Anyone who works to advance his primary candidacy on the assumption that he can’t win the general election is playing a dangerous game.
Anyone who works to advance his primary candidacy on the assumption that he can’t win the general election is playing a dangerous game.
I t’s possible to underestimate Donald Trump even in 2023.
Throughout 2015 and 2016, an incredibly diverse array of political actors and figures operated under a shared conviction: There’s no way Donald Trump is going to be our next president.
The other Republican nominees for president did not take Trump seriously. They understood by the time of the debates that he had a fan base but assumed that the rest of the party could never reconcile itself to being represented by him. So they all vied to be the non-Trump consensus candidate, and they destroyed one another. They overestimated the appeal in 2016 of a traditional, upbeat Republican campaign. They underestimated the appeal of Trump’s heresies and his attitude.
They weren’t alone, of course. Too many outside of the American Right acted as if the Trump Show was just an enjoyable lark on the way to a Hillary Clinton presidency. Cable-news network heads such as CNN’s Jeff Zucker thought that they could broadcast everything Trump did live and profit from the resulting ratings bonanza without political consequence. Liberal columnists such as Jonathan Chait and Matthew Yglesias wrote trolling columns about how Trump would make a great nominee and moderate the Republican Party. In some ways these columns were correct — Trump did moderate the GOP on foreign policy and entitlements. But neither writer was counting on Trump’s trying to impose a ban on immigration from Muslim countries, or appointing three justices to 86 Roe v. Wade.
Collectively, almost every political actor of consequence refused to accept that once Trump had secured the Republican nomination, he had a solid chance of becoming president. Why? His opponent was flagrantly unpopular, and he was almost running two candidacies in one. He was both a Republican candidate promising the moon to traditional Republican voters and a compelling anti-Republican candidate who joyfully broke with recent party orthodoxies. The electorate is tightly divided. Polls are sometimes wrong. Even someone consistently polling behind his opponent might benefit from a late-breaking development.
Liberals helped the rise of Donald Trump where they could because it gave many of their traditional conservative foes fits, and because they believed he was a sure loser. Conservative players in the great game helped the rise of Donald Trump because they thought they could benefit from it at some point. “The Establishment’s only hope: Trump & me in a cage match. Sorry to disappoint — @realDonaldTrump is terrific. #DealWithIt,” Ted Cruz tweeted, a few months before he told us what he really thought.
Trump’s 2020 reelection bid was entirely upended by Covid-19, which threw the economy and the social contract to the winds. Hardly any leaders could have survived that political stress test in a democracy like ours. And in 2024, events could similarly undo Joe Biden. The Ukraine War could come to a humiliating conclusion for the Western alliance. The markets could tumble again as more banks reveal their weaknesses. Biden could simply fall ill or become incapacitated during the campaign, leaving Trump to fight the highly uncharismatic Vice President Harris.
Republican candidates cannot content themselves with consolidating the non-Trump vote, because Trump proved that he could consolidate the party sufficiently to win in 2016. Instead, they must actively parry his attacks, counterattack, and make credible appeals to his most devoted constituents as well.
Anyone — liberal or anti-Trump media outlets, conservative politicians, district attorneys, anyone — who works to advance Donald Trump’s primary candidacy because they think he’s a general-election sure loser is playing a very dangerous game. He is still the strongest candidate among Republican voters, he’s built a strong campaign operation, and if he can win the nomination, anything is possible.