On the menu today: Dissecting the latest report that wealthy GOP donors still really, really, really want Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin to run for president. I’m skeptical that this will ever turn into a real campaign for a whole bunch of reasons — logistical and scheduling, for starters, but also because I don’t think a Youngkin bid would get these donors where they want to go, which is a 2024 general election with a non-Donald Trump nominee. Meanwhile, Trump pledges to unions that he’ll fight a war on American automakers and, “We’re going to take their money. We’re going to take their factories.” Also, there’s late-breaking news that California senator Dianne Feinstein has passed away at the age of 90.
A Youngkin Run Won’t Work
Robert Costa — the chief election and campaign correspondent for CBS News and part of the team at National Review a long, long time ago — writes over on the Washington Post op-ed page:
Some of the biggest Republican donors in the country will converge next month at the historic Cavalier Hotel in Virginia Beach for a two-day meeting to rally behind Gov. Glenn Youngkin. The closed gathering, named the “Red Vest Retreat” after the fleece Youngkin wore during his 2021 campaign, will begin Oct. 17 and be focused, officially, on the Republican effort to win full control of the General Assembly in Virginia’s upcoming elections. But unofficially, several donors tell me, it will be an opportunity for them to try to push, if not shove, Youngkin into the Republican presidential race. . . .
The thirsting for Youngkin is not a well-orchestrated power play. It is the latest slapdash scheme in a long search for a standard-bearer and a portrait of the powerlessness so many Republicans feel as Trump plows ahead, shrugging off criminal indictments and outrage over rhetoric they fear is growing dark and dangerous.
Color me extremely skeptical that this will happen. I’m a fan of Youngkin and voted for him, and I think he’s doing a good job as governor. He’ll be able to do even more if Virginia Republicans can win full control of the state legislature; right now, Republicans have 18 seats in the 40-seat state senate and 51 seats in the state assembly. This November’s elections will have a lot to say about what Youngkin can do in his last two years.* I’m sure the Virginia state GOP would appreciate all the help it can get.
Even if Youngkin wanted to announce a run for president, he wouldn’t do it until after those state legislative elections. The candidate filing deadline for the Nevada Republican caucus is October 15. The candidate filing deadline for the South Carolina Republican presidential primary is Halloween. So, right out of the gate, Youngkin 2024 would face the problem of not even being listed as a candidate in two of the first four contests.
Unless Youngkin and his team collected signatures exceptionally fast, they would likely miss a few other deadlines. The candidate filing deadline for Alabama is November 10, three days after the Virginia state legislative elections, and the one in Arkansas is four days later. The filing deadline in Texas is December 11, and California’s is December 15 — and remember: Some states require a campaign to collect a particular number of signatures from each congressional district. To qualify for the California ballot, a Republican presidential campaign must collect 47,938 signatures.
For what it’s worth, Youngkin says he’s not even paying attention to the deadlines. And then remember, there’s the separate Republican National Committee deadlines and thresholds to appear on the debate stage — not just polling numbers, but the total number of donors. (If Youngkin did run, but didn’t have enough donors to qualify, I wonder if the debate’s television network would just say “to hell with it” and invite the Virginia governor anyway and dare the RNC to stop it.)
Then there’s the minor complication that Youngkin has spent the past two years insisting he wasn’t running for president, wasn’t exploring a bid, and wasn’t interested in running for president. Last December, I think he was slightly annoyed when I asked a follow-up about whether he ever thinks about being president. Then again, back in 2006, appearing on Meet the Press, Barack Obama declared, “I will serve out my full six-year term.” When Tim Russert followed up by asking, “So you will not run for president or vice president in 2008?” Obama replied, “I will not.”
But perhaps the biggest question that Youngkin and these enthusiastic big donors should ask is: If the Virginia governor jumped into the Republican presidential primary now, would he suddenly unite and galvanize the non-Trump GOP voters, or would he just divide them further?
I’m just not convinced that the reason Trump is well ahead in the primary is because the race is missing the correct traditionally conservative governor who doesn’t freak out soccer moms. Trump is well ahead in the primary because right now at least a small majority of Republicans want him to be the nominee.
Right now, in the RealClearPolitics average of national polling, Trump is at 56.6 percent. It’s conceivable that number could drop; early in the year, it was down to about 43 percent, so it’s reasonable to conclude that about 13 percent or so of the Republican electorate wasn’t sure about another term for Trump, but jumped on the bandwagon at some point during the past four indictments.
Just for perspective, Ron DeSantis is at 14.4 percent, Nikki Haley is now in third place at 5.8 percent, Vivek Ramaswamy is at 5.1 percent, Mike Pence is at 4.2 percent, Tim Scott is at 2.8 percent, Chris Christie is at 2.7 percent, and everyone else is at less than 1 percent.
