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  • Commentary: Front-runner or flash in the pan? Sizing up Newsom, 2028

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    The 2028 presidential election is more than 1,000 days away, but you’d hardly know it from all the speculation and anticipation that’s swirling from Sacramento to the Washington Beltway.

    Standing at the center of attention is California Gov. Gavin Newsom, fresh off his big victory on Proposition 50, the backatcha ballot measure that gerrymandered the state’s congressional map to boost Democrats and offset a power grab by Texas Republicans.

    Newsom is bidding for the White House, and has been doing so for the better part of a year, though he won’t say so out loud. Is Newsom the Democratic front-runner or a mere flash in the pan?

    Times columnists Anita Chabria and Mark Z. Barabak disagree on Newsom’s presidential prospects, and more. Here the two hash out some of their differences.

    Barabak: So is the presidential race over, Anita? Should I just spend the next few years backpacking and snowboarding in the Sierra and return in January 2029 to watch Newsom iterate, meet the moment and, with intentionality, be sworn in as our nation’s 48th president?

    Chabria: You should definitely spend as much time in the Sierra as possible, but I have no idea if Newsom will be elected president in 2028 or not. That’s about a million light-years away in political terms. But I think he has a shot, and is the front-runner for the nomination right now. He’s set himself up as the quick-to-punch foil to President Trump, and increasingly as the leader of the Democratic Party. Last week, he visited Brazil for a climate summit that Trump ghosted, making Newsom the American presence.

    And in a recent (albeit small) poll, in a hypothetical race against JD Vance, the current Republican favorite, Newsom lead by three points. Though, unexpectedly, respondents still picked Kamala Harris as their choice for the nomination.

    To me, that shows he’s popular across the country. But you’ve warned that Californians have a tough time pulling voters in other states. Do you think his Golden State roots will kill off his contender status?

    Barabak: I make no predictions. I’m smart enough to know that I’m not smart enough to know. And, after 2016 and the election of Trump, the words “can’t,” “not,” “won’t,” “never ever” are permanently stricken from my political vocabulary.

    That said, I wouldn’t stake more than a penny — which may eventually be worth something, as they’re phased out of our currency — on Newsom’s chances.

    Look, I yield to no one in my love of California. (And I’ve got the Golden State tats to prove it.) But I’m mindful of how the rest of the country views the state and those politicians who bear a California return address. You can be sure whoever runs against Newsom — and I’m talking about his fellow Democrats, not just Republicans — will have a great deal to say about the state’s much-higher-than-elsewhere housing, grocery and gas prices and our shameful rates of poverty and homelessness.

    Not a great look for Newsom, especially when affordability is all the political rage these days.

    And while I understand the governor’s appeal — Fight! Fight! Fight! — I liken it to the fleeting fancy that, for a time, made attorney, convicted swindler and rhetorical battering ram Michael Avenatti seriously discussed as a Democratic presidential contender. At a certain point — and we’re still years away — people will assess the candidates with their head, not viscera.

    As for the polling, ask Edmund Muskie, Gary Hart or Hillary Clinton how much those soundings matter at this exceedingly early stage of a presidential race. Well, you can’t ask Muskie, because the former Maine senator is dead. But all three were early front-runners who failed to win the Democratic nomination.

    Chabria: I don’t argue the historical case against the Golden State, but I will argue that these are different days. People don’t vote with their heads. Fight me on that.

    They vote on charisma, tribalism, and maybe some hope and fear. They vote on issues as social media explains them. They vote on memes.

    There no reality in which our next president is rationally evaluated on their record — our current president has a criminal one and that didn’t make a difference.

    But I do think, as we’ve talked about ad nauseam, that democracy is in peril. Trump has threatened to run for a third term and recently lamented that his Cabinet doesn’t show him the same kind of fear that Chinese President Xi Jinping gets from his top advisers. And Vance, should he get the chance to run, has made it clear he’s a Christian nationalist who would like to deport nearly every immigrant he can catch, legal or not.

    Being a Californian may not be the drawback it’s historically been, especially if Trump’s authoritarianism continues and this state remains the symbol of resistance.

    But our governor does have an immediate scandal to contend with. His former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, was just arrested on federal corruption charges. Do you think that hurts him?

    Barabak: It shouldn’t.

    There’s no evidence of wrongdoing on Newsom’s part. His opponents will try the guilt-by-association thing. Some already have. But unless something damning surfaces, there’s no reason the governor should be punished for the alleged wrongdoing of Williamson or others charged in the case.

    But let’s go back to 2028 and the presidential race. I think one of our fundamental disagreements is that I believe people do very much evaluate a candidate’s ideas and records. Not in granular fashion, or the way some chin-stroking political scientist might. But voters do want to know how and whether a candidate can materially improve their lives.

    There are, of course, a great many who’d reflexively support Donald Trump, or Donald Duck for that matter, if he’s the Republican nominee. Same goes for Democrats who’d vote for Gavin Newsom or Gavin Floyd, if either were the party’s nominee. (While Newsom played baseball in college, Floyd pitched 13 seasons in the major leagues, so he’s got that advantage over the governor.)

    But I’m talking about those voters who are up for grabs — the ones who decide competitive races — who make a very rational decision based on their lives and livelihoods and which candidate they believe will benefit them most.

    Granted, the dynamic is a bit different in a primary contest. But even then, we’ve seen time and again the whole dated/married phenomenon. As in 2004, when a lot of Democrats “dated” Howard Dean early in the primary season but “married” John Kerry. I see electability — as in the perception of which Democrat can win the general election — being right up there alongside affordability when it comes time for primary voters to make their 2028 pick.

    Chabria: No doubt affordability will be a huge issue, especially if consumer confidence continues to plummet. And we are sure to hear criticisms of California, many of which are fair, as you point out. Housing costs too much, homelessness remains intractable.

    But these are also problems across the United States, and require deeper fixes than even this economically powerful state can handle alone. More than past record, future vision is going to matter. What’s the plan?

    It can’t be vague tax credits or even student loan forgiveness. We need a concrete vision for an economy that brings not just more of the basics like homes, but the kind of long-term economic stability — higher wages, good schools, living-wage jobs — that makes the middle class stronger and attainable.

    The Democrat who can lay out that vision while simultaneously continuing to battle the authoritarian creep currently eating our democracy will, in my humble opinion, be the one voters choose, regardless of origin story. After all, it was that message of change with hope that gave us President Obama, another candidate many considered a long shot at first.

    Mark, are there any 2028 prospects you’re keeping a particularly close eye on?

    Barabak: I’m taking things one election at a time, starting with the 2026 midterms, which include an open-seat race for governor here in California. The results in November 2026 will go a long way toward shaping the dynamic in November 2028. That said, there’s no shortage of Democrats eyeing the race — too many to list here. Will the number surpass the 29 major Democrats who ran in 2020? We’ll see.

    I do agree with you that, to stand any chance of winning in 2028, whomever Democrats nominate will have to offer some serious and substantive ideas on how to make people’s lives materially better. Imperiled democracy and scary authoritarianism aside, it’s still the economy, stupid.

    Which brings us full circle, back to our gallivanting governor. He may be winning fans and building his national fundraising base with his snippy memes and zippy Trump put-downs. But even if he gets past the built-in anti-California bias among so many voters outside our blessed state, he’s not going to snark his way to the White House.

    I’d wager more than a penny on that.

