Four Reasons the Deck is Stacked in Trump's Favor For the 2024 GOP Presidential Nomination
Talk of Defeating Donald Trump in the 2024 GOP Primaries Is Nonsense
Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia created a wave of what former fed Chairman Alan Greenspan once called “irrational exuberance” among anti-anti-Trumpers and reluctant Trump voters that Youngkin’s win shows that there could be a market in 2024 for a candidate who wasn’t Trump, a candidate who was like Glenn Youngkin isn’t a raging anti-Trumper, he speaks to some populist concerns but offers a far more conciliatory, dignified approach. Couldn't a candidate like that win in 2024?
No, he really couldn’t.
First of all, as Amanda Carpenter duly documented, the GOP’s candidates in 2022 are decidedly not friendly Youngkin Republicans. Many have a history of problematic behaviors towards women such as Senate candidates Herschel Walker (R-GA), Sean Parnell (R-PA), Eric Greitens (R-MO) and House Candidate Max Miller (R-OH) are going to be far more prominent. And that’s before you consider the utter disgrace that is the Ohio Republican Senate Primary.
Ultimately, Youngkin’s victory deosn’t matter for another reason. We’ve seen this movie before. The party of Glenn Youngkin will bow to the party of Donald Trump. In fact, Youngkin has promised to support Trump if he’s the nominee. Glad you liked Winsome Sears's acceptance speech. I hope you’ll like her speech advocating for four more years of Donald Trump come 2024.
Of course, Youngkin adds that it’s not certain who will be the GOP nominee.
Yes, it is. It absolutely is. If Trump wants to be the Republican nominee, he will be. He has four key advantages that make this certain.
1) The Advantage of the Current Primary System
The current primary system is a mess. It’s governed by a combination of party rules by both major parties and state laws in all fifty states. Candidates are not elected directly, rather delegates to the national convention are elected tied to voters’ votes. While Democrats have all delegates elected proportionally, the Republicans add confusion by having varying nominating rules in each state. Some are proportional, some are winner-take-all by state, some are winner-take-all by congressional district for a portion of the delegates and the rest going to the winner of the state, others have some proportional and winner-take-all elements blended together.
In many ways, the presidential nominating system tries to be a hyrbid: it implicitly expects voters showing up at the polls with varying degrees of interest and understanding to show the type of thoughtfulness as dedicated party activists showing up at state and county conventions in past decades. It never works well, it’s not designed to. It’s barely designed or thought out at all.
The system favors the candidate who comes out strongest in the first three or four states, particularly on the Republican side with the inclusion of winner take-all states. It takes less than the 30% of the vote to win Iowa and New Hampshire in most years and around 35-40% to win in South Carolina. Because the process is frontloaded, the momentum from the early states becomes key and whichever candidate is up after the early states find themselves up quite a bit more, and at that point, we begin to hear about “delegate math.”
After Super Tuesday, it’s usually mathematically possible for the frontrunner to still not win the majority of the delegates to the Convention, but it becomes increasingly improbable for anyone else to outright win the majority. The surviving campaigns begin to dream of and publicly speak of an open convention where the delegates would pick the nominee in response to increasingly delegate math-focused media. This is the beginning of the end of the primary campaign.
While political nerds love the idea of an old-fashioned, open convention where the delegates choose the nominee, Republican voters hate that idea more than they hate the idea of nominating a horrible candidate. The point of view is understandable. They’ve been led to believe they get to vote for the party nominee. On that basis, there’s been a campaign that’s lasted two years, and billions of dollars have been spent. For it to end with 2000 people they’ve never heard of gathering to choose the nominee seems like a betrayal. So thus the frontrunner (with perhaps a setback or two) invariably becomes the nominee. This has been the case in every Republican contest since 1988.*
There’s no reason to think Trump would not come out with a very successful showing in the first four early states. Maybe, Independent voters in New Hampshire allow for an upset, maybe, but there’s zero chance that Trump doesn’t get enough votes to sweep the other states.
