and this one are distinct.
***
Both races pose the same question to Republican voters
that I described back in February: Why
not something different this time?
But the baseline against which “something different” is
measured has changed radically in eight years.
Trump’s victory in 2016 can be understood as the
Republican electorate finally growing exhausted with the soft libertarianism of
the party’s post-Reagan politics. The GOP leadership didn’t share the base’s
preferences on matters like immigration and entitlements, and it lacked the
relish for cultural conflict that right-wing media and its consumers felt. All
of which might have been tolerable if that leadership had at least reliably
delivered presidential victories, but the only Republican to prevail in the 24
years between 1992 and 2016 was the not-fondly-remembered George W. Bush.
Believing it had little left to lose, the base was ready
for something different. Trump was … different, stylistically and
substantively.
Ted Cruz believed those substantive differences would be
Trump’s downfall. He assumed, quite reasonably, that the right-wing base would
apply the same exacting ideological litmus test of “true conservatism” to the
upstart that so many other Republican politicians had flunked in years prior by
proving squishy on policy. Cruz had passed that test with flying colors, which
is why he spent most of the campaign believing that Trump would eventually
collapse and Trump’s voters would switch to him.
What he discovered was that populist conservatives don’t
care much about conservatism when they’re getting a raw enough dose of
populism. Trump’s substantive differences with GOP orthodoxy on policy weren’t
disqualifying after all.
The theory of DeSantis’
nascent candidacy, à la 2016, is that Republicans are once again ready for
something different. But this time the contrast that’s supposedly going to beat
Trump has to do with style, not substance.
Yes, yes, I know, DeSantis has spent this spring
laser-focused on piling
up legislative victories. Isn’t that all about drawing a substantive
contrast with Trump? “We already saw in Ted Cruz’s 2016 campaign the limits of
ideological correctness,” Ross
Douthat wrote recently, worried that DeSantis is repeating Cruz’s
mistake. “There are Republican primary voters who cast ballots with a matrix of
conservative positions in their heads but not enough to overcome the appeal of
the Trump persona, and a campaign against him won’t prosper if its main selling
point is just True Conservatism 2.0.”
I think that misunderstands what DeSantis is trying to
achieve by piling up legislative wins. He’s not so much trying to outdo Trump
on policy as to neutralize policy as a factor in the primary,
which also explains why he tends to adopt
Trump’s own position on fraught subjects. The governor is running on
competence and electability, implicitly promising Trump voters that they can
get all the same stuff they like from a government with DeSantis in charge that
they’d get from Trump, minus the many self-sabotaging distractions. “You don’t
need to worry about either of us being good on policy,” he’s telling voters.
“Focus instead on which of us is more likely to win and then to run a tight
ship in office.”
That’s a stylistic pitch. Whereas Trump and Cruz offered
two different visions of what Republican policy and politics should be,
DeSantis is conceding that primary voters were right to prefer Trump’s vision
in 2016. The question of what the party should be is settled. The question that
remains is who’s most capable of gaining and wielding power to realize that
vision.
Even DeSantis’ recent break
with Trump over banning abortion after six weeks has less to do with
the substance of the policy than with style, I think. He can’t match Trump’s
charismatic macho bluster in confronting liberals, so he aims to compensate by
presenting himself as less compromising on policy than even Trump is. That’s
the subtext of his critique of Trump over COVID restrictions as well: Anyone
can err in making a policy choice but to be swayed by a sinister liberal icon
like Anthony Fauci is unforgivable. Trump didn’t “fight,” DeSantis will.
That’s different from trying to beat Trump on substance
by offering “True Conservatism 2.0.” Unlike
some people, the governor is smart enough to recognize that’s hopeless.
***
A campaign focused on stylistic contrasts in
demonstrating resolve is one important way 2024 won’t look like 2016. The other
is that no one is under any illusions at this point about who or what Donald
Trump is.
Centuries from now, schoolchildren will marvel at how
many people believed he could become a responsible steward as president after
he was first elected. He’ll “grow in office,” we were told. He’ll be surrounded
by “adults.” Trump himself hinted from time to time during the campaign
that his
persona in office would differ from his persona as a candidate.
Even after he’d been sworn in, desperate pundits would
seize on instances where he briefly behaved more or less normally to proclaim
that this, at last, was the
moment he had truly become
president.
No one says that anymore. There’s no
hopeful scenario for a second Trump term.
A Republican voter considering Trump in the 2016 primary
had to ask himself whether he preferred a charismatic TV star preaching
protectionism and isolationism to a lackluster programmatic conservative in the
Ted Cruz mold. A Republican considering Trump in the 2024 primary has to ask
himself whether he prefers a twice-impeached coup plotter to a much younger
populist who’s gung-ho to wage the sort of culture war that the base craves.
And that voter will need to somehow confront the fact
that the party has had not one, not two, but three disappointing elections
under Trump’s leadership, something DeSantis is already eager to remind them
of.
Many things flow from those differences.
