The Future or the Past?

There are a lot of conversations happening right now about the path forward to 2024. Charles Cooke suggests that many who want to run need to stay on the sidelines. Nate Hochman points out that the elite trying to block Trump do nothing but help Trump. Ultimately, some massive egos will have to do serious self-reflection and self-assessment headed into 2024. If the GOP field consists of a crowd like in 2016, we get a candidate who will not unite the party.

People forget that Donald Trump won the GOP nomination with the smallest percentage of the vote any Republican nominee got through his party’s primaries. Trump got 44.95%. For reference, Romney got 52.1% of the GOP primary vote in 2012, and McCain got 46.7% in 2008. McCain was the second most divisive GOP nominee in the history of Republican primaries. Trump was the most divisive.

The only party nominee who got a lower share of the primary vote than Trump was Michael Dukakis in the 1988 Democratic primary. Dukakis got just under 43% of the vote.

Republican primaries only go back to 1976. Every nominee from Ford forward got over 50% of the primary vote except McCain and Trump. Among incumbent Republicans, Trump also got the second worse primary vote percentage of an incumbent. George H. W. Bush got 72.8% of the vote for his second term primary. Trump got 93.9%, despite no serious opposition. Both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush got over 98% for their second-term primary fights.

To go forward, I don’t know that we need to go backward. The Democrats have made that mistake with Joe Biden. He was the only man who could hold the fractious Democrats together. Given the number of Republicans who voted Democrat in this 2022 midterm (13% nationally and in Arizona up to 11%), it seems Trump is one of the few who could further fracture the GOP.

While I have many friends who are thinking of running for President in 2024, I would advise them that if they have been in or around Trump’s orbit, they need to have a serious assessment of themselves — why them instead of their boss? Can they credibly say they’d be better than the man they served?

And if they say yes because we need a change in the future, why not a change from the Trump Administration altogether instead of anchoring the future in the past?

Those are tough questions each person is going to have to answer. And undoubtedly, in the egos of politicians, each will default to themselves being the best path forward.

Once they’ve done that, they should assess again to be sure.

What will not work moving forward is the elite, the party leaders, and the billionaires coronating someone. Those people, even the ones not running, also need to have some level of self-awareness. The party's base does not like to be told what to do from a top-down approach. Working quietly behind the scenes is more prudent than screaming loudly up front. Influencing the base behind the scenes will have better outcomes than insisting on their own candidate. Also, I would suggest the Super PAC running ads in Iowa right now for DeSantis is both a waste of money and doing more to hurt DeSantis than help him, taking “peaking too soon” to new levels.

Frankly, much of what the GOP is dealing with right now goes back to McCain and Romney. McCain got second place to Bush in 2000, and Republicans usually give it to the next guy in line. In 2008, Romney was second place, which gave him 2012.

In 2012, so many of the base were tired of the second round getting the nomination the next time. If you go back to 2012, you’ll recall that virtually every Republican got ahead of Romney in the polls before crashing. First, Rick Perry surged. Then Herman Cain surged. Then Newt Gingrich surged. Then Rick Santorum surged. Romney had the financial backing and establishment machine to outlast them.

Then he lost to Obama in a race the GOP insisted had to be won to save the country. The psychological damage festered along with a lot of resentment towards the GOP establishment. It spilled over in 2016. The base was not going to be pushed by the establishment into more of the same. And, truth be told, when it was just Cruz v. Trump, the establishment threw its weight behind Trump because they figured he’d lose or they could control him. We should not memory hole the massive establishment rally to Trump when Cruz was the last man standing against him.

If the establishment wants to shape the field, they can do so by placing some of the would-be contenders into well-paid positions they would not want to give up, by building up storehouses of money for a compelling nominee in harder-to-trace super PACs, and letting the base resolve itself into a future view that is not anchored to the past.

That last bit is already happening. The base wants a winner, and Trump has had three consecutive disappointing elections. 2018 was explained as just a midterm against the incumbent. 2022, however, forces a second look at that. 2020 was explained as a stolen election. In 2022, everyone who doubled down on the stolen election claims lost.

The base is ready to go forward. They want a winner, and Trump is now a three-time loser.¹ Screaming at the base, lecturing the base, and rallying to an alternative who is clearly designated as the establishment's favorite will only cause the base to dig in their heels and raise their middle fingers.

1. It remains stunning to me that the media has largely failed, because of the Russia mythology, to fully report and record just how terrible a candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton actually was.