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Tag: GOP candidates

  • Buttigieg, Newsom and Vance top way-too-early 2028 New Hampshire poll

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    Vice President JD Vance dominates a hypothetical 2028 GOP presidential primary field in New Hampshire, while California Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg are tied atop the Democratic heap, according to a years-early poll of the early primary state.

    Vance leads the list of potential GOP candidates with 56 percent support. No other Republican cracked double digits; the next closest would-be contender, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, had just 8 percent support. He was followed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, former Rep. Liz Cheney, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley (who won 43 percent of the primary vote in the state in 2024), Vivek Ramaswamy, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Sen. Ted Cruz.

    Buttigieg, who finished second in the state’s 2020 presidential primary, is tied with Newsom at 23 percent. They’re followed by Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker at 9 percent and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) at 7 percent. Former Vice President Kamala Harris, who narrowly won New Hampshire last year, finished fifth among the Democrats that Saint Anselm polled with just 6 percent support.

    Trailing Harris were Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — who twice won the state’s Democratic primary but is not expected to run again — and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who finished third in the state in 2020. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer rounded out the list. The survey was conducted online Aug. 26-27 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.3 percentage points.

    Nearly all of the top Democrats have visited the state over the past year to headline party fundraisers or campaign for the party’s candidates — trips typical of presidential aspirants to what has historically been the first-in-the-nation primary state. Buttigieg retains a loyal following in New Hampshire from his 2020 bid, and interest in Newsom has soared among Democratic activists as he counterattacks the Trump administration on redistricting.

    Big Republican names have largely stayed away from New Hampshire since the election, though Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) visited the state days before launching her gubernatorial bid.

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  • Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the Republican Debate

    Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the Republican Debate

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    In their first presidential debate last night, Republicans staged their own version of Tom Stoppard’s classic play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

    Stoppard’s story focuses on the titular two characters, who are minor figures in Hamlet. The playwright recounts the Hamlet story from their peripheral perspective, as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wait and wander, distant from the real action. For much of the play’s three acts, they strain for even glimpses of the man at the center of the tale, Prince Hamlet.

    The eight GOP candidates onstage last night often seemed like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, with their words largely stripped of meaning by the absence of the central protagonist in their drama.

    The debate had plenty of heat, flashes of genuine anger, and revealing policy disputes. Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who has often seemed a secondary player in this race, delivered a forceful performance—particularly in rebutting the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy on policy toward Ukraine—that made her the most vivid figure onstage to many Republicans.

    But all that sound and fury fundamentally lacked relevance to the central story in the GOP race: whether anyone can dent former President Donald Trump’s massive lead over the field. At times, it seemed as if the other candidates had lost sight of the fact that it is Trump, not the motormouthed Ramaswamy, who is 40 points or more ahead of all of them in national polls.

    “Trump is the big winner,” the Republican consultant Alex Conant told me after the debate. “Nobody made an argument about why they would be a better nominee than Donald Trump. They didn’t even begin to make that argument.”

    There were plausible reasons the candidates focused so little on the man they are trying to overtake. The Fox News moderators did not ask specifically about Trump’s legal troubles until an hour into the debate, instead focusing on discussions about the economy, climate change, and abortion. Ramaswamy seemed to be daring the other candidates to smack him down by repeatedly attacking not only their policies but their motivations. “I’m the only person on this stage who isn’t bought and paid for,” he insisted at one point. Loud booing from the audience almost anytime someone criticized Trump may also have discouraged anyone from targeting him too often.

    But it was more than the debate’s immediate circumstances that explained the field’s decision to minimize direct confrontation with Trump. That choice merely extended the strategy most have followed throughout this campaign, which in turn has replicated the deferential approach most of Trump’s rivals took during the 2016 race.

    David A. Graham: Ramaswamy and the rest

    Haley took the most direct shot at the former president on policy, criticizing him from the right for increasing the national debt so much during his tenure; Florida Governor Ron DeSantis jabbed Trump too—though not by name—for supporting lockdowns early in the pandemic. Yet these exchanges were overshadowed by the refusal of any of the contenders, apart from former Governors Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, to object to Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election or his role in sparking the January 6 insurrection. All of them except Hutchinson and Christie raised their hand to indicate they would support Trump as the GOP presidential nominee even if he is convicted of a crime before the election.

