Is Trump's Support Really Leaky-- And Does His Team Know How To Plug The Leaks?

Yesterday, in his New York Magazine column, Ed Kilgore wondered aloud if Trump could run to DeSantis’ left in 2024. Trump will never have a coherent platform— recall he didn’t even let the Republican Party have one at all when he was in charge— so in a sense, it’s a silly question. The only thing that’s important to Trump is winning for the sake of winning. He isn’t motivated by any issues or ideology. He could run to DeSantis’ left or to DeSantis’ right or one way one day and another day the the next day. All that’s important to him is that he run DeSantis over and then back up onto his lifeless body.

Kilgore suggests that Trump may go after “DeSantis’ pre-MAGA existence: going after the political stances he took before Trump allegedly saved his career from mediocrity and defeat.” In Congress, DeSantis was an extremist ideologue and a Freedom Caucus clown. “[I]nstead of maligning his governor as a RINO squish the way he has described most Republican rivals, Trump will go after DeSantis for supporting budget austerity, ‘entitlement reform,’ and free trade (all positions common among hard-core pre-MAGA conservatives):

In 2013, during DeSantis’ first year in office, he voted for a far-right budget resolution that sought to balance the federal budget in just four years — twice as fast as a competing measure by [Paul] Ryan that got the Republican budget wonk lampooned as a “zombie-eyed granny starver.”

The draconian cuts DeSantis voted for would have raised the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare to 70. It would have weakened Medicare by offering seniors “premium support” instead of comprehensive health coverage. And it would have eroded Social Security by giving recipients miserly annual adjustments for inflation. Taken together, the two measures would have cut these bedrock safety-net programs for seniors by more than $250 billion over a decade.

“Trump famously abandoned austerity politics upon taking office in 2017,” Kilgore reminded his readers, “presiding over an orgy of tax-cutting and uninhibited spending. And while his failed assault on Obamacare included serial efforts to gut the Medicaid program that provides health care for low-income Americans, he distanced himself from the traditional GOP hunger to mess with Social Security and Medicare, safety-net programs that middle-class voters— and perhaps especially Republican retirees and near retirees— regarded as benefits they had earned. Discarding the green eyeshade of austerity was one of several voter-pleasing steps Trump took to detoxify conservative politics. Others were abandoning free-trade shibboleths that the GOP’s white working-class base intensely disliked and downplaying a reflexive defense-hawk tendency that predictably led to unpopular ‘forever wars.’ On all these issues… Trump will try to depict DeSantis as an Establishment figure who would bring back the bad old days.”

One of the ironies of the proposed Trump attack on DeSantis’s pre-MAGA posture is that in every significant respect he was in those days entirely in lockstep with his comrades of the House Freedom Caucus, later regarded as Trump’s ultra-MAGA shock troops in Congress. Back then, the HFC was more of a vanguard for the tea-party movement with its fierce advocacy of tight-fisted assaults on the New Deal–Great Society legacy. Perhaps more to the point, as the fight over Kevin McCarthy’s Speakership bid showed, HFC members are again urging budget austerity— now that it’s a Democratic administration that they allege is spending America into insolvency. Indeed, most are flirting with making entitlement reform a condition for accepting debt-limit measures necessary to head off economic calamity. Trump can’t go after DeSantis’s like-minded 2013 thinking without fragging some of his most devoted followers today.

But risks aside, the question remains whether GOP primary voters can be convinced to consider the Ron DeSantis of a bygone (if not really that bygone) era as the essential Ron DeSantis, as opposed to the savage crusader against “wokeness” he appears to be today, whose appeal to Trump’s conservative Evangelical fans is becoming an existential threat to the 45th president’s comeback. Could the governor who is battling to turn a progressive state college into a “Hillsdale of the South” really be a tedious Establishment Republican who wants to cut the Social Security checks of righteous churchgoing Republican retirees? It won’t be an easy sell. But one thing we know for sure: If Trump decides on this as his strategy, he won’t pull any punches in pursuing it. The man who in 2016 dared to insinuate that John McCain was a loser for enduring years of torture as a POW isn’t going to show any grudging respect for Ron DeSantis once he begins smiting him hip and thigh.