Is the idea that when the Virginia governor jumps in, all the DeSantis, Haley, Pence, Scott, and Christie fans will ditch their guy and jump onto the Youngkin bandwagon? (Do you think the Ramaswamy fan base is a pro-Youngkin crowd? Nah, me neither.)
That’s not going to happen. What’s most likely to happen is that once Youngkin jumps in, he will take 1 or 2 percent from everybody, and instead of the 43 percent of the Republican primary electorate being split among six major candidates — sorry, Doug Burgum — it gets split up among seven. If your objective is to have a nominee besides Trump, that doesn’t really get you anywhere.
Perhaps about half the Republican Party primary voters went into this cycle hell-bent on making Trump their nominee again, and no one else ever had a realistic chance with those voters. (Again, having a half-dozen non-Trump options may well be ensuring that the non-Trump forces remain too divided until it is too late, a rerun of the dynamic in 2016.)
But another reason Trump is, so far, cruising to the nomination is that many of his GOP rivals have, so far, largely made only half-hearted critiques of the former president. DeSantis tried to make an argument about electability, but that reasoning is undermined when Trump’s head-to-head polling numbers against Biden look so close.
No, the rest of the field needed a variation of the Christie argument, attempting to persuade Trump voters that Trump is not good for them. At Wednesday night’s debate, Christie said:
This guy has not only divided our party. He’s divided families, all over this country. He’s divided friends, all over this country. I’ve spoken to people, and I know everyone else has, who have sat, at Thanksgiving dinner, or at a birthday party, and can’t have a conversation anymore if they disagree with Donald Trump.
One of the many reasons Trump is bad for conservatives, bad for the GOP, and bad for the county is that he will just grab onto the worst ideas of the opposition if he thinks it will help him win at that particular moment. There was a little-noticed promise in Trump’s speech in Detroit Wednesday:
“I’m here tonight to lay out a vision for a revival of economic nationalism,” Trump said. “The Wall Street predators, the Chinese cheaters and the corrupt politicians have hurt you. I will make you better. For years, foreign nations have looted and plundered your hopes, your dreams and your heritage, and now they’re going to pay for what they have stolen and what they have done to you, my friends.”
He added: “We’re going to take their money. We’re going to take their factories. We’re going to rebuild the industrial bedrock of this country.”
A campaign spokesman did not immediately clarify what Trump meant by taking “their” money and factories. [Emphasis added.]
Over in that other Washington publication I write for, I noted that apparently, “The only way Trump can really fight the threat of socialism in America is by having the federal government seize the factories of the private sector and take over the management of them. That’ll show those commies!”
In other words, Trump is the self-proclaimed anti-socialist who wants to seize the means of production.
He believes in nothing, other than winning. It’s not just that he believes he, as president, could, would, and should have the authority to “take their money” and “take their factories.” He’s convincing more and more Americans that the president should have the authority to “take their money” and “take their factories.” He does not believe in constitutional limits upon his own power. He does not believe in checks and balances. If it even crosses your mind to write, “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” you should never get anywhere near the U.S. presidency.
What is the one thing that a president does before starting the job? Declare, with a hand on the Bible and with the whole world watching, ‘I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” You cannot preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States when you’re running around saying it ought to be terminated, and that you have the authority to seize other people’s property in the name of economic nationalism.
*Hugh Hewitt wants Virginians in stage legislative districts with no Republican candidate listed to write me in. This is a terrible idea. With my luck, some Democratic state legislator with no Republican candidate will get caught in a terrible scandal next month, the write-in option will catch on, and then I’ll get stuck representing some district when I’m already stretched too thin. (I mean a really terrible scandal. Remember, this is where Governor Klan Blackface, er, I mean Ralph Northam served out his term because no one in the state Democratic Party could quite find the motivation to remove him from office. For a while, voters in one district in Richmond were just fine with Joe Morrissey, a Democrat who served six months in jail for having sex with his 17-year-old secretary when he was in his late 50s. He married her, and . . . things are not going well. Thankfully, Virginia Democrats in his state senate district wised up and he lost to a primary challenger in June. In the state’s 13th Senate district, Republican Eric Detri will take on Democrat Lashrecse Aird. Look at the bright side, Richmonders, neither one of these candidates is schtupping their underage secretary.)
ADDENDUM: Late breaking news, just as I send this off: Senator Dianne Feinstein of California has passed away at age 90.
Rest in peace, senator. There will be plenty of time to analyze and discuss her legacy, and all the parts of her record that we disagreed with and opposed. But for now, may God help her loved ones find peace at this difficult time.