Trump wants his foes to stay weak. By not showing up, he reduces them to squabbling bit players trying to bring each other down while the major contenders offer pale imitations of his own message and values.
Republican voters once open to someone other than the former president are concluding that if they’re going to get Trumpism, they might as well go with the guy who invented it. And they’re getting little useful advice from party leaders who — as Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) told his biographer McKay Coppins — see Trump as a disaster but are too timid to say so publicly.
It didn’t have to be like this, because the strength of Trump’s lock on the party is vastly exaggerated.
Sure, Trump has an unshakable base, those who would stick with him if he were indicted a dozen more times. But that hard core accounts for no more than about 35 percent of the Republican primary electorate. There really is (or was) room for someone else to break through.
But not one of them has inspired real excitement, and the politician who once seemed best placed to take Trump on, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has had a miserable year.
As a result, Trump has been able to combine his base with a fair share of the largest group of Republicans: those with a more or less positive view of the former president but willing to support someone else.
Not so long ago, such Republicans were flocking to others, particularly DeSantis. Trump seemed anything but inevitable at the beginning of 2023. Many in the party blamed him (and the candidates he backed) for its disappointing showing in the 2022 midterms.
A mid-January poll for the Bulwark by North Star Opinion Research and GOP pollster Whit Ayres found that when Republicans were offered a choice among DeSantis, Trump and “another candidate,” 44 percent picked DeSantis to 28 percent for Trump and 10 percent for the unnamed alternative. When the other potential GOP candidates were listed by name, DeSantis led Trump by 39 percent to 28 percent.
Other polling early in the year generally showed Trump ahead, but mostly not by his currently prohibitive margin. On Sunday, the RealClearPolitics polling average put Trump at 57.5 percent, DeSantis at 13.3 percent, Vivek Ramaswamy at 7 percent, Nikki Haley at 5.2 percent and everyone else below 5 percent.
The sad news for the country is that Republicans let a real chance to end Trump’s career slip away. The opportunity may not come around again. Critics of the GOP enjoy observing that the more Trump is indicted, the more Republican voters flock to him. The timelines of his growing lead and his expanding list of felony counts do overlap, but there are better explanations for his comeback.
The most obvious is that his primary foes have plainly failed to impress voters. At least as important, they and Trump’s (often secret) party critics were unwilling to risk enraging him and his supporters. So they held back from throwing knockout punches when Trump was on the ropes. That’s no way to beat a brawler who’ll do anything to win.
Congressional leaders also seem to have calculated that their hopes of keeping their narrow House majority and winning back the Senate depend on voters whom Trump can draw to the polls — and traditional conservatives cannot. Trump is rubbing that in by forgoing the Wednesday debate in favor of a trip to Michigan, where he’ll pretend to be a friend of the state’s autoworkers. He was, in fact, a very antilabor president, but he sure knows how to play roles on TV.
The party’s paralyzing Trump dependency has only grown with its ongoing loss of middle-of-the-road suburban voters, small-c conservatives temperamentally who are skeptical of a contemporary Big-C Conservatism increasingly shaped by the Far Right.
The journey of suburban Montgomery County outside of Philadelphia is a microcosm of the GOP’s troubles. In 1988, George H.W. Bush, the paragon of old-style moderate conservatism, won 60 percent of the county’s vote, carrying Pennsylvania and the presidential election. In 2020, Trump got just over 36 percent, losing the state and the presidency.
In the short term, Republican strategists see no path to rebuilding a more moderate coalition. The party’s primary electorate is concluding that in a closely divided country, Trump is about as electable as any of his less-than-stellar rivals. The candidates who gather on Wednesday at the Reagan Library need to grasp that they’re on the verge of allowing the most dangerous man in American politics one more shot at power.
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