Of course, he might not get a majority. Some anti-anti-Trumpers imagine a grand coalition where everyone unites behind their preferred candidate. This is really as far away from happening as it was when the anti-Trump vote was split between John Kasich and Ted Cruz. Those who don’t want Trump as the 2024 nominee remain divided and there’s no reason to think there’s any move towards an agreement and decades of primary history to argue that it’s not going to happen.
There are many proposals to fix the primary system such as a national primary, rotating regional primaries, etc. I’ve written about this issue in my book but as far as 2024 is concerned, this doesn’t matter. There’s no desire, no buy-in, and no movement to make any changes. You’re stuck with the existing system for the 2024 cycle and if anything, it will get worse.
2) The Advantage of Being a Liar and a Dirty Campaigner
Potential strong candidates such as Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley have foresworn a campaign for the Presidency if Trump runs. Governor Ron DeSantis (R-Fl) hasn’t, but if he thinks he can run against Trump, he has another think coming.
Trump doesn’t believe in the Eleventh Commandment (thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican) any more than he believes in the first ten. Anyone who runs against him and gets close is going to get a lot of hard elbows.
Scott and Haley know that if they run against Trump, their reward will be: a) an insulting nickname that sticks to them forever like it did for Lyin’ Ted or Little Marco, and b) having lies told about them that will be believed readily by many voters. They’ll be stories about begging for jobs or endorsements. In addition, both would have to eat four years of praise and veneration for Trump.
Of course, they wouldn’t have to swallow nearly as much Trump praise in running against him than Ron DeSantis would. DeSantis rapped himself in Trump’s endorsement in 2018. How does he run against him credibly in 2024 with ads like this still on the Internet?:
If DeSantis chooses to run, we’ll hear from Trump how DeSantis came to him in 2018 and “begged like a dog” for his endorsement and how he made DeSantis Governor of Florida. In this case, I’d believe there was at least a grain of truth to Trumps’ story. Running against Trump would be folly for DeSantis. DeSantis’ brand is as a fighter and to prove that brand, he would have to fight Trump, attack Trump, and give as good as he got.
If he didn’t, DeSantis would end up crushed like a bug on the side of the political road in Iowa. If he did, he might still get crushed. Even if against all odds, he managed to win the Republican nomination, it would turn out to be a pyrrhic victory as the primary would have been so toxic as to destroy DeSantis’ chances of winning in the fall.
3) The Advantage of Being a Sore Loser and a Bully
Remember when Ted Cruz won the Iowa Caucuses'. Trump didn’t accept defeat. He screamed about fraud, demanded a new caucus. He repeated the same patterns when Cruz racked up delegates at the Colorado State Convention and the Wisconsin Republican Primary, talking about how the process was rigged. There were also veiled threats he might leave the party after Wisconsin if he didn’t get the nomination.
This is another key to his domination. Potential opponents know that if they beat Donald Trump, there’s no chance he’s going to endorse them. Party leaders and voters are afraid of an Independent or Third Party effort launched by Trump. In fact, the Republican Party after slightly distancing itself from Trump after the attack on the Capitol began to shift back to Trump after he made whispers about a third-party effort. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy went to Mar-a-lago, genuflected at Trump’s feet, and then the party became once again all-Trump all the time.
The irony is that Donald Trump is the true leader of a political party that’s made up of people who are terrified of Democratic governance and he maintains that position by threatening to blow up the Party and throw the election to the Democrats. There are not enough Republicans who are going to call him on it.
That’s not just true of party leaders, that’s true of grassroots voters. Would enough reluctant Trumper voters who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 to save the country from Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden really turn around and vote for Ron DeSantis or Ben Sasse and risk Trump slitting the party and handing the election to Biden or whoever the Democrats nominate?
I’ve observed that some people who loved Trump have been turned on him, and so have a few people who opportunistically used Trump. Yet, no one who is afraid of Trump has. Fear’s a powerful drug and one that the GOP is fully under the influence of.