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    Anita Chabria, Mark Z. Barabak

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  • Trump Is About to Steamroll Nikki Haley

    Trump Is About to Steamroll Nikki Haley

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    If one word could sum up Nikki Haley’s ambivalent challenge to Donald Trump in the New Hampshire Republican primary, that word might be: if.

    If as used by New Hampshire’s Republican Governor Chris Sununu, Haley’s most prominent supporter in the state, when he concluded his energetic introduction of her at a large rally in Manchester on Friday night. “If you think Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, don’t sit on your couch and not participate in democracy,” Sununu insisted. “You gotta go vote, right?”

    In that formulation, if served as more shield than sword. By framing his argument that way, Sununu clearly intended to appeal to the voters who do consider Trump a threat to democracy, but without endorsing that sentiment himself.

    That slight hesitation about fully confronting the GOP’s fearsome front-runner has been the consistent attitude of Haley’s campaign. Haley, the former South Carolina governor, has shown impressive political skills and steely discipline to outmaneuver a large field of men and emerge as the most viable remaining alternative to Trump. She has displayed fortitude in soldiering on against Trump as a procession of Republican elected officials has endorsed him for the nomination over the past few weeks. And beginning with her speech last Monday night after the Iowa caucus, Haley has turned up the volume on her own criticism of Trump, yoking him to Joe Biden as too old and divisive. “With me, you’ll get no drama, no vendettas, no vengeance,” she told the crowd on Friday night.

    But in this possibly decisive week of the GOP race, Haley has made clear that she will go so far and no further in criticizing or challenging Trump, just as Sununu did with his telltale if. Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary realistically represents the last chance for Haley to stop, or even slow, the former president’s march to his third consecutive GOP nomination. If Trump wins, especially by a big margin, he will be on a glide path to becoming the nominee. Nothing Haley has done this week reflects the gravity of that moment. “She’s got to swing for the fences, and so far she’s just throwing out bunts,” Mark McKinnon, who served as the chief media adviser to George W. Bush’s two presidential campaigns, told me.

    Read: What Trump’s victory in Iowa reveals

    Many New Hampshire political leaders resistant to Trump fear that Haley has not done nearly enough to generate a surge of turnout among independent voters—known locally as “undeclared voters.” Mike Dennehy, a longtime GOP strategist in New Hampshire, says that Haley’s messaging to these undeclared voters has lacked enough urgency to generate the brushfire of excitement she needs among them. “In my opinion, she’s not doing what she needs to do to connect with independent voters,” Dennehy told me. Haley, he believes, should be framing the choice to New Hampshire voters much more starkly, telling them: “It’s the end of the road here; I’m your last chance to stop a Trump-Biden rematch.” Haley fleetingly raised that argument in her remarks following the Iowa caucus, but it has receded as she’s reverted toward her standard stump speech in New Hampshire.

    McKinnon and Dennehy know something about New Hampshire presidential campaigns that catch fire among independents. Dennehy was the New Hampshire campaign manager for then–Senator John McCain when he stunned George W. Bush, McKinnon’s candidate, in the 2000 New Hampshire primary. Bush arrived after a big win in the kickoff Iowa caucus and held a commanding lead in national polls. On the day of that New Hampshire primary, I had lunch with McKinnon; Matthew Dowd, the campaign’s voter-targeting guru; and Karl Rove, Bush’s chief strategist. They were relaxed, confident, and starting to kick around ideas for how they would contest the general election, while I scribbled in a notebook. Then, halfway through the lunch, Rove took a call, abruptly left the table, and never came back. The reason for his sudden summons back to campaign headquarters became apparent a few hours later: McCain that night beat Bush among independent voters by three to one, exit polls found, and won the state overall by nearly 20 percentage points.

    In retrospect, McKinnon said, the Bush campaign should have seen what was coming. “McCain was definitely on fire; you could feel it on the ground,” he told me. For months McCain had held lengthy town halls across the state, answering questions for hours and then driving to the next event on the “Straight Talk Express” campaign bus, taking questions from reporters for hours more. He was provocative, funny, unfiltered, and unafraid of challenging Republican orthodoxy. “He was entirely authentic, entirely accessible; he was campaigning like he was running for governor of New Hampshire, steely, granite-like,” McKinnon recalled.

    Like McCain, Haley has burrowed into New Hampshire with months of grassroots events. But the similarities stop there. Haley’s town halls are much more structured and controlled; sometimes she doesn’t even take questions from the audience. Her interactions with reporters are limited and often stilted. And she made a choice this week to reject debates by ABC and CNN unless Trump also participated, which forced the sponsors to cancel the sessions. Some Republican strategists are sympathetic to her decision not to appear again with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, but more of the people I spoke with believe that by withdrawing, she forfeited the biggest platforms she would have had this week to drive a message to New Hampshire voters. “It’s about pulling as many independents out to vote as you can, and you can’t get to those independents if you don’t go on places like CNN and WMUR,” Dennehy said, referring to the powerful local New Hampshire television station that would have co-hosted one of the debates with ABC.

    Read: The end is coming for Trump’s GOP rivals

    Haley is pushing a tougher message against Trump than she was before Iowa. When a reporter this weekend asked her what her closing message was to New Hampshire voters, Haley replied, “Americans deserve better than what the options are. You’ve got Biden and Trump both distracted with investigations, both distracted with other things that aren’t about how to make Americans’ lives safer and better.” She says flatly that Trump is lying about her record and that America should not have to choose between two roughly 80-year-old candidates. After Trump at a Friday-night rally confused Haley with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during an extended monologue about the January 6 riot, Haley on Saturday responded by questioning his mental acuity: “When you’re dealing with the pressures of a presidency, we can’t have someone else that we question whether they’re mentally fit to do this.” And she’s been willing to differentiate from Trump on issues where she can reaffirm positions that were considered conservative in the Ronald Reagan–era GOP. That includes criticizing Trump for running up the federal deficit, not taking a tough enough stand against China, and playing “footsy,” as she termed it, with dictators such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

    But Haley has muffled her case against Trump by more often refusing to confront him or by even defending him. When asked by CNN’s Dana Bash last week about Trump being held liable for sexual abuse in the defamation case brought against him by writer E. Jean Carroll, Haley implausibly replied, “I haven’t paid attention to his cases.” Last Friday, reporters asked Haley whether she saw racism in Trump’s multiplying jabs at her immigrant ancestry, which included reposting an inaccurate “birther”-like claim that she was ineligible to run because her parents had not been U.S. citizens when she was born. Her response could not have been more tepid: “I’ll let people decide what he means by his attacks.”

    Haley has also continued to insist that, if elected, she would pardon Trump should he be convicted in any of the cases against him. Hours before the Iowa caucuses last Monday, she told a Fox News anchor that she would vote for Trump over Biden “any day of the week.” She’s closing her New Hampshire campaign with an unusual three-minute ad centered on a testimonial to her compassion and commitment from the mother of Otto Warmbier, the American college student who died in North Korean captivity; but nowhere does the ad criticize Trump for his coziness with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. In Haley’s stump speech to New Hampshire voters, she still declares that chaos “follows” Trump “rightly or wrongly,” as he if is potentially just an innocent bystander to all the firestorms that he ignites with his words and actions. (Haley does Olympic-level contortions to avoid expressing any value judgments about Trump.) On Saturday, she even tempered her criticism of Trump’s confusion the night before when she reassuringly told a Fox interviewer, “I’m not saying that this is a Joe Biden situation.” To truly threaten a front-runner as commanding as Trump, “you’ve just got to throw caution to the wind,” McKinnon said.  “And it’s the opposite with Haley: The wind throws caution to her.”

