Is Losing Nobly a Republican Virtue?

By Noah Rothman

Friday, August 04, 2023

 

There is a lot to chew on in the Manhattan Institute’s poll of the Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina GOP primary electorate. When it comes to the state of play in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, however, the survey only underscores how static the race has been so far.

 

But beyond the toplines, Manhattan Institute tested a variety of issues and dispositional affinities to which Republican voters are predisposed, and it produced some interesting results. For example, this survey is one of the first to test just how attached GOP voters are to candidates who lose but lose valiantly.

 

Posing the question in this way is more revealing of Republican voters’ sentiments than polls that only ask Republican voters if they believe Donald Trump won or lost the 2020 election. GOP respondents perceive that question as a proxy designed to gauge their overall support for Trump. Without fail, the question proves that, yes, Republican voters still support Trump.

 

By asking Republicans if they think it is better to sacrifice political power while “staying true to their principles,” they find that many of Trump’s Republican supporters in these early primary states do, in fact, understand that Trump lost. At least, that is the logical corollary. Most Iowans and South Carolinians who back Trump think it is better to lose than to compromise or moderate their positions to seek power. New Hampshire’s Trump backers are slightly more amenable to compromise in pursuit of victory, but the issue is still closely run.

 

There is little evidence to suggest that efforts by Trump-aligned losing candidates, such as Arizona’s 2022 gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, to claim that they, too, were cheated out of their victory have gained traction among Republican voters. The legitimacy of her loss seems more widely accepted among self-identified GOP voters. But this poll provides some hard evidence to support the notion that a significant number of influential Republican primary voters see losing as a virtue — a mark of implacable grit and, perhaps, a source of validation for a losing candidate’s otherwise broken voters.

 

My former Commentary colleague Abe Greenwald identified some of the “perks of losing” in an insightful piece back in April:

 

Losing also grants tremendous freedoms. It permits you to keep nurturing your anger and, if so inclined, to seek remedies outside the bounds of acceptable conduct. Maybe best of all, you’re freed from accountability. The powerless are to be pitied, not blamed.

 

Victory is a burden, he notes. It is accompanied by all sorts of responsibilities and the frustrating “compromises” associated with governing a diverse and disaggregated continental republic. The lost cause is unadulterated by the messy, unsatisfying demands imposed on the victors. In a contest between purity and power, many Republicans choose purity.

 

Previously, this amorphous sentiment has just been in the ether. The Manhattan Institute has put some meat on these bones, for whatever it’s worth.