    To Conant, all of this seemed reminiscent of the 2016 campaign, when Trump’s rivals seemed reluctant to attack him in the hope that he would somehow collapse on his own. “Their strategy is wrong,” Conant said. “He’s going to be the nominee unless somebody can capture the support of Republicans who are open to an alternative. And nobody even tried to do that tonight.”

    David Kochel, an Iowa-based Republican consultant, wasn’t as critical. But he agreed that the field displayed little urgency about its biggest imperative: dislodging from Trump some of the voters now swelling his big lead in the polls. “What this race needs is to start focusing in on [the question of] ‘Trump or the future, which is it?’” Kochel told me. “I’m not sure we saw enough of that” last night.

    The failure to more directly address the elephant in the room, or what Bret Baier, a co-moderator, called “the elephant not in the room,” undoubtedly muted the debate’s potential impact on the race. Nonetheless, the evening might provide a tailwind to some of the contenders, and a headwind to others.

    The consensus among Republicans I spoke with after the debate was that Haley made a more compelling impression than the other seven candidates onstage. Her best moment came when she lacerated Ramaswamy for calling to end U.S. support to Ukraine, a move she said would essentially surrender the country to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “You are choosing a murderer over a pro-American country,” she told Ramaswamy. “You have no foreign-policy experience, and it shows.”

    The debate “lifted Nikki Haley as one of the prime alternatives for the people who are worried that Trump carries too much baggage to get elected,” the veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres told me last night. “She gutted Ramaswamy.”

    Ramaswamy forced himself into the center of the conversation for much of the night, making unequivocal conservative declarations such as “The climate agenda is a hoax,” and categorical attacks on the rest of the candidates as corrupt career politicians.

    Yet the evening showed why he may not advance any further than other outsider candidates in earlier GOP races, like Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann in 2012. His choice to emulate Trump as an agent of chaos surely thrilled the GOP voters most alienated from the party leadership. But Ramaswamy’s disruptive behavior and tendency toward absolutist positions that he could not effectively defend seemed likely to lower his ultimate ceiling of support. He appeared to simultaneously deepen but narrow his potential audience.

    Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina also had a difficult night, though less by commission than omission. In his first turn on such a big stage, he simply failed to make much of an imprint; the evening underscored the limitations of his campaign message beyond his personal story of rising from poverty. “I forgot he was even there,” Kochel said. “Maybe nice guys finish last; I don’t know. He disappeared.”

    Former Vice President Mike Pence, by contrast, was as animated as he’s been in a public forum. That was true both when he was making the case for an almost pre-Trumpian policy agenda that reprised priorities associated with Ronald Reagan and when he was defending his actions on January 6.

    DeSantis, who seemed slightly overcaffeinated at the outset, didn’t disappear, but he didn’t fill Trump’s shoes as the focal point of the debate either. The other candidates devoted little effort to criticizing or contrasting with him. To Conant, that was a sign they consider him a fading ember: “No reason to risk losing a back-and-forth with a dead man,” Conant said. Others thought that although DeSantis did not stand out, he didn’t make any mistakes and may have succeeded in reminding more conservative voters why they liked him so much before his unsteady first months as a presidential candidate.

    Christie in turn may have connected effectively with the relatively thin slice of GOP voters irrevocably hostile to Trump. That may constitute only 10 to 15 percent of the GOP electorate nationally, but it represents much more than that in New Hampshire, where Christie could prove formidable, Ayres told me.

    But it won’t matter much which candidate slightly improved, or diminished, their position if they all remain so far behind Trump. Ayres believes materially weakening Trump in the GOP race may be beyond the capacity of any of his rivals; the only force that might bring him back within their reach, Ayres told me, is if his trial for trying to overturn the 2020 election commences before the voting advances too far next year and damages his image among more Republican voters.

    In a Republican context, Ayres said, “The only institutions that have the ability to bring him back to Earth are not political institutions; they are judicial institutions.”

    Kochel, who attended the debate, pointed out that the loud disapproval from the crowd at any mention of Trump’s legal troubles accurately reflected the desire of most GOP voters to bury the issue. “A lot of the base right now collectively has their hands up over their ears and are going ‘La-la-la,’” Kochel said. The problem for the party, though, is that while Republican partisans may not want to deal with the electoral implications of nominating a candidate facing 91 criminal charges, “general-election voters are going to deliver a verdict on all of this even if a jury doesn’t.”

