Matt Continetti’s incisive column yesterday laid out the case for why the reports of Trump’s political demise were greatly exaggerated:
Recently, a few high-profile Republicans have predicted that Trump won’t be the GOP nominee. These prognosticators share certain traits: None of them thought Trump would win in 2016, they said Republicans would win big in 2022 (yes, I did too), and they no longer hold elected office precisely because of the changes Trump made to their party. Trump inspires a form of wishful thinking among certain groups of people, a collective illusion that, despite all evidence to the contrary, someday his behavior will change, and he will be content playing golf. Well, it won’t, and he’s not. The way to thwart Trump is for voters to choose someone else.
That outcome is less likely in a multi-candidate race. In 2016, the non-Trump vote divided three ways among Senators Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and then-governor John Kasich (R., Ohio). The fracture allowed Trump to capitalize on the winner-take-all structure of GOP primaries and win significant contests, and eventually the nomination, with a plurality of votes. The same thing is happening in polls today. As Nathaniel Rakich observes at FiveThirtyEight, when pollsters offer Republicans several choices, Trump wins by a huge margin. But, in head-to-head matchups with Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Trump tends to lose.
Continetti later adds that “there’s a sleeper candidate or two out there who will make this race interesting.” I’m instinctively skeptical. DeSantis has the best claim to being the inheritor of Trump’s legacy — to make his pitch to voters on the grounds that he’s better positioned to carry out the America First agenda than Trump is at this point. To me, that seems like the most viable (and perhaps the only) way for a non-Trump Republican primary contender to peel off voters in an electorate that still views the former president in a highly positive light, even in polls where DeSantis is leading. Any GOP presidential hopeful running against Trump in 2024 will face the structural challenge that this residual loyalty presents; how do you attack the reigning heavyweight champion without provoking indignation from the base? Arguing that you’re the man to implement the priorities he ran on in 2016 seems like the best option, and DeSantis seems like the best candidate to make that argument.
With that being said, the 2016 upset — which defied not only conventional wisdom, but the expectations of many otherwise intelligent political commentators — should invite instinctive skepticism of my instinctive skepticism. If Trump’s ascendance from the butt of late-night jokes to the Republican nominee to the White House taught us anything, it’s that expecting the unexpected is a wise posture in these matters.
In any event, we can probably expect at least a handful of other would-be Republican nominees whose names are not Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump to throw their hat in the ring in 2024. A few, to Continetti’s point, might even make the race more interesting. But the sheer number of candidates who have publicly speculated about jumping into the primary — Larry Hogan, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, Liz Cheney, John Bolton, Asa Hutchinson, and Chris Christie, among others — evokes memories of 2016, for the reasons Continetti cites. For any Republican who would like to see the GOP move on from Trump, the prospect of a 2016-scale stage of candidates should be worrying. As I argued back in November, “if long-shot Republican primary contenders view another Trump nomination as an undesirable scenario — and indeed, many of the would-be candidates in that category have already suggested as much — they should sit this one out.” Trump’s resurgent political fortunes only serve to reinforce that point.