By Noah
Rothman
Monday,
July 31, 2023
The latest New York
Times/Sienna survey of the Republican political
landscape tells a familiar tale: Donald Trump remains the dominant figure in
the GOP with the support of roughly half (54 percent) of the primary vote, and
roughly half of (52 percent) of that half comes from Republican primary voters
who will consider voting for no other candidate. We’re left with a race in
which about a quarter of the GOP won’t vote for anyone other than Trump,
another quarter won’t vote for him under any circumstances, and a vast middle
of the Republican primary electorate is persuadable but leans toward Trump.
That is the state of play that has pertained for months, and the persuadable
vote remains unpersuaded by the non-Trump options.
Even
beyond the headline horse-race numbers, the Times/Sienna poll makes
especially clear the problem faced by those who hope to move the party past
Trump. Fifty-six percent of Republican voters said that they believe that Trump
“did not do anything wrong” in relation to the allegations of criminal
misconduct brought against him by the Justice Department. And 71 percent said
Trump had “not committed serious federal crimes.” Another 71 percent said it
was imperative that the GOP “stand behind Trump.” Among those who think the
Republican Party is obliged to support Trump’s criminal defense are 83 percent
of voters who are “open to Trump” in the primaries, 63 percent of GOP voters
who are backing DeSantis in the primaries, and nearly one-third of Republicans
who describe themselves as not being open to pro-Trump arguments. In other words,
believing that Trump is being persecuted isn’t exclusive to Trump supporters;
it’s a GOP-wide phenomenon.
There is
a nascent effort among Trump’s Republican opponents to accuse the former
president of wasting his donors’ contributions by dedicating a wildly disproportionate
amount of campaign cash to his
legal-defense fund.
The assumption in that line of attack is that Trump’s supporters will regard
that as a misallocation of resources, but we have no indication that Republican
voters will see it that way. In fact, it seems most Republican voters view
Trump’s legal woes as contributing to his overall appeal as a candidate, which
renders the distinctions between his campaign’s coffers and his legal-defense
fund negligible.
The Times write-up of the poll featured
a colorful argument in Trump’s favor made by a 69-year-old retail manager who
mocked the “little sissy” milksops who “cry about everything.” There is,
however, a lot to be gleaned from this categorization of Trump support in the
rawest, most emotional terms. In poll after poll, Republicans have expressed in
no uncertain terms that they are not evaluating Donald Trump’s performance
analytically as they would (and do) for other Republican politicians. They will
not stomach even
rhetorical criticisms of
the former president, and they are inclined to dismiss as illegitimate the
consequences Trump’s conduct invites.
The Times/Sienna
poll doesn’t just paint a portrait of a primary race that has been static over
the course of this year. It illustrates a dynamic around Trump’s political
persona that has been static for the better part of a decade.
Trump’s
legal woes are interchangeable with any number of persecutions to which the
former president has been supposedly subjected. Their specifics never matter
much because, by the time his supporters are finished transforming them into
allegories for the conditions they resent in their own lives, the issue is no
longer Trump.
When
Trump is accused of paying off a pornographic actress to keep silent about
their extramarital tryst, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins insists that the real issue is
that America treats Christianity like a “welcome mat” on which “people can just
stomp their feet,” and he says he’s just “glad that there’s somebody on the
playground that is willing to punch the bully.” When Trump’s property is
searched by the FBI because he allegedly mishandled classified documents and
misled investigators, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee says the real story is that
“it can and it will ultimately happen” to average voters, too.
Trump
himself has entertained the validity of
the claim that
he is “the most persecuted person in the history of our country,” but that
might not go far enough for some. He may be “the most persecuted man since
Christ,” depending on
whom you ask.
Trump’s latest legal troubles have been subsumed into this psychologically
unhealthy rubric. “Any Republican that doesn’t act on Democratic fraud should
be immediately primaried,” Trump said at a weekend rally, transforming
his prosecution into a political litmus test. And this strategy is likely to
work, as it has in the past, to make the president’s biggest liabilities in a
general election into core strengths in the primary.
The task
before a Republican who hopes to defeat the former president in the primary
will be to disabuse the party’s voters of the vague impression that his
problems are a validation of their own circumstances. It’s understandable why
Republican candidates would shrink from such a monumental undertaking: These
are not rational conclusions, so they are impervious to rationality. Moreover,
it’s hard to imagine how a Republican candidate could engage in that effort in
a way that didn’t appear to indict voters for having bad judgment or being susceptible
to motivated reasoning. But if the GOP’s other aspirants cannot convince
Republican voters that Trump has personal agency, is as flawed and fallible as
any man, and does not exist as an abstract proxy for a variety of unrelated
circumstances, there is no point to their presence in this primary campaign.
So many
Republican officials have foolishly lent credence to the notion that Trump’s
unique and constant struggles are the most visible signs of a sub-rosa
conspiracy against individual voters that it may be impossible to debunk that
notion now. But the job is still to try. If Trump’s Republican opponents run
against Trump only by criticizing his policy preferences or his flare for the
dramatic, they will lose. Of course, if Republican voters cannot help but see
in Trump and his predilection for self-inflicted wounds a reflection of
themselves, they were destined to lose anyway.
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