4) The Advantage of Having the State and National Parties Run by the Lunatic Fringe
Once upon a time county, state, and national Republican parties were run by respectable people. Many of them reminded you of your parents. They were business owners, lawyers, and retired military officers. They were non-descript straight-laced folks whose politics leaned right, who followed the proprieties of being party leaders, and kept things running smoothly. The party’s youth could be seen in staff positions at the State party with level-headed War on Terror veterans, conservative college graduates about to head off to law school, and other relatively quiet people. It was very boring but reliable. And there’s something to be said for the organizational leadership of a political party being level-headed, normal, and boring.
The Trump-era led to a shift. As the GOP reorganized into a cult of personality, the normies began to leave. They didn’t become #NeverTrumpers or join Project Lincoln. In fact, most of them probably vote a straight GOP ticket. But for many a former Republican official, coaching Little League or starting a new business sounds a heck of a lot more their speed than having to explain away Trump’s latest lie, find a new way to sing the praises of the Party’s Dear Leader, or sell the latest conspiracy theory from Q-Anon or the MyPillow guy.
In turn, the new face of the Republican Party leadership is far more radical. They’re more concerned with censuring Republican politicians who win elections than actually beating Democrats. While this takeover isn’t universal, the new face of party leadership is more like Arizona Chairman Kelly “Chemtrail Kelly” Ward than your father’s GOP and they are loyal to Trump. The Republican Party state headquarters are more likely to be staffed by Turning Point USA kids who have inhaled deeply of Charlie Kirk’s toxic blend of conspiracy theories and proto-fascism.
What does this have to do with Trump’s chances of winning the party’s nomination? After all, these are nobodies as far as your average voter is concerned. Heretofore, we’ve assumed that voters will be able to choose whether they want to nominate Trump again, but that may be assuming too much. Trump has control of a lot of state and national party officials that could tip the scales further.
One possible change is allowing for winner-take-all primaries to occur earlier in the process. Trump was not happy with the number of states that chose delegates proportionally in the early going and made it difficult for him to reach the magic number of delegates needed to claim the party nomination. A change in national party rules plus a change in rules in various states could make this happen.
Another potential change would be the cancellation of proportional primaries and the election of pro-Trump delegates instead by Trump-dominated State Conventions. State parties hold a lot of power to choose their own nominees even above state law (see: California Democratic Party v. Jones.) It would be easy enough for a group of states to declare their state governments hadn’t done enough to ensure election integrity and therefore the Republican delegates would all be chosen by the State Central Committee or at a special party convention.
How many states might do that? Keep in mind that many states canceled their contests in 2020 or printed ballots with only Trump’s name on them. Imagine a dozen states with 400 delegates between them doing this. This wouldn’t be enough to make Trump the nominee but it would be very hard for anyone else to get a majority.
This would make strong candidates hesitant to challenge Trump. While the 2024 field of challengers would have to be better than Bill Weld and Joe Walsh in 2020, it may not be that much better.
I’d also add that should Trump not run in 2024, this control of state parties could allow Trump to pick a nominee such as his son Don, Jr. and it’d be just as hard to mount a challenge against him.
If Trump wants to run for President, there’s simply no way to stop him from winning the Republican nomination. It also seems he’s very much inclined to run. The things most likely to keep him from not running are the sort of chronic health problems that a man approaching eighty begins to encounter or if a longshot prosecution lands him in jail. If these votes are your best hopes, you’d better reconsider your strategy.
Even if He Doesn’t Run, The GOP is Still the Trump Party
If former President Trump doesn’t run in 2024, does that mean the GOP won’t be under his influence? Absolutely not. The same reasons that would make Trump unbeatable as a GOP candidate would make him impossible to be rid of as an ex-President.
It’s easy to foresee how Trump would continue to have sway, even if Don. Jr doesn’t announce for President. First of all, you’d be likely to have a Trump Presidential forum or two during the 2024 cycle held at Mar-a-lago or other Trump properties. Perhaps, Trump would take part in questioning the candidates. It would be a given that each candidate would begin (and maybe even close) their remarks by paying tribute to the Presidency of Donald Trump. Those who didn’t lavish him with exotic praise would be marked people.
Would Trump actually endorse? Probably not right away. He’d definitely have candidates he didn’t like, those who were insufficiently Trumpy or didn’t do a good enough job singing his praise. He’d publicly attack them and make himself the story of the campaign.
