The 2024 Republican primary isn’t over yet, but it’s clear Trump was never going to be derailed by an obscure figure.
Charlie, one thing we can say for certain about this ongoing GOP presidential primary is that any candidate who began his campaign as a relatively obscure political figure in Republican circles . . . hasn’t gotten very far in building support in the polls. If you started as a longshot candidate, several months of campaigning in all the early primary states and two debates have left you . . . still a longshot candidate.
Maybe, if you squint, you can argue Vivek Ramaswamy has grown from a complete unknown to a guy in the mid single digits nationally. Nikki Haley is polling a bit better than a few months ago. Ron DeSantis remains a distant second, but still ahead of everyone else, at least nationally and in Iowa and South Carolina.
At this point, it’s not clear that anyone can overtake Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. But Trump was never going to be derailed by lesser-known figures like North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, little-known former governor of Arkansas Asa Hutchinson, the amiable South Carolina senator Tim Scott, or the out-of-the-game-for-a-while Chris Christie. This isn’t saying that these aren’t good men, or that they haven’t given good speeches or had good debate moments, or that they wouldn’t have made good presidents. But for their campaigns to succeed, they needed to be much better known before the race began, and to have a plausible plan for overtaking Trump.
Heck, Mike Pence started this race with high name recognition and plenty of donors, and he just dropped out of the race, rarely exceeding more than 5 percent in national polls. As discussed in today’s Morning Jolt, Pence just seemed to think that both the pro-Trump and anti-Trump voters in the GOP primary would eventually come around to him because of Pence’s principled stands, long record, and, er, lively personality. They never did.
This isn’t me or anyone else being a “nattering nabob of negativity,” it is just an acknowledgment that running for president is hard and a lot of mediocre but ambitious political figures drastically underestimate how difficult it is. They announce their bids, start holding events in Iowa and New Hampshire, start doing media interviews, run some ads, and just wait for the primary electorate to fall in love with them.
This applies to Dean Phillips’s longshot bid on the Democratic side as well. If you really want to be president, you should do some things that get Americans to know who you are before you throw your hat in the ring. Whether or not it is fair, the major parties do not just hand their nomination to any old schmo who shows up and gives a speech.
This morning, our old friend Moe Lane observed, “There is nothing more futile than trying to convince politicians that they need to drop out of an unwinnable primary. You’re fighting against their instincts and personal history. Usually they’ve heard that they can’t win before, just before they did.” Indeed, most presidential campaigns operate in a stupefying denial of basic political reality, and then, when they suspend their operations, lament that things just didn’t work out.