    The evidence from Iowa suggests that Haley’s cautious approach has left her with a coalition too narrow to make a strong stand. With Trump bashing her in ads and his stump speech as “liberal” and “weak,” particularly on issues relating to immigration, Haley predictably ran poorly in Iowa among the most conservative voters, according to the entrance poll conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations.

    But although she performed better among more moderate elements of the GOP coalition—particularly those with four-year college degrees—she failed to inspire enough of them to come out and vote on a cold night. In Iowa, Haley won her highest share of the vote in the most populous urban and suburban counties. But the total number of votes she won in the big counties was only a fraction of the total that had come out for Marco Rubio, a candidate who appealed to a similar coalition, in the 2016 GOP caucus. Max Rust, a data analyst at The Wall Street Journal, told me in an email that his unpublished analysis found that Iowa turnout fell more compared with 2016 in better educated and more affluent areas than in rural and blue-collar places. “I was really surprised how much Haley underperformed in the suburbs,” David Kochel, a longtime GOP strategist, told me.

    With Trump holding a steady double-digit lead over her in the New Hampshire tracking polls, Haley faces the prospect of a similar squeeze in Tuesday’s primary. Trump’s ferocious attacks on her from the right leave her with little opportunity to crack his support among staunch conservatives. And her much more carefully nuanced criticism of him leaves her facing long odds of catalyzing the massive turnout among independent voters she’d need to generate any momentum moving forward. The Suffolk University/Boston Globe/NBC-10 tracking poll released Saturday showed Haley only running even with Trump among undeclared voters, signaling that she’s failing to draw into the primary the large center-left contingent most hostile to the former president. (At the same time, Trump continued to lead her in the survey by two-to-one among Republicans.)

    “There’s always been this ambivalence that emanates from her about Trump,” Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire, told me. Scala, the author of Stormy Weather, a book about the New Hampshire primary, said that he understands that Haley must maneuver carefully, because “ultimately, if you want to win the nomination of this party, you are going to have to win over voters who like Trump.” But, Scala added, “I have to think [her] ambivalence rubs off on voters” and may discourage many of those most critical of Trump from bothering to turn out. (Sununu hasn’t helped that problem by publicly insisting that Haley may be hoping only for a strong second-place finish, and repeatedly declaring that he would vote for Trump if he wins the nomination.)

    In my interactions with voters at a few Haley events here, she seems to inspire more respect than enthusiasm. Some are drawn to her contained and cerebral style, and to her message of generational change. “I was thinking if we give her a chance, we will get an opportunity to go in a new direction,” George Jobel, a marketing manager from Concord, told me after Haley’s Manchester rally. But for many others, Haley is simply the last option to register a vote of disapproval about Trump. Dan O’Donnell, a realtor and undeclared voter from Hollis, is planning to cast his ballot for the former South Carolina governor. But he told me that when friends ask him if he’s voting for Haley, “I tell them, ‘No, I’m going to vote against Trump.’” In the latest Suffolk tracking poll, most independent voters backing Haley likewise said that they were motivated primarily to vote against Trump, rather than for her.

    In fairness to Haley, it’s not like anyone else this year—or, for that matter, in 2016—cracked the code of beating Trump in a Republican primary. DeSantis tried the opposite of her strategy, by running to Trump’s right and hoping that moderates would eventually consolidate around him if he was the only alternative remaining; that approach has left DeSantis in an even weaker position than Haley, barely surviving in the race. And toppling a front-runner is never easy: Even after McCain’s New Hampshire upset in 2000, he won only a few more states, and Bush recovered to resoundingly win the nomination.

    But McCain at least went down swinging, indelibly imprinting a maverick image that allowed him to come back and win the GOP nomination eight years later. In his own way, even DeSantis seems liberated by the prospect of defeat, publicly declaring that Trump cares more about personal loyalty than the good of the country or even the party, and accurately complaining that Fox and other conservative media outlets function as a “Praetorian guard” suppressing criticism of the former president.

    Haley, by contrast, still seems here to be weighing every word, as if she expects she will eventually need to defend it from the witness box in some Stalin-esque future MAGA-loyalty trial. If Haley thought she had a better chance to win, maybe she and her allies would dispense with the word if when describing Trump’s potential threat to American democracy. But her reluctance to fully confront Trump probably betrays what she really thinks about the odds that she can wrest control of the party from him this year. In this break-the-glass moment for Trump’s Republican opponents, Haley has made clear she will do no more than tap lightly on the window.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • What Trump’s Victory in Iowa Reveals

    What Trump’s Victory in Iowa Reveals

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    Donald Trump’s victory in the Iowa caucus was as dominant as expected, underscoring the exceedingly narrow path available to any of the Republican forces hoping to prevent his third consecutive nomination. And yet, for all Trump’s strength within the party, the results also hinted at some of the risks the GOP will face if it nominates him again.

    Based on Trump’s overwhelming lead in the poll conducted of voters on their way into the voting, the cable networks called the contest for Trump before the actual caucus was even completed. It was a fittingly anticlimactic conclusion to a caucus contest whose result all year has never seemed in doubt. In part, that may have been because none of Trump’s rivals offered Iowa voters a fully articulated case against him until Florida Governor Ron DeSantis unleashed more pointed arguments against the front-runner in the final days.

    Trump steamrolled over the opposition of the state’s Republican and evangelical Christian leadership to amass by far the largest margin of victory ever in a contested Iowa GOP caucus. He drew strong support across virtually every demographic group—though, in a preview of a continuing general election challenge if he wins the nomination, his vote notably lagged among caucus-goers with at least a four-year college degree.

    Read: The end is coming for Trump’s GOP rivals

    The results as of late Monday evening showed DeSantis solidifying a small lead over former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley for a distant second place behind Trump. Even though DeSantis held off Haley, his weak finish after investing so much time and money in the state—and attracting endorsements from local political leaders including Governor Kim Reynolds—likely extinguishes his chances of winning the nomination. That’s true whether he remains in the race, as he pledged on Monday, or drops out in the next few weeks.

    Though Haley could not overtake DeSantis here, she has a second chance to establish momentum next week in New Hampshire, where she is running close to Trump in some surveys. But the magnitude of Trump’s Iowa victory shows how far Haley remains from creating a genuine threat to the front-runner. Her support largely remained confined to an archipelago of better-educated, more moderate voters in the state’s largest population centers.

    After the Iowa results, “she’ll be the alternative to Donald Trump,” said Douglas Gross, a longtime GOP Iowa activist who supported Haley. Her credible showing “is not because of organization or message, because she didn’t have either. It’s because she’s perceived as the alternative to Trump and the other candidates tried to be Trump.”

    Haley, though, clearly signaled her intent to escalate her challenge to Trump as the race moves on to New Hampshire. In an energetic post-caucus speech, she debuted a new line of argument against Trump, linking him to President Joe Biden as an aging symbol of a caustic and divisive past that American voters must transcend. “Our campaign is the last best hope of stopping the Trump-Biden nightmare,” she insisted, in a line of argument likely to dominate her message in the week until New Hampshire votes on January 23.