    David A. Graham: What people keep missing about Ron DeSantis

    Apart from Christie and Hutchinson, the candidates on the stage seemed no more eager than the audience to address Trump’s actions. While all of them agreed Pence did the right thing on January 6 by refusing Trump’s demands to reject the election results, none except those two and Pence himself suggested Trump did something wrong in pressuring his vice president. Nor did the others find fault in anything else Trump did to subvert the 2020 result.

    The final act of Stoppard’s play finds Rosencrantz and Guildenstern drifting toward a doom that neither understands, nor can summon the will to escape. In their caution and timidity, the Republicans distantly chasing Trump don’t look much different.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Nikki Haley’s Dilemma Is Also the Republicans’ Problem

    Nikki Haley’s Dilemma Is Also the Republicans’ Problem

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    Republicans have had 10 months to hammer out a coherent post-Roe message on abortion. You would think they’d have nailed it by now.

    Yet on Tuesday, Nikki Haley set out to declare her position on the issue—and proceeded to be about as clear as concrete.

    She began with plausible precision. “I want to save as many lives and help as many moms as possible,” the former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations told reporters gathered at the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America headquarters, in Northern Virginia—a press event billed as a “major policy speech.” But her statements quickly got squishier. It’s good that some states have passed anti-abortion laws in the past year, she said. And as for the states that have reacted by enshrining abortion-rights protections? Well, she wishes “that weren’t the case.”

    And then she seemed to channel Veep’s Selina Meyer. “Different people in different places are taking different paths,” Haley said, with a self-assurance that belied the indeterminacy of her words.

    Read: Abortion pills will be the next battle in the 2024 election

    Questioning whether any national anti-abortion legislation would ever pass, Haley did gesture at a need for some action. “To do that at the federal level, the next president must find national consensus,” she said. As for what that might look like, she had no words. And she took no questions.

    Some people seemed to like Haley’s speech, in a tepid way. She sounded human when she described how her husband had been adopted, and how she’d struggled with infertility. “Ms. Haley deserves credit for confronting the subject head on, with a speech that wasn’t sanctimonious or censorious,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote, before concluding, “The party could do worse than Ms. Haley’s pitch.” But it could do better—or at least do with something more specific.

    Leaders of the self-described pro-life movement were predictably annoyed at Haley’s conciliatory-sounding vagueness. “Disappointing speech by @NikkiHaley today. Leads with compromise & defeatism, not vision & courage,” Lila Rose, who heads the group Live Action, tweeted. “We agree that consensus is important, but to achieve consensus we will need to stake out a principled position,” wrote Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America.

    Even Haley’s hosts seemed on the wrong page. “We are clear on Ambassador Haley’s commitment to acting on the American consensus against late-term abortion by protecting unborn children by at least 15 weeks,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement sent to me. But a few hours later, Team Haley emailed me to correct the record: “She committed to working to find a consensus on banning late-term abortion. No specific weeks,” Nachama Soloveichik, Haley’s communications director, wrote. Not only did Haley alienate both sides—she confused them!

    Mary Ziegler: Abortion restrictions targeted at minors never stop there

    Haley is in a tough spot, as are all of the Republican presidential wannabes. They each have their own personal convictions on abortion; former Vice President Mike Pence, for example, has been outspoken in his support for a national ban. But they’re up against an issue that seems to have cost their party a string of recent elections. Most Americans believe that abortion should be accessible, with some limits.

    The “consensus” position, then, is somewhere in the foggy zone between no abortion ever and abortion whenever. But primary elections tend to push candidates toward one extreme or another. “The gap between what the base demands and what swing voters will tolerate has gotten really wide,” Sarah Longwell, the publisher of the Never Trump site The Bulwark, told me. “Nowhere is this more true than on abortion.”

    What all politicians need to do “is settle on a position they believe they can defend, and they need to repeat it consistently and clearly,” Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist, told me. “Any politician whose position on abortion is vague will be wrapped around the axle eventually with questions and doubts about where they actually stand.”

    Some GOP candidates have followed Ayres’s advice. But much axle-wrapping has occurred already in the early days of the 2024 primary season.