It’s true, as Douthat writes, that Republicans seem to be
making a number of other vintage 2016 mistakes as the governor prepares to
enter the race. Some donors seem put off by his populism and are eyeing
no-hoper alternatives; those no-hopers appear inclined to stay in the race long
past the point of viability, squatting on votes that might otherwise go to
DeSantis; Republican movers and shakers have grown fatalistic too soon about a
Trump victory, risking a self-fulfilling prophecy; and the media, as
demonstrated by CNN’s recent town hall, sounds a little too excited to have him
back in the mix.
I’m naively optimistic that none of those parallels will
hold for long if DeSantis shows momentum in the polls this
summer, though.
Donors surely recognize the risk of Trump prevailing over
a divided field again, having learned from painful experience. Deprived of
their money, and not wanting to bear responsibility for facilitating a third
Trump nomination if the race between him and DeSantis is tight, most of the
no-hopers will quit before the primaries. The fatalism will fade as DeSantis’
polling improves and Trump’s legal troubles mount. And the media will be more
sober in covering Trump this time around, if only to avoid the ferocious
backlash CNN is now experiencing.
Although 2024 polling doesn’t yet show a meaningful
difference between Trump and DeSantis when pitted against Biden, that too could
change as the governor becomes better known. The more proof there is that
DeSantis is right when he claims the GOP will fare better with him at the top
of the ticket, the more electability is likely to weigh on Republican voters. For
instance:
If Trump is at the top of the
ticket, Democrats would have a five-point advantage in the generic
congressional ballot, leading Republicans 47 to 42 percent. Without Trump,
Democrats and Republicans are deadlocked at 44 percent, according to the survey
from WPA Intelligence released Wednesday and obtained by National Review.
…
While Biden is unpopular with
voters, Trump is even more so. If the election were held today, 47 percent of
voters would choose Biden while only 40 percent would choose Trump. Twelve
percent are undecided.
…
Additionally, if Trump were to be
charged with a crime either in Georgia or by special counsel Jack Smith at the
federal level, his support would drop to 39 percent overall while Biden’s
support would be upped to 49 or 50 percent respectively.
“You have basically three people at this point that are
credible in this whole thing,” DeSantis reportedly told donors
on a conference call on Thursday. “Biden, Trump, and me. And I think of those
three, two have a chance to get elected president—Biden and me, based on all
the data in the swing states, which is not great for the former president and
probably insurmountable because people aren’t going to change their view of
him.”
In 2016 the question of Trump’s electability and his
effect on Republican candidates down ballot was a black box during the primary.
Three grim election cycles and one insurrection later, any primary voter who
isn’t already committed to him knows they’re inviting electoral disaster for
the GOP if they fail to unite behind his most formidable challenger in the
primary.
That doesn’t guarantee that the anti-Trump vote will
consolidate this time, but it improves the odds. And don’t forget, unlike eight
years ago, this time many Trump-hating Democrats in Iowa may
have a say in how the GOP caucus there shakes out.
In short, 2024 will differ from 2016 because Republican
voters know precisely what they’re getting this time.
Which is not to say that Trump won’t win anyway.
***
That’s because the party has changed in eight years.
Voters who find Trump insufferable and dangerous have fled, others drawn to his
authoritarian charisma have flooded in.
At the risk of belaboring a point I made
elsewhere this week, his viciousness and amorality are no longer vices
that right-wingers are expected to tolerate uneasily and then put aside on
Election Day in the interests of Republican victory, as was true in 2016. They’ve
become affirmative reasons to support him, evidence of his righteous
brutality. To object morally to him or conclude that he’s unfit for office
is now tantamount to confessing your left-wing sympathies.
Convincing a cult of personality that’s grown more feral
over time to replace the personality at its center because you just
passed a
DEI bill or whatever is a tall ask.
DeSantis’ “Trump
without the nonsense” pitch might have succeeded in 2016, when Republican
voters were willing to overlook his nonsense in the interest of trying
something radically different. But in 2024, that nonsense is part of the GOP’s
tribal identity.
It may turn out that all the legislative victories in the
world can’t hope to impress a right-wing electorate as much as being indicted
by multiple Democratic prosecutors does. If I’m right that DeSantis’ many
policy achievements will function mainly as a proxy for his ability to antagonize
the left, he may find himself trumped nonetheless by Trump’s even more
impressive achievement in getting himself criminally charged by liberals
numerous times.
In fact, the governor could plausibly find himself
reliving a very particular chapter of the 2016 primary. Recall that, for the
last four months of 2015, it was Ben Carson who looked to be Trump’s most
formidable challenger. But Carson failed to impress once Republican voters took
a hard look at him and he faded, clearing the way for Ted Cruz’s ascent.
DeSantis might not receive much of a bounce after he
announces his candidacy next week or, if he does get one, it could fade
quickly. It’s also possible, if not likely, that the other non-Trump candidates
will pile on him at the first (and probably Trump-less) Republican debate,
ruining his introduction to undecided voters. If he falters, some of his donors
and supporters who are desperate to unseat Trump won’t
be patient while he tries to recover. They’ll abandon ship in their haste
to find a more viable alternative, leaving DeSantis to suffer Carson’s fate.
In that sense, it really might be 2016 all over again. And this time, there’s unlikely to be a Cruz in the rest of the field who can at least make Trump sweat a bit before he prevails.
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