    For Haley, the first challenge may be reversing the gathering sense in the party that Trump is on the verge of wrapping up the contest even as it just begins. The behavior of GOP elected officials in the final days before the caucus may have revealed as much about the state of the race as the result of the first voting itself. Trump in recent days has received a parade of endorsements, including from Utah Senator Mike Lee, who criticized him sharply in 2016, and Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whom Trump mercilessly belittled and mocked when he ran in the 2016 presidential race.

    Read: Trump is coming for Obamacare again

    As telling: Reynolds, the most prominent supporter of DeSantis, and New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, Haley’s most prominent backer, each declared in separate television interviews just hours before the vote that they would support Trump if he’s the nominee. Haley did the same in an interview on Fox: “I would take Donald Trump over Joe Biden any day of the week,” she told the Fox News Channel host Neil Cavuto on Monday, hours before she unveiled her much tougher message toward the former president Monday night.

    Trump himself revealed his confidence in a restrained victory speech Monday night that included rare praise of DeSantis, Haley, and Vivek Ramaswamy, who finished fourth and then dropped out of the race. Trump’s uncharacteristically sedate and conciliatory remarks suggested that he sees the opportunity to force out the others, and consolidate the party, before very long.

    Trump’s commanding lead in the vote testified to the depth of his victory. Results from the “entrance poll” of caucus-goers on their way to cast their votes underscored the breadth of his win.

    Across every demographic divide in the party, Trump improved over his performance in 2016, when he narrowly lost the state to Texas Senator Ted Cruz. This time, Trump won both men and women comfortably, according to the entrance poll conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations. He won nearly half of voters in both urban and suburban areas, as well as a majority in rural areas, the poll found.

    DeSantis won endorsements from much of the state’s evangelical-Christian leadership, but Trump crushed him among those voters by almost two to one, according to the entrance poll. In 2016, Iowa evangelicals had preferred Cruz to Trump by double digits. Trump on Monday also carried nearly half of voters who were not evangelicals, beating Haley among them by about 20 percentage points. In 2016, Trump managed only a three-percentage-point edge over Rubio among Iowa caucus-goers who were not evangelicals. (In both the 2012 and 2016 Republican presidential primaries, the candidate who won Iowa voters who are not evangelicals ultimately won the nomination.)

    Before Trump, the most important dividing line in GOP presidential primaries had been between voters who were and were not evangelical Christians. But on Monday night, as in 2016, Trump reoriented that axis: Education was a far better predictor of support for him than whether a voter identified as an evangelical.

    Trump carried two-thirds of the caucus-goers who do not have a four-year college degree, the entrance poll found on Monday night. That was more than twice as much as Trump won among those voters in 2016, when Cruz narrowly beat him among them.

    Other findings in the entrance poll also testified to Trump’s success at reshaping the party in his image. The share of caucus-goers who identified as “very conservative” was much higher than in 2016. About two-thirds of those attending the caucuses said they do not believe that President Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election. Rural areas that Trump split with Cruz in 2016 broke decisively for him this time.

    Yet amid all these signs of strength, the entrance poll offered some clear warning signs for Trump in a potential general election—as did some of the county-level results.

    Despite some predictions to the contrary, Trump still faced substantial resistance from college-educated voters, just as he did in 2016. In the entrance poll Monday night, he drew only a little more than one-third of them. That was enough to push Trump safely past Haley, who split the remainder of those voters primarily with DeSantis (each of them won just under three in 10 of them). But compared with the 2016 Iowa result, Trump improved much less among college-educated voters than he did among those without degrees.

    Trump’s relative weakness among college-educated voters in the 2016 GOP primary presaged the alienation from him in white-collar suburbs that grew during his presidency. Though Biden’s approval among those voters has declined since 2021, Trump’s modest showing even among the college-educated voters willing to turn out for a GOP caucus likely shows that resistance to him also remains substantial. When the results are tallied, Trump might win all 99 counties in Iowa, an incredible achievement if he manages it. But Trump drew well under his statewide percentage in Polk County, the state’s most populous; in fast-growing Dallas County; and in Story and Johnson, the counties centered on Iowa State University and the University of Iowa. (Johnson is the one county where Trump trails as of now.) Those are all the sorts of places that have moved away from the GOP in the Trump years.

    Also noteworthy was voters’ response to an entrance-poll question about whether they would still consider Trump fit for the presidency if he was convicted of a crime. Nearly two-thirds said yes, which speaks to his strength within the Republican Party. But about three in 10 said no, which speaks to possible problems in a general election. That result was consistent with the findings in a wide array of polls that somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of GOP partisans believe that Trump’s actions after the 2020 election were a threat to democracy or illegal. How many of those Republican-leaning voters would ultimately support him will be crucial to his viability if he wins the nomination. On that front, it may be worth filing away that more than four in 10 college graduates who participated in the caucus said they would not view Trump as fit for the presidency if he’s convicted of a crime, the entrance poll found.

    Those are problems Trump will need to confront on another day, if he wins the nomination. For now, he has delivered an imposing show of strength within a party that he has reshaped in his belligerent, conspiratorial image. The winter gloom in Iowa may not be any bleaker than the spirits tonight of the dwindling band of those in the GOP hoping to loosen Trump’s iron grip on the party.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Political Accountability Isn’t Dead Yet

    Political Accountability Isn’t Dead Yet

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    On September 22, when federal prosecutors accused Senator Robert Menendez of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, Representative Andy Kim, a fellow New Jersey Democrat, asked one of his neighbors what he thought of the charges. “That’s Jersey,” the man replied.

    The neighbor’s shrug spoke volumes about not only a state with a sordid history of political corruption but also a country that seemed to have grown inured to scandal. In nearby New York, George Santos had settled into his Republican House seat despite having been indicted on more than a dozen counts of fraud and having acknowledged that the story he’d used to woo voters was almost entirely fiction. Criminal indictments have done nothing to dent Republican support for Donald Trump, who is currently the front-runner for both the GOP nomination and the presidency next year.

    It turns out, however, that the supposedly cynical citizens of New Jersey did care that their senior senator was allegedly on the take. In the days after the indictment was unsealed, multiple polls found that Menendez’s approval rating had plummeted to just 8 percent. New Jersey’s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, and its other Democratic senator, Cory Booker, both called on Menendez to quit. All but three of the nine Democrats in New Jersey’s House delegation have urged the senator to resign, and one of them is his own son.

    Menendez has pleaded not guilty to the charges and rejected calls to resign. A son of Cuban immigrants, he has denounced the case against him as a racially motivated persecution. But his days in the Senate are almost certainly numbered, whether he leaves of his own accord or voters usher him out. Kim has announced that he will challenge Menendez next year, and so has Tammy Murphy, New Jersey’s first lady. Menendez’s trial is scheduled for May, just one month before the primary. Early polls show Menendez barely registering support among Democrats.

    Casey Michel: We’ve never seen anything like the Menendez indictment

    “I hit a breaking point,” Kim told me, explaining his decision to run. “I think a lot of people hit a breaking point, where they’re just like, ‘We’re done with this now.’”

    Accountability has come more swiftly for Santos. National party leaders had largely protected him—Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his successor, Mike Johnson, both needed Santos’s vote in the GOP’s tight House majority. But a damning report from the bipartisan House Ethics Committee proved to be his undoing: Earlier this month, Santos became just the sixth lawmaker in American history to be expelled from the House.

