Republican Primary Is Pretty Ugly Already-- And It Hasn't Even Started Yet

The Party Establishment Has One Goal-- Defenestrating Trump

More than a few Republican establishment folks are praying Trump dies soon. They believe that would make their lives so much easier. Yesterday David Freelander reported that the Republican establishment is now actively plotting against Trump, not to murder him, just to get him out of the way. He wrote that “donors, strategists and grassroots leaders, many of whom say it is the conversation they are all having privately among themselves too— how to make sure that Trump doesn’t once again take advantage of a split field and walk away with the Republican nomination, costing the party not just the presidency but a chance to retake the Senate and hold on to the House. Just this week, both the Koch Brothers-affiliated Americans For Prosperity and the anti-tax behemoth Club for Growth signaled that they were looking to rally around a Trump-alternative. And with the Iowa Caucus now just 11 months away, party insiders say that this question— how to stop Trump— is the one they need to find an answer to before too many contenders start piling into the race.”

“I don’t think it is fair to call Donald Trump a damaged candidate,” said Eric Levine, a top GOP fundraiser who has been calling on the party to move on from Trump since the 2020 election and the uprising at the Capitol. “He is a metastasizing cancer who if he is not stopped is going to destroy the party. Donald Trump is a loser. He is the first president since Hoover to lose the House, the Senate and the presidency in a single term. Because of him Chuck Schumer is the Leader Schumer, and the progressive agenda is threatening to take over the country. And he is probably the only Republican in the country, if not the only person in the country, who can’t beat Joe Biden.”

The big fear among donors like Levine and other party players is that, like in 2016, a number of challengers to Trump will jump into the primary and linger too long, splitting the field and allowing Trump to win. And some of these top Republicans are meeting with potential candidates and telling them that if they want to run, they should by all means do so— but that they should also be prepared to drop out well before voting begins in order to make sure that the GOP puts their best candidate forward against Biden.

…Leading donors who have spoken with the top-non-Trump contenders like Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence say that all get it, that none of them are looking to play the spoiler and are aware of the dangers to the party, if not the country, of a Trump Redux. For evidence, these donors point to the potential candidate’s public statements and recent memoirs, in which all are critical of Trump in one way or another.

…Trump seems to recognize how the prospect of a crowded field would help him, keeping quiet even as some of his former closest aides consider their own campaigns, and training his fire instead on Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is leading him in some polls. Trump has been reluctant to take the bait as his former ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, taunts her former boss by calling for a “new generation” of leadership. Trump is Trump, so he has hit back occasionally, but has also said publicly that Haley “should do it,” a sign that, as former chair of the South Carolina Republican Party Katon Dawson put it, “Trump has a solid 31 [percent]. And if it’s a big field a solid 31 can carry you to the nomination. The only way to defeat him is if some of these folks team up.”

…One oddity of the current moment is that the weaker Trump seems, with federal and local investigations piling up and his campaign launch landing with a thud, the higher the chances that more possible candidates will launch their own bids, seeing a path to victory more likely. And the more candidates enter, the easier it becomes for Trump to win with an increasingly smaller share of the vote.

…These public clarion calls, donors and party leaders say, are all part of a larger strategy to raise an alarm on Trump’s weaknesses; they hope that GOP primary voters start prioritizing electability like their Democratic counterparts did four years ago. Republicans tend to get enthralled with several candidates throughout the course of a presidential primary. The hope this year, senior strategists said, is that voters’ minds stay focused on who can best beat Biden, so that even if DeSantis — or whomever the frontrunner of the moment is — stumbles, attention and affection coalesces around the next Non-Trump in the field.

There is a concerted effort afoot to reach out even to some of Trump’s most loyal voters. Evangelical leaders have said they are reminding their voters about comments Trump made after the midterms in which he seemed to blame evangelicals for the disappointing results and accused them of “disloyalty” for not already lining up behind his ’24 effort. Plus, they say, even the evangelical movement needs to start thinking long term, and Trump would come into office an immediate lame duck.

“Trump can only offer four more years,” said Dave Wilson, the president of the Palmetto Family Council, an influential evangelical group in South Carolina. “How are we going to build a movement that goes beyond the next four years to the next eight years to the next twenty years, that parallels what we have seen over on the progressive side?”

For many party leaders however, such sentiments are just a hope. There is as of now no real effort to consolidate the field, no real plan among the donor class to pull their billions behind a single non-Trump candidate. There is a belief that somehow the Republican collective consciousness has learned from 2016 and that candidates, donors and party leaders will move in concert behind the right person once the process starts to play out.

“Republicans are very motivated to defeat Joe Biden,” said Tom Rath, a longtime Republican hand in New Hampshire. “The Trump people aren’t at the table for them, but there are already discussions happening about what we do. If we get in a situation where Trump is winning primaries with 40 percent of the vote and losing badly to Biden, I think you are going to see those discussion begin to accelerate, to say the least. We just hope it’s not too late by then.”

According to a new poll by YouGov for The Economist, all the potential GOP presidential candidates have decent favorability ratings among registered voters:

• Ron DeSantis- 49% to 38% (11% don’t have an opinion)

• Ted Cruz- 47% to 44% (10% have no opinion)

• Señor Trumpanzee- 46% to 51% (3% have no opinion)

• Mike Pence- 44% to 49% (7% have no opinion)

• Marco Rubio- 44% to 41% (16% have no opinion)

• Nikki Haley- 40% to 33% (27% have no opinion)

Another YouGov poll, this one for Yahoo shows that in a head-to-head matchup, more Republican voters would cast their ballots for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (45%) than for former President Donald Trump (41%) if the party’s 2024 presidential primary were held today. Yet if even one additional Republican candidate challenges Trump and DeSantis for the nomination, splitting the party’s “anti-Trump” vote, the former president would take the lead… [That] vividly illustrates the dilemma facing GOP officials who believe that renominating Trump could doom the party’s chances in 2016: How do you narrow the field enough to prevent the former president from skirting past a divided opposition with less than 50% of the vote (just A he did in 2016)?”

But it will be much worse than a 3-way race. Vanity candidates with no real chance of winning— Mike Pompeo, Glenn Youngkin, Larry Hogan, Chris Sununu, Tim Scott, John Bolton, Asa Hutchinson, Chris Christie, Kristi Noem, Liz Cheney, Francis X. Suarez— are seriously toying with a run. That would ensure a Trump primary victory and, probably, a Biden general election win.

A Monmouth poll released yesterday shows that none of the other candidates aside from Trump and DeSantis are being taken seriously be most GOP voters. The only demographic where Trump leads DeSantis is among working class Republicans.

Meanwhile Pence will be campaigning in Iowa just as Nikki Haley is declaring her candidacy next week, trying to steal some of her limelight. Remember, regardless of the current polling, all the minor candidates think they can overcome that and eventually Trump and DeSantis will destroy each other and that Republican voters will call on them to take the battle to Biden.