Once the dust settled, Trump would expect star treatment. Being a diva, he’d demand that if the GOP nominee wants his endorsement Trump be given a prime speaking spot at the Convention, maybe a whole night centered around him and his family. You can bet he’d deliver an incendiary speech and leave it to the candidate and the party to deal with it. If the nominee doesn’t disavow Trump’s comments, it will hurt with suburban voters and women. If he does, the nominee will risk Trump deciding to urge his supporters to stay home.
In the fall, if Trump was still supporting the nominee, he would campaign in such a way that he could take the credit if the nominee won and offer blame for failing to be Trumpy enough if the nominee loses. Expect that to repeat for multiple cycles.
I think barring something major happening**, Trump will be a dominant force in the GOP as long as his health holds. His father Fred lived to be 94, so if Trump’s lifespan tracks with his father’s or exceeds it by a bit, it’s not inconceivable that Trump’s influence could continue into the 2030s and maybe even early 2040s. The GOP is going to be dealing with him and his clan a long time, so long that some of the judges were a supposed benefit of Trump will have retired and Trump will still be turning off voters.
Derangement or Delusion
Of course, many will scoff saying I don’t know what will happen and that I’m suffering from TDS. This is mostly deflection and the sort of denial about the true state of the GOP and the cost of Trumpism.
Ross Douthat is a columnist I admire greatly and he’s often been right, but he was never more wrong than when he wrote an article entitled, “There Will be No Trump Coup.” He made the mistake many make with Trump. They assume that at the core of all the weirdness that is Trump is healthy normality somewhere.
Assuming Trump might decide to fade into the sunset, build his presidential library, and spend time with his grandkids rather than making another run for the White House or deciding to dominate the Party for decades to come is little different than expecting to graciously concede and have a nice cup of coffee with Joe Biden before departing Washington.
His opponents have gotten him wrong too, but only because their views of the man are illogical. The idea of Trump as a Russian asset is as laughable as that of him as a respectable ex-President. Imagine Vladimir Putin deciding to recruit a completely undisciplined man who couldn’t shut up or keep a secret even when it would be to his benefit. Trump’s a bad man, but he’s not bad in every way. He’s bad in his own way and he’s shown us what that means time and time again. He keeps showing us who he is? How along until we believe him.
He’s an egotist, a drama queen, a malicious gossip, and thrives on keeping people scared and angry. He’s dominated the GOP for the last six years. He’ll continue to dominate as long as he lives leading to many stupid and unnecessary losses and giving Democrats a perfect boogie man to keep suburban voters in line.
Those dreaming of Trump losing a primary or the party moving past Trump are self-deluded. Trumpism in the GOP is endemic. If you don’t deal with that reality, if you pretend normal’s around the corner, you’re going to be voting for very stupid and very bad people every other November for a very long long time.
The only way away from Trump will be to found a new political party that will separate from Trump and his craziness and try to build a broad right-leaning coalition to solve problems. Trump has threatened to leave the GOP and start a new party. Serious conservatives should beat Trump in the only way they can— by beating him to the exit
*In 1976, Ronald Reagan was able to rally after losing the first six primaries to nearly beat Gerald Ford. However the system was far less frontloaded. The Iowa Caucuses were held January. Reagan first won in North Carolina, which was the seventh contest. In 2020, North Carolina voted on Super Tuesday and was one of fourteen states plus American Samoa that voted immediately after the four early states
**Trump invited a mob to Washington DC, stirred them up and set them loose on the Capitol on January 6th and it took less than a month for the GOP to start downplaying it, I’m not sure what’s supposed to be bad enough to lead to him no longer being the GOP grand poobah
So a John Kasich or even a Ted Cruz? More Republicans like Kevin McCarthy? Shall we bring back Ryan’s & Boehners?
How do you think we got here?
Trump didn’t rise on some fantasy of “lunatic fringes” hoodwinking the great unwashed. Nor on the support of the comfortable and uninflected. I’m guessing a lot of your analysis is correct, except you left out counting voters.