What would possess an American political party to keep nominating for the presidency the same candidate while reaping diminishing returns? Donald Trump is now seeking his third consecutive Republican presidential nomination. He lost the last election and, twice, the national popular vote, presided over his party’s loss of both chambers of Congress, and saw the voters reject his preferred candidates in 2022. He is widely and deeply mistrusted, according to nationwide surveys. Yet his supporters have not abandoned him, and he remains at this writing the leader in Republican primary polls.
Since the formation of the current two-party system in 1854, only four candidates have been nominated more than twice. Three of them were Democrats: Grover Cleveland, William Jennings Bryan, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt won not three but four sweeping national majorities; Cleveland won the popular vote in all three of his campaigns and the White House twice. The only Republican to pull off the trick, Richard Nixon, took eight years to return from a narrow defeat to score a victory and then a landslide.
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