There is an unavoidable downside to telling Republican voters they got the Trump question wrong twice and are about to do so a third time.
A few months before the first ballots are cast, Republican primary voters appear ready to assume an arduous task: running a candidate battling multiple indictments in multiple jurisdictions and almost as many civil cases in what looks likely to be a competitive presidential election.
The candidates making this argument will also have to behave as if they believe it. This means shuttering vanity campaigns and auditions for administration jobs ranging from the vice presidency to postmaster general while there is still time to coalesce around a viable Trump alternative. “Former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential hopes are finished,” CNBC commentator Jake Novak wrote in February 2020. “You can expect him to maybe stay in the race for another three weeks or so until the Super Tuesday primaries are over, but that’s about it.”
Two things saved Democrats from risking a winnable presidential election that Republicans can learn from next year. The first is that South Carolina Democrats, especially the state’s black primary voters, pulled the party back from the ledge. They salvaged the campaign of their safest general election candidate and set him on a path to the nomination, reducing the rest of the field to also-rans.
The problem is that Trump has the capacity to win majority support. The most recent CNN poll has him winning 52% of the Republican vote nationally. The Wall Street Journal has Trump at 59%. There is exactly one poll in the RealClearPolitics average that has Trump below 50% nationally, and even it shows the former president leading by 27 points.
Thus, while winnowing the Republican field increases the chances of a non-Trump candidate winning, it does not guarantee it. Moreover, the failure of any candidate to be truly competitive keeps more of them in the race. While only Trump and DeSantis are consistently polling in the double digits, Ramaswamy, Haley, Pence, Christie, and Scott combined add up to 22.7% in the national RealClearPolitics average. That’s a nontrivial slice of the primary electorate and one that as a matter of pure arithmetic could return DeSantis to his peak poll numbers.
Trump has the top tier all to himself, with DeSantis in sole possession of the second tier. Third-tier candidates moving into the second tier won’t move the needle unless that is the beginning rather than the end of their momentum. Myriad legal challenges against Trump threaten his availability to campaign. The E. Jean Carroll defamation case trial date is the same day as the Iowa caucuses. One federal trial is scheduled to begin the day before Super Tuesday. Another commences two months before the convention.
A Trump-Biden rematch would pit two unpopular senior citizens against each other, each with an established track record as president. Other Republicans could more easily make the election a referendum on Biden or more effectively capitalize on concerns about the oldest president’s age, shared even by many Democrats.
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