    The government’s case against Menendez could still fall apart; he’s beaten charges of corruption before. But the public can hold its elected officials to a higher standard than a jury would. If the appearance (and, in this case, reappearance) of impropriety can cause voters to lose faith in the system, the events of the past few months might go some way toward restoring it. That both Menendez and Santos have suffered consequences for their alleged misdeeds offers some reassurance to ethics watchdogs who have seen Trump survive scandal after scandal, and indictment after indictment. “You can’t get away with anything. There are still some guardrails,” Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me.

    Yet Trump’s enduring impact on political accountability remains an open question. Has he lowered the standards for everyone, or do the laws of political gravity still apply to ethically compromised lawmakers not named Trump? “Donald Trump is a unique animal,” Lisa Gilbert, the executive vice president of the Washington-based nonprofit Public Citizen, told me. “He has built a cultlike following and surrounded himself with people who believe that no matter what he does, he is in the right.” Few politicians could ever hope to build such a buffer.

    Trump hasn’t evaded accountability entirely: The ethical norms he shattered while in office likely contributed to his defeat in 2020. And although he’s leading in the polls, one or more convictions next year could weaken his bid and demonstrate that the systems meant to hold American leaders in check function even against politicians who have used their popularity to insulate themselves from culpability. “He is being charged,” Gilbert said. “There are accountability mechanisms that are moving in spite of that apparatus. And to me, that’s a sign that eventually the rule of law will prevail.”

    At the same time, the Menendez and Santos examples provide only so much comfort for ethics watchdogs. The allegations against both politicians were particularly egregious. The phrase lining his pockets is usually metaphorical, but in addition to gold bars, the FBI found envelopes of cash in the pockets of suit jackets emblazoned with Menendez’s name in his closet.

    The earlier allegations Menendez faced were almost as lurid; prosecutors said he had accepted nearly $1 million in gifts from a Florida ophthalmologist, including private flights and lavish Caribbean vacations, in exchange for helping the doctor secure contracts and visas for his girlfriends. A 2018 trial ended in a hung jury, and the Department of Justice subsequently dropped the case.

    Santos was caught lying about virtually his entire life—his religion, where he had gone to school, where he worked—and then was accused of using his campaign coffers as a personal piggy bank, spending the money on Botox and the website OnlyFans.

    Read: George Santos was finally too much for Republicans

    Some of the charges against Trump, such as falsifying business records and mishandling classified documents, involve more complicated questions of law. “A lot of the Trump scandals that he’s been indicted for may sort of be beyond the grasp of the average voter,” says Tom Jensen, the director of the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling, which conducted one of the surveys finding that Menendez’s approval rating had sunk after the indictment. “Gold bars are not beyond the grasp of the average voter. Voters get gold bars, and when it’s something that’s so easy for voters to understand, you’re a lot more likely to see this sort of precipitous decline.”

    Jensen told me that in his 16 years as a pollster, he had seen only two other examples where public support dropped so dramatically after the eruption of scandal. One was Rod Blagojevich, the former Democratic governor of Illinois who was convicted of attempting to sell the Senate seat that Barack Obama vacated when he became president in 2009. The other was John Edwards, who, after running for president as a Democrat in 2008, admitted to having an affair while his wife, Elizabeth, was battling a recurrence of breast cancer. (He would later admit to fathering a child with his mistress, and face charges that he illegally used campaign funds to hide the affair; Edwards was found not guilty on the one count on which the jury reached a verdict.)

    The Trump era has revealed an asymmetry in how the parties respond to scandal. Republicans have overlooked or justified all sorts of behavior that would have doomed most other politicians, including multiple allegations of sexual assault (such as those that Trump essentially admitted to in the infamous Access Hollywood video made public in 2016). Although Santos was expelled by a Republican-controlled House, Democrats provided the bulk of the votes to oust him, while a majority of GOP lawmakers voted against expulsion. Democrats were quick to pressure Senator Al Franken to resign in 2018 after several women accused him of touching them inappropriately. (Some Democrats later regretted that they had pushed Franken out so fast.) The party also forced a defiant New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to step down in 2021 amid multiple allegations of misconduct and harassment.

    Trump’s gut-it-out strategy seems to have inspired politicians in both parties to resist demands to resign and to bet that the public’s short attention span will allow them to weather just about any controversy. Gone are the days when a scandalized politician would quit at the first sign of embarrassment, as New York Governor Eliot Spitzer did in 2008, less than 48 hours after the revelation that he had patronized high-end prostitutes. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam was able to serve out his full term despite losing the support of virtually the entire Democratic Party in 2019 after photos surfaced of him dressed in racist costumes in a medical-school yearbook. Cuomo defied calls to resign for months, and Santos forced the House to expel him rather than quit. Menendez has similarly rebuffed the many longtime colleagues who have urged him to leave.

    Shame may have left politics in the Trump era, but consequences haven’t—at least in the cases of Menendez and Santos. “Maybe these can be first steps,” Bookbinder told me, sounding a note of cautious optimism. “If you say nothing matters, then really nothing will matter. I hope we can go back to the place where people do feel like they owe it to their constituents to behave in an ethical and legal way.”

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    Russell Berman

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  • The Two Republican Theories for Beating Trump

    The Two Republican Theories for Beating Trump

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    The latest GOP presidential debate demonstrated again that Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley are pursuing utterly inimical strategies for catching the front-runner, Donald Trump.

    The debate, on Wednesday evening, also showed why neither approach looks remotely sufficient to dislodge Trump from his commanding position in the race.

    DeSantis delivered a stronger overall debate performance than Haley. But the evening mostly displayed the structural limitations of the theory that each campaign is operating under, and the limited progress either candidate has made toward surmounting those obstacles.

    As he showed during the debate, DeSantis is grounding his coalition on the right by defining himself as an unflagging champion for the party’s most conservative elements. During the debate, the Florida governor’s frequent attacks on Haley, and more infrequent (and oblique) jabs at Trump, both represented variations on the charge that neither rival can be trusted to advance conservative priorities.

    Haley, in mirror image, is grounding her coalition in the party’s center. She has focused on consolidating the centrist GOP voters and donors who have long expressed the most resistance to Trump. That includes moderates, people with at least a four-year college degree, GOP-leaning independents, and suburbanites.

    DeSantis’s vision, in other words, has been to start on the right and over time build toward the center; Haley wants to grow in the opposite direction by locking down the center, and then expanding into the right.

    Supporters of both Haley and DeSantis believe that the other’s approach lowers their ceiling too much to ultimately topple Trump. The problem for all Republicans looking for an alternative to the former president is that last week’s debate offered the latest evidence that each camp may be right about the other’s limitations. With the voting beginning only five weeks from Monday in the Iowa caucus, neither Haley nor DeSantis has found any effective way to loosen Trump’s grip on the party.

    Neither, in fact, has even tried hard to do so. Instead, they have centered their efforts almost entirely on trying to squeeze out the other to become Trump’s principal rival. To beat Trump, or to come close, eventually either of them will need to peel away some of the roughly 60 percent of GOP voters who now say in national polls that they intend to support him for the nomination. But both have behaved as if they can leave that challenge for a later day, while focusing on trying to clear the field to create a one-on-one contest with the front-runner.

    The theory in DeSantis’s camp has been that the only way to beat Trump is to aim directly at his core supporters with a conservative message. DeSantis advisers acknowledge that his positioning has not connected with many centrist voters. But his camp believes that if DeSantis can emerge after the early states as the last viable alternative to Trump, the moderates most resistant to the former president will have no choice but to rally around the Florida governor, even if they consider him too Trump-like himself.

