There are three glaringly obvious reasons why we should not default to expecting an exact replay of 2016.
Donald Trump might win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. He might, in fact, win due to some combination of dynamics similar to those that propelled him eight years ago: Republican voter mistrust of the party’s other leadership, Trump’s celebrity and facility for attracting free media coverage, a divided field that suffers from collective-action problems and includes some people acting effectively as Trump allies, opponents fearful of confronting him directly, and underperformance and in some cases outright self-destruction from promising alternative candidates.
The key word here, however, is “might.”
There remains a lot of presidential punditry that takes as its starting point the assumption that this is 2016 all over again, or at least that this is the default state, which will require a Herculean effort to overcome. In December, I took issue with Christian Schneider over this. Now, we have Matt Continetti arguing that Trump has “bounced back,” McKay Coppins in the Atlantic contending that Republicans are falling into the same trap of passively hoping Trump will die or go away, and Sarah Longwell of the Bulwark spinning as bad news a Bulwark–commissioned national poll showing that Trump would trail Ron DeSantis by 22 points in a head-to-head race, 16 points in a three-way race with an unnamed placeholder, and eleven points in a ten-candidate field.
Well, maybe. Maybe Trump is going to come back, but Continetti doesn’t really present evidence that supports the thesis that he already has, other than noting that the Biden-classified-documents story has greatly lessened the odds that Trump will be successfully criminally prosecuted for documents at Mar-a-Lago. Maybe too many Republican donors and elected officials are just hoping somebody else will stop Trump, but all Coppins can manage in assessing potential opponents is to say that “few of the other top figures in the party—Ron DeSantis, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley—have demonstrated an ability to take on Trump directly and look stronger for it.”
One of the chronic problems that has bedeviled both electoral punditry and Republican campaign strategy in one presidential race after another is the habit of continually fighting the last war, failing to observe changes in the public mood, and falling back on the implicit guidance of past patterns. One textbook example of this in 2016 itself was the Republican bigwigs further front-loading the primaries to help the establishment front-runner avoid a protracted primary challenge (as Mitt Romney and John McCain faced), not anticipating a front-runner such as Trump. Another was Jeb Bush hesitating to unload on Trump because his deepest fear was Trump doing a replay of the 1992 Ross Perot third-party campaign that damaged Jeb’s dad. We should resist hunkering down in our mental Maginot Lines and assuming that it’s 2015-16 forever.
There are three glaringly obvious reasons why we should not default to expecting an exact replay of 2016.
First, Trump’s opponents aren’t the same. At no time did a single Trump opponent dwarf all the others in public polling, fundraising, name recognition, popularity with conservative activists and media, and capacity for driving the news cycle in the way that Ron DeSantis does right now. Nobody else is in his league, not even Mike Pence. DeSantis’s status as the big 2022 winner in a year of Republican losers helps him stand out; his perch as governor of the nation’s third-largest state gives him the ability to create news; and he is a favorite of big-megaphone conservative media outlets such as Fox News. None of the four sitting governors in the 2016 field (Chris Christie, John Kasich, Scott Walker, and Bobby Jindal) combined DeSantis’s combative conservatism with a large-state platform and a state legislature willing to follow his lead in laying out an agenda. Even if some GOP donors are timid, the $200 million reelection campaign run by DeSantis in 2022 leaves him with a massive war chest and the likelihood that he will outraise Trump, who started 2023 with $25 million in the bank after transferring $60 million to a pro-Trump SuperPAC.
Sure, DeSantis may yet fail, and that is a reason why it may be prudent for other Republicans to enter the race, so long as they don’t overstay their welcome if it becomes apparent that they cannot win. We don’t know yet how DeSantis will respond to Trump attacks once they are both announced candidates, and we don’t know yet how DeSantis will handle the inevitable need to punch back. But the strength of DeSantis in polling such as the recent University of New Hampshire poll of the Granite State suggests that, assuming DeSantis runs, he will enter the race from Day One as a peer or leading Trump. While the polling we have thus far is spotty (don’t hold your breath while looking for a good early poll of Iowa) and in any event premature, it requires a real effort to avoid the glaring signs of DeSantis’s powerful position with the Republican electorate. Thus far, Trump and his surrogates have rolled out a conspicuously pathetic series of critiques of DeSantis: that it’s disloyal for him to run against a man who helped make his career (recall how well this royalist theme worked for Jeb against Marco Rubio), that DeSantis locked down Florida too much or was too pro-vaccine, that DeSantis is “the establishment candidate” while Trump is touting his own ties to Kevin McCarthy, etc. None of this sticks or suggests confidence in how easily “Ron DeSanctimonious” can be dispatched.
Second, the popular mood and issue environment aren’t the same. Many of the things Trump did to distinguish himself in 2016 are either now party orthodoxy (such as his combative approach to the media or his hard line on immigration and trade with China) or faded in relevance (such as running against the Bush family and the Iraq war). Other issues have risen in importance, such as ideological education, the pandemic, and inflation. Trump is no longer selling something novel to voters who feel nobody is listening. At the same time, the 2022 election has delivered some fresh lessons in how Republicans can lose precisely by following Trump’s leadership.
Third, Trump isn’t the same. There’s a big age difference between 70 and 78. He’s increasingly stale and predictable, ill-equipped to keeping his options open and his opponents off-balance, and too obsessed with his own record and his ever-increasing list of old grievances to keep his finger on the pulse of where voters are headed. He practically speaks his own too-online language of signals to his longtime diehards, rather than talking like a regular guy who just walked in the door and is unencumbered by the past. He is also burning millions in legal fees and distracted by the many investigations surrounding him, which was not the case in 2016. He has yet to demonstrate that he still has the energy and enthusiasm for a vigorous national campaign schedule. What Trump is now trying to do, coming back at the age of 78 after losing a national campaign, is entirely unprecedented in American history. Grover Cleveland remains the only president to return after being voted out of office, but Cleveland was 55 years old in 1892, had won the national popular vote in his defeat, and led a party that had lost six consecutive national elections before his 1884 victory but had gained 86 seats in the House in the 1890 midterms.
As George Orwell once observed, “Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.” The habit of thinking that Trump will always win because he has not been defeated in a primary before is a species of this kind of thinking. If he’s going to win in 2024, it will require more than just running the 2016 playbook on autopilot and expecting that the world hasn’t changed, and neither have the players.