    Asked on the campaign trail whether he’d support a 15-week federal ban on abortion, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina told CBS, “I do believe that we should have a robust conversation about what’s happening on a very important topic,” before pivoting so hard to an anecdote about Janet Yellen that I thought he’d need a neck brace. In a follow-up interview, Scott backtracked, clarifying that as president, he would “literally sign the most conservative pro-life legislation” Congress sent to his desk.

    Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is expected to mount a presidential bid, did approve a very conservative state law recently—a six-week abortion ban. But he signed that legislation in the dead of night earlier this month, while most people in Tallahassee were probably in bed. (By contrast, last year, he celebrated the signing of a 15-week ban with a big party at a church.) The following day, DeSantis gave a speech at a Christian university full of students who are opposed to abortion, yet said nothing about his major legislative achievement. He’s mostly stayed quiet about it since—even at glad-handing events in early primary states.

    So far, the only confirmed presidential candidate who seems clear on his position and keenly aware of the political optics is Donald Trump. Despite being hailed by anti-abortion activists as the “most pro-life president” in history, Trump has never been rigid on abortion (probably because he supported abortion rights for most of his life as a public figure), and he doesn’t talk much about the issue now. But a spokesperson told The Washington Post recently that Trump “believes that the Supreme Court, led by the three Justices which he supported, got it right when they ruled this is an issue that should be decided at the State level.” Shorter Trump: I’ve done my bit—it’s up to the states now. God bless.

    If any national consensus on abortion exists, the GOP strategist Ayres said, Trump’s position “is pretty close” to it. Trump has always seemed to have “a lizard-brain sense of where the voters are,” Longwell said. “He has a relationship to the base, and he doesn’t have to pitch what he believes.” And, unlike DeSantis, Trump has never signed a law banning abortion at any stage, so it’ll be harder to pin him down. Sure, there’s an activist class that would like to see abortion banned in all cases. To them, Trump could reply, You got your justices. You’re welcome.

    Read: The new pro-life movement has a plan to end abortion

    Right now Trump and his lizard brain have a commanding lead in the GOP primary. His victory would set up an interesting general-election situation—a fitting one for our complicated post-Roe country: a former president who once personally supported abortion rights and is now politically opposed to them running against a sitting president whose own position on abortion is the exact opposite.

    Until a Republican presidential nominee emerges, we’ll hear many more Haley-esque platitudes that sound thoughtful and weighty but ultimately aren’t.

    “Whether we can save more lives nationally depends entirely on doing what no one has done to date,” Haley told reporters on Tuesday, before wrapping up her speech with—you could almost hear a drumroll—“finding consensus.” The waffling will continue, in other words, until the primary concludes.

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    Elaine Godfrey

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  • Is Trump Still a Viable Candidate? Yes and No.

    Is Trump Still a Viable Candidate? Yes and No.

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    Even before Donald Trump announced he was seeking the presidency again, last week’s election results showed Republicans how difficult it will be to escape the former president’s gravitational pull.

    Widespread voter resistance to a Republican Party refashioned in Trump’s image offset disenchantment with the economy and President Joe Biden’s performance and allowed Democrats to post one of the best first-midterm showings for the sitting president’s party in more than a century. In almost all the key battleground states, the same powerful coalition of voters who opposed Trump in the 2018 and 2020 elections delivered stunning rebukes to GOP candidates running with the former president’s endorsement or in his polarizing style, or both.

    David Frum: Trump’s running, and Republicans have only themselves to blame

    The results were much better for Republicans running in red states and districts. But for party strategists operating anywhere outside the most reliably conservative terrain, the election’s message was unequivocal. In those contested areas, “there is no road back to relevance if Donald Trump continues to be the dominant figure in the Republican Party and especially if he is our nominee in 2024,” Dick Wadhams, the former GOP chair in Colorado, told me.

    Trump’s unusually early presidential announcement, though, made clear that he will not surrender his grip on the GOP without a fight. Last night’s announcement speech itself was instantly forgettable, a rambling greatest-hits collection of familiar priorities (building a border wall), bombastic descriptions of American carnage (“the blood-soaked streets of our once-great cities”), and well-worn grievances (“I’m a victim”) delivered with surprisingly little emotion or energy. He pointedly denied responsibility for the GOP’s disappointing showing last week, instead blaming “the citizens of our country [who] have not yet realized the full extent and gravity of the pain our nation is going through.”