    The voters now drawn to Haley “share a goal in common with Governor DeSantis in that they want an alternative to Trump,” Bob Vander Plaats, a prominent Iowa religious conservative who has endorsed DeSantis, told me. “The more that DeSantis proves there is one alternative to Trump, he will start peeling off that lane as well.” By contrast, Vander Plaats argues, if DeSantis falls out of contention, his support is more likely to flow back to Trump than toward Haley. “I haven’t heard any supporter of DeSantis yet saying: ‘I’m deciding between him and Haley,’” he told me. “Basically, they are between Trump and him.”

    DeSantis’s supporters anticipate that his strategy will pay off if he finishes strongly in Iowa. But so far, his decision to offer voters what amounts to Trumpism without Trump has returned few dividends. With his Trump-like agenda on immigration and foreign policy, and emphasis on culture-war issues such as transgender rights, DeSantis has alienated many of the centrist GOP voters most dubious of the former president while failing to dislodge many of his core supporters.

    “Ron DeSantis should have consolidated the non-Trump wing of the party from the get go and then gone after soft Trump supporters,” Alex Stroman, a former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party, told me in an email. “Instead, he tried to out-MAGA Trump from the right and alienated not only soft-Trump voters but also the more pragmatic wing of the party. It was a strategic blunder.”

    Haley has filled that vacuum with the elements of the party most skeptical of Trump. Her approach has been to start with the primary voters who like the former president the least, with the hope of eventually attracting more of those ambivalent about him. Her backers believe she has a better chance than DeSantis to reach those “maybe Trump” voters. As the veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres told me, DeSantis “has tried to appeal to some of the ‘always Trump’ voters, but the ‘always Trump’ voters are always Trump for a reason. Nikki Haley seems to have figured out the job is to consolidate the ‘maybe Trump’ voters who supported Trump twice but now … want a different style and different temperament.”

    Read: A war on blue America

    DeSantis still leads Haley in most national polls, though that may be changing. And he remains even or ahead of her in the polls in Iowa, where he has campaigned relentlessly, won support from most of the state’s Republican leadership (including Governor Kim Reynolds), attracted broad backing in the influential religious-conservative community, and spent heavily on building a grassroots organization.

    But DeSantis is in a much weaker position in the other early states. A recent poll by CNN and the University of New Hampshire found him falling to fourth in the Granite State. That poll found Haley emerging as a clear second to Trump, as did another recent CNN survey in South Carolina. In each state, she attracted about twice as much support as DeSantis did. Polls also consistently show Haley running much better than DeSantis, or Trump, in hypothetical general election match ups against President Joe Biden.

    All of these positive trends largely explain why DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, another GOP contender, attacked Haley at the debate. Haley was right when she suggested that the attention reflected anxiety in DeSantis’s camp about her rise. But that motivation doesn’t necessarily make the attacks any less effective.

    After delivering the most assured performances in the first three GOP debates, Haley seemed wobbly last week as DeSantis and Ramaswamy pummeled her from the right. Dave Wilson, a longtime Republican and social-conservative activist in South Carolina, told me that Haley had not faced that kind of sustained ideological assault from the right during her career in the state. “It hasn’t been used against her in South Carolina,” Wilson said. “Nikki has never been some kind of mainstreamer or a shill for the big corporations. That’s not who she has portrayed herself as, or how she governed, when she was governor of South Carolina.”

    Read: Trump voters are American too

    At the debate, Haley never seemed to find solid ground when DeSantis accused her of resisting the hard-line approaches he has championed in Florida on issues affecting transgender people. Haley neither embraced DeSantis’s agenda nor challenged it and instead insisted he was mischaracterizing her own record, without entirely clarifying her views. “Especially on those types of cultural issues, it is probably always going to be advantage DeSantis,” Vander Plaats told me. “I think if you turned down the volume and just [looked at] the physical appearance, Nikki was very concerned at that point, like she knew she was in a tough space, and DeSantis was in a very confident space.”

    Her uneasy response on issues of LGBTQ rights was a stark contrast to the confident course she has set on abortion. One reason Haley has gained favor with more centrist Republicans is that she has so clearly argued that the GOP cannot achieve sweeping federal abortion restrictions and must pursue consensus around more limited goals. “I think Nikki Haley talks about social issues the same way that real people do: not through demagoguery or hysterics like some candidates, but having real policy disagreements while showing compassion for those affected—and I think that’s the winning formula,” Stroman said.

    But at the debate, Haley was unwilling to apply that formula to LGBTQ issues, even as she seemed to seek a more empathetic tone than DeSantis.

    “She has clearly thought through a more moderate, nuanced position on abortion that would have greater appeal in a general election,” Alice Stewart, a longtime GOP strategist who has worked for leading social-conservative candidates, told me. “It appears she has not mapped out her position on other culture-war issues, such as transgender procedures and school bathrooms.”

    Doubling down on his message at the debate, DeSantis’s campaign told me afterward that “within the confines of the Constitution” he would support nationalizing the key laws affecting transgender people that he has passed in Florida, such as banning gender-affirming care for minors. Haley’s campaign still appeared focused mostly on deflecting this argument: In comments to me after the debate, her aides stressed that although DeSantis criticized her for opposing legislation as governor requiring students to use the restroom of the gender they were assigned at birth, he similarly indicated that the issue was not a priority for him not long thereafter, during his first gubernatorial campaign in 2018. Their message was that DeSantis is stressing these issues now merely out of expediency. But in an email exchange with me after the debate, Haley’s campaign drew a clearer distinction with DeSantis than she did during the encounter: rather than national action to impose on every state the restrictions Florida has approved on LGBTQ issues, the campaign said Haley would “encourage states to pass laws” that ban classroom discussion of sexual orientation or regulate bathroom use for transgender kids. The one exception the campaign noted is that, like DeSantis, she would also support national legislation banning transgender girls from competing in school sports.

    The debate drew only a small audience and is unlikely by itself to significantly change the trajectory of the DeSantis and Haley competition. Wilson and Stroman both said they doubt that DeSantis’s ideological attacks will hurt Haley much in the South Carolina primary. “It’s going to be harder in South Carolina than he thinks, because everyone knows what Nikki Haley did in this state,” Wilson said. “Under her leadership, a lot of strong conservative stands were taken.”

    But, of course, GOP voters don’t know nearly as much about Haley in the cascade of states that will vote in early March, after South Carolina. DeSantis supporters view her unsteady response to his ideological assault at the debate as validation of their belief that Haley can never attract enough conservative voters to genuinely threaten Trump. “There’s just no path for her to win the nomination,” Vander Plaats argued. “That lane doesn’t exist.”

    The path for any alternative to beat Trump is a rocky one, but it’s premature to assume that Haley cannot outlast DeSantis to become the last viable challenger to the former president. She still has time to formulate better responses to the charge that she’s insufficiently conservative for the Trump-era GOP. Portraying Haley as too squishy in the culture war might help her in New Hampshire, the state where she’s hoping to emerge as Trump’s principal rival.

    But the debate underscored her need to sharpen her answers on those issues as the race moves on. And for Haley’s supporters, it raised an ominous question: If she couldn’t respond more effectively to an attack on her conservative credentials from DeSantis and Ramaswamy, how would she hold up if she ever becomes enough of a threat for Donald Trump to press that case himself?