Even more than from the Freedom Caucus and their devotees, Trump’s biggest support has been from the evangelical universe. These people are imbeciles, but they vote— and many may not vote for Trump again. Or at least their leaders may not tell them to or may even tell them to vote for someone else. As we noted a few days ago, Trump is furious at the lack of support from the evangelical leaders assumed were in his pocket. Yesterday, Julia Manchester reported that Trump’s public anger about their disloyalty “highlighted the changing dynamic in GOP politics as the leaders of one of Trump’s most supportive demographics appear to distance themselves from the former president.”

David Brody, the chief political analyst at the Christian Broadcasting Network, with whom Trump appeared last week, told Manchester that “It’s going to make these next few months uncomfortable for evangelical leaders because they’re going to have to, in essence, answer that question: Are you for Trump or are you not?”

Trump’s comments come after influential evangelical pastor Robert Jeffress interviewed former Vice President Mike Pence, who is also evangelical, on stage at First Baptist Church in Dallas last week.

Pence is a potential 2024 Trump rival and Jeffress is a longtime supporter of Trump but has notably held off on endorsing him ahead of next year’s presidential election.

But in an interview with The Hill on Friday, Jeffress said he believes the former president will be the GOP presidential nominee in 2024 and that his decision to hold off on endorsing the president is “just a matter of timing.”

“I just don’t see a need to make an official endorsement two years out,” Jeffress said.

“Just let me cut to the chase,” he said. “I think President Trump is the presumptive nominee for 2024. I expect he will be the nominee in 2024 and I believe he’ll be the next president of the United States.”

However, Jeffress said that if Pence decides to run in 2024 he will be “a strong contender.”

White, evangelical Protestants played a key role in Trump’s coalition in 2016 and 2020 and have historically been a loyal Republican voting bloc. According to Pew Research, 84 percent of white, evangelical Protestants voted for Trump in 2020, while 77 percent voted for him in 2016.

The conservative voting bloc was drawn to Trump for his stances on issues like abortion and immigration. Trump, who appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices, has largely been credited for setting in motion the overturning of Roe v. Wade— one of his key campaign promises.

“He’s very much action-oriented and so therefore if he made promises and he delivered on those promises, which he did for four years, he’s going to say ‘well, what’s the problem here?’” Brody said.

While notable group leaders are choosing to wait to endorse the former president— despite him delivering on those promises— many are now wondering if it’s a signal that Trump’s support is softening among evangelicals ahead of the 2024 Republican primary.

“I think Trump is not helping himself here,” said Robert Jones, founder of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute. “Trump did not really gain the votes of white evangelicals through white evangelical leaders in 2016.”

Jeffress publicly broke with Russell Moore, the-then president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, over Trump in 2016. Moore has been a vocal critic of the then-GOP candidate, while Jeffress embraced him.

“If you had just listened to evangelical leaders, you would have thought there was a great divide in the evangelical community on this,” Jones continued. “Of course when it came time to vote in primaries, the rank and file of white evangelicals lined up quite handily behind Trump.”

“There was never a divide on the ground in the way there was among evangelical leaders,” he said. “I think Trump himself may misunderstand the dynamics that evangelicals were never waiting on their leaders to tell them who to vote for.”

Brody said that broadly evangelical leaders and voters also have not been turned off by the controversies that have dogged Trump for decades, arguing that they always knew what they were signing up for.

“If chaos was there before— and it was— and chaos was here now, what has changed? Nothing has changed,” Brody said.

…[P]olling this week showed Trump running ahead of DeSantis. A new Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey released on Friday showed Trump leading DeSantis 48 percent to 28 percent. Meanwhile, a Morning Consult poll released on Wednesday showed Trump leading DeSantis 48 percent to 31 percent.

But if multiple Republican contenders jump into the primary, which is likely to happen, evangelical support could be divvied up.

“Evangelicals are going to have a decision to make and Trump will probably end up losing some of that support,” Brody said.

And experts say they doubt that Trump’s support among evangelical voters themselves will suffer drastically anytime soon.

“When you look at Trump’s favorability numbers, they have moved down a bit since he was in office among white evangelicals but not very much,” Jones said. “To me, unless the numbers look significantly worse than they did in 2016 for him, I would not count him out, and they do not.”