    Yet Trump’s greatest obstacle to a comeback may be the widespread belief among party leaders, donors, and key figures within conservative media that continued hostility toward him is the principal reason Democrats last week succeeded at holding the Senate, adding control of more governorships and state legislatures and minimizing their losses in the House of Representatives, even though Republicans are poised to capture a slim majority in the chamber.

    Such a strong performance is exceedingly rare for the party in the White House during the president’s first midterm. Over at least the past century, it is unprecedented for that party to do so well when the president faces as much discontent as Biden does now. Since 1900, the only other examples of the incumbent party running at least as well as Democrats did this year came for presidents who were soaring in popularity, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934 (during the early New Deal), John F. Kennedy in 1962 (after he defused the Cuban Missile crisis), Bill Clinton in 1998 (amid the backlash to the Republican Congress’s moves to impeach him), and George W. Bush in 2002 (after 9/11).

    This year, though, just 44 percent of voters nationwide said they approved of Biden’s job performance, while a 55 percent majority disapproved, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations. Biden, the exit polls found, did not receive majority support in any of the states with the most closely watched gubernatorial and Senate races, and in some of those states (including Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona), his approval rating barely peaked above 40 percent.

    In the 21st century, as I’ve written, there are very few examples of Senate (and even gubernatorial) candidates from the president’s party winning elections in states where his approval rating had fallen that low. Yet Democrats rolled to unexpected victories in many of the key swing-state races, including Senate contests in Arizona, New Hampshire, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, and governor’s races in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. (Democrats also led in the Georgia Senate race heading for a December runoff between Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock and the Republican challenger, Herschel Walker.) In more reliably blue states, such as Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Minnesota, and New York, Republicans were uniformly frustrated in their hopes for breakthroughs in Senate and governor’s races (though the GOP did flip several New York House districts).

    Read: Trumpism is toxic

    GOP governors did score decisive reelection victories in Republican-leaning states such as Florida, Georgia, and Texas. GOP Senate candidates also won in states with large populations of non-college-educated white voters (particularly Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina). Exit polls showed GOP candidates continuing to benefit from the electoral advantages Trump has bequeathed them: dominant majorities among white voters without a college education, nonurban, and white Evangelical voters, as well as a higher floor of support among Latino voters, particularly men.

    But the overall ledger showed more bright spots for Democrats. And given Americans’ broadly negative views on Biden and the economy, the only plausible explanation for that success is many voters’ unwavering resistance to the Trump-era GOP. Democrats successfully painted many Republican nominees (including most of the high-profile contenders Trump endorsed) as extremists, citing their opposition to legal abortion and refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of Biden’s 2020 victory. Outside the conservative heartland, Democrats in most key statewide races maintained a winning edge among the groups that most resisted Trump: younger voters, college-educated white voters, people of color, and secular adults, with women in each group tilting more toward them than men.

    Most striking, the exit polls found that Democrats carried a plurality of independent voters nationally and won them by bigger margins in most of the marquee contests. “I think, at the end of the day, our crazy was more repelling than their crazy,” Jason Cabel Roe, a Michigan-based GOP consultant, told me.

    Nationally, nearly six in 10 voters said they had an unfavorable opinion of Trump, and they voted almost four to one for Democrats. Among independent voters, Trump’s national unfavorable ratings rose to two-thirds overall, nearly three-fourths among women. Among women especially, that was a far more negative rating than independents gave to Biden.

    Election results showed that the white-collar suburban areas across blue and swing states that rejected Trump remained locked down against GOP candidates this year, even amid the pervasive discontent over the economy.  In Pennsylvania, the Democratic candidate John Fetterman matched Biden’s elevated advantage over Trump in the big four suburban counties outside Philadelphia; Warnock did the same in the populous Cobb and Gwinnett Counties, outside Atlanta. In 2020, Biden became the first Democratic candidate since Harry Truman in 1948 to carry Maricopa County (centered on Phoenix and its suburbs) when he won it by about 45,000 votes; as of this morning, Senator Mark Kelly led there by nearly 100,000 votes. In Colorado, Senator Michael Bennet almost exactly matched Biden’s massive 2020 margins in Denver and its big surrounding suburban counties.

    Especially striking was that these suburban areas broke as badly against GOP candidates who tried to define themselves as centrists, including the Senate nominees in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Washington State.