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Magical Thinking in Milwaukee

    Magical Thinking in Milwaukee

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    One couldn’t help but pity the dutiful campaign staffers and surrogates who trickled into the spin room in Milwaukee last night. They arrived with an unenviable task: to convince reporters that their respective candidates had won the first debate of the Republican presidential primary.

    To anyone who had watched, it was plain, of course, that none of the eight Republicans onstage had won in any meaningful sense. Donald Trump—facing four indictments and leading in the polls by 40 points—didn’t even bother to show up. And with many voters tuning in to the race for the first time, Trump’s rivals struggled to show they were equipped to take him down. In fact, few even tried. The former president’s name barely came up in the debate’s first hour—and when the conversation did turn to the subject of his growing rap sheet, most of the candidates defended him. All but two pledged to support Trump as the party’s nominee even if he is convicted. By the end of the evening, Trump’s path to renomination looked clearer than ever.

    So how to spin this state of affairs if you work for one of the also-rans?

    The answer, it turned out, was simple: Ignore it.

    In multiple interviews after last night’s debate, I asked GOP campaign representatives how they planned to win the primary if their candidates were unwilling to directly confront Trump. Some offered platitudes—“This is a marathon, not a sprint.” Others gestured vaguely at plans to criticize the front-runner in the future. Most flatly refused to acknowledge the reality of Trump’s current dominance in the race. They preferred to pretend.

    Representative Chip Roy of Texas, a supporter of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, scoffed when I mentioned Trump’s lead in the polls. “Go back and look at where Ted [Cruz] was in the numbers in 2016,” Roy instructed me.

    “But … Cruz didn’t win the primary,” I replied, confused.

    “Well, but he won Iowa!”

    Matt Gorman, a spokesperson for Senator Tim Scott’s campaign, complained that reporters and pundits were overstating the likelihood of another Trump nomination. “Too many people think it’s inevitable,” he said. But when asked how that outcome might be avoided, Gorman had only wishful thinking to offer: “We hope that [Trump] debates. That’s our hope.”

    Read: A parade of listless vessels

    It’s easy to see why, in an ideal world, Trump’s rivals would want to get him back on the debate stage. Several of the candidates managed strong moments last night. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley earned loud applause after calling out Republicans in Washington for adding trillions of dollars to the national debt: “Our kids are never going to forgive us for this.” Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie offered a passionate defense of former Vice President Mike Pence for refusing to go along with Trump’s ploy to overturn the 2020 election on January 6, 2021: “He deserves not grudging credit. He deserves our thanks as Americans for putting his oath of office and the Constitution of the United States before personal, political, and unfair pressure.” And the 38-year-old entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy successfully made himself the evening’s main character with a rat-a-tat of Trumpian talking points, one-liners, and comic insults that aggravated his opponents as the debate wore on.

    Some of the debate’s sharpest moments came when the candidates were tangling with Ramaswamy. Christie derided him as an “amateur” who “sounds like ChatGPT.” Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations, snapped at him, “You have no foreign-policy experience, and it shows.” Even Pence, who typically affects the manner of a sleepy Sunday-school teacher, seemed to repeatedly lose his cool with Ramaswamy. “Now is not the time for on-the-job training,” Pence said at one point. “We don’t need to bring in a rookie.” (This counts as a harsh burn for Pence.)

    On social media and in the press room, theories abounded as to why Ramaswamy seemed to be getting under so many of his opponents’ skin. Maybe it was generational—the know-it-all Millennial with the irritating high-school-debate patter disrespecting his Boomer elders. Or maybe it was his “Ted Cruz energy”—that signature blend of arrogance and smarminess that seems calibrated to repel. Certainly it didn’t help that Ramaswamy insisted on dismissing his opponents as “super-PAC puppets.”

    Read: Vivek Ramaswamy’s truth

    But perhaps the onstage hostility had less to do with Ramaswamy than with that other blustery political neophyte who cartwheeled into GOP politics one day on a whim and promptly overshadowed the rest of the field. With Trump refusing to participate in the debates, Ramaswamy made for a serviceable proxy. (Certainly, his campaign seems to share Trump’s taste for trolling: When I asked Chris Grant, a Ramaswamy adviser, about Pence’s repeated outbursts at the candidate last night, Grant laughed and then giddily compared the former vice president to the grandpa on The Simpsons yelling at a cloud.) Still, sinking Ramaswamy—who currently polls in the high single digits—won’t meaningfully change the shape of the field. The only way to pull that off is to take votes away from the front-runner. And no one seems to have a clear plan to do that.

    Back in January, I wrote about the “magical thinking” that pervaded the GOP ahead of 2024. Virtually everyone in the party I talked with—donors, strategists, elected officials—wanted to move on from Trump, but no one was willing to do anything about it. Instead, they all seemed to be waiting for the problem to resolve itself, whether via criminal charges or death or some other miraculous development. “There is a desire for deus ex machina,” one GOP consultant told me at the time. “It’s like 2016 all over again, only more fatalistic.”

    Seven months later, on a debate stage in Milwaukee, we witnessed the natural consequence of this attitude. Trump—still alive—is gliding toward his third consecutive presidential nomination while his rivals squabble with one another.

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    McKay Coppins

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  • What It Would Take to Beat Trump in the Primaries

    What It Would Take to Beat Trump in the Primaries

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    This should be a window of widening opportunity and optimism for the Republicans chasing Donald Trump, the commanding front-runner in the 2024 GOP presidential race.

    Instead, this is a time of mounting uncertainty and unease.

    Rather than undermine Trump’s campaign, his indictment last week for mishandling classified documents has underscored how narrow a path is available for the candidates hoping to deny him the nomination. What should have been a moment of political danger for Trump instead has become another stage for him to demonstrate his dominance within the party. Almost all GOP leaders have reflexively snapped to his defense, and polls show that most Republican voters accept his vitriolic claims to be the victim of a politicized and illegitimate prosecution.

    As GOP partisans rally around him amid the proliferating legal threats, recent national surveys have routinely found Trump attracting support from more than 50 percent of primary voters. Very few primary candidates in either party have ever drawn that much support in polls this early in the calendar. In an equally revealing measure of his strength, the choice by most of the candidates running against Trump to echo his attacks on the indictment shows how little appetite even they believe exists within the party coalition for a full-on confrontation with him.

    The conundrum for Republicans is that polls measuring public reaction to Trump’s legal difficulties have also found that outside the Republican coalition, a significant majority of voters are disturbed by the allegations accumulating against him. Beyond the GOP base, most voters have said in polls that they believe his handling of classified material has created a national-security risk and that he should not serve as president again if he’s convicted of a crime. Such negative responses from the broader electorate suggest that Trump’s legal challenges are weakening him as a potential general-election candidate even as they strengthen him in the primary. It’s as if Republican leaders and voters can see a tornado on the horizon—and are flooring the gas pedal to reach it faster.

    This far away from the first caucuses and primaries next winter—and about two months from the first debate in August—the other candidates correctly argue that it’s too soon to declare Trump unbeatable for the nomination.

    Republicans skeptical of Trump hold out hope that GOP voters will grow weary from the cumulative weight of the multiple legal proceedings converging on him. And he still faces potential federal and Fulton County Georgia charges over his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election.

