By Noah Rothman
Tuesday, September 05, 2023
Maryland governor Larry Hogan was speaking for many if not most
Republican politicos when he endorsed a quiet pressure campaign designed to
winnow the field of GOP presidential candidates to present Donald Trump with
one viable challenger. Trump’s defeat in the GOP primary is a crucial first
step on the GOP’s path back to “winning elections again,” he told CBS News
correspondent Robert Costa. But Hogan doesn’t seem to be speaking for
Republican voters. Among the GOP rank and file, there is a prevailing sense
that Republicans can’t lose in 2024.
Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson has
documented a strange mix of catastrophism and overconfidence that dominates the
thinking among Republican voters. “Republicans both deeply fear a 2024 loss and
can’t fathom its actually happening,” she wrote. And the focus groups she conducts for the New
York Times bear this conclusion out. Though their political views and
values differed, precisely none of the eleven Republican participants in her last sample could envision a scenario in which Joe
Biden won reelection in 2024. That doesn’t just also apply to
Donald Trump if he emerges as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. They
think it is especially true of the former president, who Republican primary voters appear to believe is Biden’s strongest hypothetical opponent.
The theories that political observers posit to explain
the Right’s certitude are unsatisfying, partly because they are predicated on a
variety of uncharitable assumptions about Republican voters. For example, the
notion that Republicans refuse to entertain the prospect of loss because Trump
has coached them into believing that he didn’t actually lose the 2020 election
is one unsatisfactory theory.
Self-identified Republicans are inclined to echo the
former president’s claims about the 2020 race when speaking with pollsters,
just as they are inclined to view most Trump-related phenomena as proximate
tests of their support for Trump himself. But Republicans have mixed views of the actions Mike Pence took on January
6, and the relatively warm reception the former vice president received
from his opponents and the Republicans in the audience during
a portion of the first primary debate in which his conduct was relitigated do
not suggest Trump’s electoral record is a live wire. Moreover, there is no
transitive property to Trump’s stolen-election narrative, though his mimics in
the GOP did their best to incept the idea that the midterm elections were similarly marred by fraud and malfeasance. Republican
voters know their candidates lost in 2022.
The GOP’s voters may be presumptuous, but they are not
delusional. Rather, Republicans are responding rationally to the general lay of
the political landscape.
GOP voters think the economy is terrible, believe that
most people agree with them, and assume voters would take Trump’s economic
record over Joe Biden’s in a heartbeat — and they may not be wrong. Voters
are deeply dissatisfied with the economy over which Biden
has presided, blame Democrats for their circumstances, and
consistently give Trump’s handling of economic issues high marks.
Republican voters think Trump is a victim of an
overzealous government, which has been weaponized with the aim of neutralizing
the former president as a political force and stealing from them the
opportunity to vote for him again. Once again, they think most Americans agree
with this point of view, and, to some extent, they do. When asked about the
many criminal allegations against Trump, pluralities regularly tell Ipsos pollsters that they believe the
charges are politically motivated.
The Republican primary electorate thinks Joe Biden is
irredeemably corrupt and, once again, they have reason to believe theirs is not
a minority point of view. Sixty-four percent of respondents to a recent YouGov survey, including 47 percent of Democrats and
two-thirds of independents, believe Hunter Biden “definitely or probably” did
something illegal. Forty-four percent of that poll’s respondents said “yes”
when asked if “Joe Biden did anything illegal regarding Hunter Biden.”
Republicans believe the stink of corruption about the president is contributing
to the erosion of support for Biden’s reelection, and who is to say they’re wrong?
Republicans believe all this while catastrophizing the
prospect of Joe Biden’s reelection, often earnestly and in ways that are
reinforced by prominent Republican officeholders. If you believed that
Biden’s conduct is “treasonous,” that “America is finished” if he gets to spend another four years
in the Oval Office, and you’re receiving signals from your environment that
suggest most Americans agree to the extent they are willing to put their
objections to Trump aside, why wouldn’t you conclude that your side can’t lose?
The problem with this analysis is not that it is a
rationalization to justify nominating Trump to the presidency for a third time.
The problem is that the analysis is incomplete.
Republicans trying to convince themselves that voters are
purely economic actors and will subordinate their concerns about Trump to
pocketbook issues fail to consider the fact that voters did not do that in
either 2020 or 2022. Trump lost his reelection bid in 2020 despite voters’ favorable view of his management of the
economy. Moreover, amid economic circumstances that were marginally worse than
they are today and for which Democrats received the lion’s share of the blame, midterm-election voters turned
out to vote against the GOP’s candidates — in particular, the party’s nominees
who emulated Trump’s most grating habits.
The voting public may concede the notion that the charges
Trump faces at the federal and state levels are politically motivated — an
outlook that is likely to evolve as voters get more intimately acquitted with
the evidence against the former president, which they surely will be when
proceedings against Trump consume the national discourse. But American adults
hold that view while still favoring
the prosecution of the former president, sometimes in the same poll. If voters are willing to entertain (for now)
the notion that Trump is being persecuted, it’s persecution they’re willing to
live with if it extricates the former president from public life.
The allegations of corruption surrounding Joe Biden are
breaking through despite a concerted campaign in the press to remind Americans
that the GOP has produced no tangible evidence that the president benefited
financially from his son’s con artistry. But they still think Trump and his
family are worse. The same YouGov survey that the Right has latched onto found that a majority of
respondents say that the former president and his adult children are corrupt,
while just 28 percent disagree. “Since October, that gap has increased from 18
to 25 points,” observed Yahoo News reporter Andrew Romano.
Unseating an incumbent president, even an unpopular one,
is a herculean feat. But Republicans have minimized the scale of that challenge
in their minds because Trump is functionally an incumbent, too. He has a record
on which to run, a formidable party machine clearing the path before him,
and a ubiquitous cheering section in conservative media outlets. What’s more,
the circumstances in which Americans find themselves are so undesirable that
Trump polls competitively against Biden before the campaign
has even begun. Why should the Right give its critics the satisfaction of
abandoning Trump when there seems to be more risk in putting an unknown
quantity up against Biden in 2024? Republicans don’t think Republicans can
lose, and they seem determined to test that proposition over and over in the
most improvident ways imaginable.
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