    In Colorado, the GOP nominated Joe O’Dea, a moderate, energetic candidate who explicitly distanced himself from Trump. Yet he too was swamped. To Wadhams, that pattern is a clear signal that in Democratic-leaning and swing states, virtually no individual Republican can wash off Trump’s stain on the GOP image.

    Heading into the election, Wadhams told me, the key uncertainty in Colorado was whether “those vast numbers of unaffiliated voters who had voted so strongly Democratic and anti-Trump in 2018 and 2020 would … give strong Republican candidates a serious look in 2022,” now that Trump is no longer in the White House. On Election Day, he added, “I got my answer, and the answer was no.” The lesson, he said, “is that even among the unaffiliated voters who I thought we had a shot at, they ultimately said, ‘Those Republicans are still crazy; they are still in the hip pocket of Donald Trump.’”

    House elections produced the same pattern. Republican House gains were concentrated in the least urban districts, where Trump has always been strongest, including sparsely settled distant suburbs and pure rural areas, according to an analysis by The Washington Post’s Philip Bump. But the GOP’s overall House success was constrained because the party still faced a virtual brick wall of resistance in the central cities and inner suburbs of the large metro areas that repeatedly rejected Trump: With about 10 races still to be called, Democrats have won 129 of the 140 seats in the three most urban districts, according to figures Bump provided to me.

    Such disappointing results have led more GOP leaders than at any point in Trump’s political career to publicly declare that the party must now move beyond him. Trump will likely also face much more serious resistance from party elites and leading conservative media outlets. His announcement speech had a musty feel, which may preview the difficulty he could face convincing GOP voters that his day has not passed. And in Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump could face a challenger more formidable than any he swept aside in 2016.

    But, still, displacing Trump may not be so easy. Compared with the Democrats, the GOP presidential primary rules favor winner-take-all systems that benefit the candidate with the largest block of support, even if that’s less than a majority, Benjamin Ginsberg, the former chief counsel for the Republican National Committee, told me. That could benefit Trump because even if the disappointment over last week’s results shrinks his potential ceiling of support, he retains a dedicated floor among non-college-educated, nonurban, and evangelical white Republicans. In 2016, as I wrote at the time, Trump pulled away from the field to become the presumptive nominee at a point where he had not won 50 percent of the vote in any state and had captured only about 40 percent of all ballots cast.

    A second challenge is whether anyone, including DeSantis, can consolidate the college- educated Republican voters most resistant to the former president. Some early 2024 polls already show Trump attracting only about one-third of Republicans holding a four-year degree or more. But that’s about as much support from them as he captured during the competitive stage of the GOP race in 2016; he won because he amassed a dominant advantage among non-college Republicans (many of whom are also evangelical Christians), while those with degrees splintered among many alternatives, such as John Kasich, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz.

    That could easily happen again, particularly if candidates who position themselves as more centrist on social issues, such as Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin and former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, run. Both men are probably too moderate (or at least perceived that way) to win a GOP presidential nomination, but they could siphon away too many of the voters that a more viable alternative like DeSantis would need to overtake Trump.

    Then there is the grueling practical reality of running against Trump, who has shown himself willing to say and do almost anything. In 2016, he bludgeoned Cruz and Rubio so relentlessly that they still seem broken in a manner reminiscent of Game of Thrones. DeSantis might fare better, but until someone actually runs against Trump, it’s impossible to guarantee that they can handle the jackhammer pressure. Nor is it clear that the donors and strategists who now insist that the party must move on from Trump will remain steadfast if he threatens to trash the nominee or run as an independent should he lose.

    Another wild card is a possible indictment of the former president, from investigations by either the Justice Department or the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. An indictment could cause more Republican voters to reflexively rally around him. But it could also make some back away, either because his behavior offends them, or more likely, because they conclude that his legal troubles would further degrade his capacity to win a general election.

    Last week’s results signaled plenty of vulnerabilities also for Biden, including the national-exit-poll finding that two-thirds of voters do not want him to run again. But if the 2022 election demonstrated anything, it is that many Americans who are disappointed in Biden will stand with him and his party nonetheless if the alternative is to entrust power to a Trump-era GOP that they view as a threat to their rights, their values, and democracy itself. That’s the ominous prospect for GOP officials in swing states nervously watching Trump storm into the party’s next presidential nominating contest.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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