    Republican voters “are going to start asking who else is out there, who has a cleaner record, and who is not going to have the constant political volleying going on in the background of their campaign,” Dave Wilson, a prominent Republican and social-conservative activist in South Carolina, told me. “They are looking for someone they can rally behind, because Republicans really want to defeat Joe Biden.”

    Scott Reed was the campaign manager in 1996 for Bob Dole’s presidential campaign and is now a co-chair of Committed to America, a super PAC supporting Mike Pence. Reed told me he also believes that “time is Trump’s enemy” as his legal troubles persist. The belief in GOP circles that “the Department of Justice is totally out of control” offers Trump an important shield among primary voters, Reed said. But he believes that as the details about Trump’s handling of classified documents in the latest indictment “sink in … his support is going to begin to erode.” And as more indictments possibly accumulate, Reed added, “I think the repetition of these proceedings will wear him down.”

    Yet other strategists say that the response so far among both GOP voters and elected officials raises doubts about whether any legal setback can undermine Trump’s position. (The party’s bottomless willingness throughout his presidency to defend actions that previously had appeared indefensible, of course, points toward the same conclusion.) The veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres has divided the GOP electorate into three categories: about 10 percent that is “never Trump,” about 35 percent that is immovably committed to him, and about half that he describes as “maybe Trump,” who are generally sympathetic to the former president and supportive of his policies but uneasy about some of his personal actions and open to an alternative.

    Those “maybe Trump” voters are the key to any coalition that can beat him in the primary race, Ayres told me, but as the polls demonstrate, they flock to his side when he’s under attack. “Many of them had conflict with siblings, with parents, sometimes with children, sometimes even with spouses, about their support for Donald Trump,” Ayres said. “And they are very defensive about it. That makes them instinctively rally to Donald Trump’s defense, because if they suggest in any way that he is not fit for office, then that casts aspersions on their own past support for him.”

    This reflex helps explain the paradoxical dynamic of Trump’s position having improved in the GOP race since his first indictment in early April. A national CBS survey conducted after last week’s federal indictment found his support in the primary soaring past 60 percent for the first time, with three-fourths of Republican voters dismissing the charges as politically motivated and four-fifths saying he should serve as president even if convicted in the case.

    The Republicans dubious of Trump focus more on the evidence in the same surveys that voters outside the GOP base are, predictably, disturbed by the behavior alleged in the multiplying cases against him. Trump argues that Democrats are concocting these allegations because they fear him more than any other Republican candidate, but Wilson accurately pointed out that many Democrats believe Trump has been so damaged since 2020 that he might be the easiest GOP nominee to beat. “I don’t think Democrats really want someone other than Trump,” Wilson said. Privately, in my conversations with them, plenty of Democratic strategists agree.

    Ayres believes that evidence of the resistance to Trump in the wider electorate may eventually cause more GOP voters to think twice about nominating him. Polls have usually found that most Republican voters say agreement on issues is more important for them in choosing a nominee than electability. But Ayres said that in focus groups he’s conducted, “maybe Trump” voters do spontaneously raise concerns about whether Trump can win again given everything that’s happened since Election Day, including the January 6 insurrection. “Traditionally an electability argument is ineffective in primaries,” Ayres said. “The way the dynamic usually works is ‘I like Candidate X, therefore Candidate X has the best chance to win.’ The question is whether the electability argument is more potent in this situation than it was formerly … and the only answer to that is: We will find out.” One early measure suggests that, for now, the answer remains no. In the new CBS poll, Republicans were more bullish on Trump’s chances of winning next year than on any other candidate’s.

    Read: Will Trump get a speedy trial?

    Another reason the legal proceedings haven’t hurt Trump more is that his rivals have been so reluctant to challenge him over his actions—or even to make the argument that multiple criminal trials would weaken him as a general-election candidate. But there are some signs that this may be changing: Pence, Nikki Haley, and Tim Scott this week somewhat criticized his behavior, though they were careful to also endorse the former president’s core message that the most recent indictment is illegitimate and politically motivated. Some strategists working in the race believe that by the first Republican debate in August, the other candidates will have assailed Trump’s handling of the classified documents more explicitly than they are now.

    Still, Trump’s fortifications inside the party remain formidable against even a more direct assault. Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for Trump’s campaign, points out that 85 to 90 percent of Republicans approve of his record as president. In 2016, Trump didn’t win an absolute majority of the vote in any contest until his home state of New York, after he had effectively clinched the nomination; now he’s routinely drawing majority support in polls.

    In those new national polls, Trump is consistently attracting about 35 to 40 percent of Republican voters with a four-year college degree or more, roughly the same limited portion he drew in 2016. But multiple recent surveys have found him winning about 60 percent of Republican voters without a college degree, considerably more than he did in 2016.

    McLaughlin maintains that Trump’s bond with non-college-educated white voters in a GOP primary is as deep as Bill Clinton’s “connection with Black voters” was when he won the Democratic primaries a generation ago. Ayres, though no fan of Trump, agrees that the numbers he’s posting among Republicans without a college degree are “breathtaking.” That strength may benefit Trump even more than in 2016, because polling indicates that those non-college-educated white voters will make up an even bigger share of the total GOP vote next year, as Trump has attracted more of them into the party and driven out more of the suburban white-collar white voters most skeptical of him.

    But if Trump looks stronger inside the GOP than he was in 2016, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may also present a more formidable challenger than Trump faced seven years ago. On paper, DeSantis has more potential than any of the 2016 contenders to attract the moderate and college-educated voters most dubious of Trump and peel away some of the right-leaning “maybe Trump” voters who like his policies but not his behavior. The optimistic way of looking at Trump’s imposing poll numbers, some GOP strategists opposed to him told me, is that he’s functionally the incumbent in the race and still about half of primary voters remain reluctant to back him. That gives DeSantis an audience to work with.

    In practice, though, DeSantis has struggled to find his footing. DeSantis’s choice to run at Trump primarily from his right has so far produced few apparent benefits for him. DeSantis’s positioning has caused some donors and strategists to question whether he would be any more viable in a general election, but it has not yet shown signs of siphoning away conservative voters from Trump. Still, the fact that DeSantis’s favorability among Republicans has remained quite high amid the barrage of attacks from Trump suggests that if GOP voters ultimately decide that Trump is too damaged, the Florida governor could remain an attractive fallback option for them.

    Whether DeSantis or someone else emerges as the principal challenger, the size of Trump’s advantage underscores how crucial it will be to trip him early. Like earlier front-runners in both parties, Trump’s greatest risk may be that another candidate upsets him in one of the traditional first contests of Iowa and New Hampshire. Throughout the history of both parties’ nomination contests, such a surprise defeat has tended to reset the race most powerfully when the front-runner looks the most formidable, as Trump does now. “If Trump is not stopped in Iowa or New Hampshire, he will roll to the nomination,” Reed said.

    Even if someone beats Trump in one of those early contests, though, history suggests that they will still have their work cut out for them. In every seriously contested Republican primary since 1980, the front-runner as the voting began has been beaten in either Iowa or New Hampshire. That unexpected defeat has usually exposed the early leader to a more difficult and unpredictable race than he expected. But the daunting precedent for Trump’s rivals is that all those front-runners—from Ronald Reagan in 1980 to George W. Bush in 2000 to Trump himself in 2016—recovered to eventually win the nomination. In his time as a national figure, Trump has shattered a seemingly endless list of political traditions. But to beat him next year, his GOP rivals will need to shatter a precedent of their own.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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