Has Trump already won the GOP Primary?
Trump, competing in the GOP primary, is not unlike late '80s Mike Tyson. His opponents enter the ring already defeated by their own fear.
Much is being made today of the effects of the Fox-Dominion trial and how it may have already consolidated the Trump vote in the GOP presidential primary. Time will tell. Earlier this year, Ron DeSantis gave the Trump campaign a scare with his relative ease in capturing the fancy of the donor class of the Republican party. But as early as late last month, the donors started openly questioning if the Florida Governor who won re-election so handily in the midterms indeed had the stuff to actually beat Trump. The money men in the GOP — and it is almost always, unfortunately, men — are getting anxious.
And what about the swing states? Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis narrowly leads President Biden in battleground states like Arizona and Pennsylvania, according to Public Opinion Strategies and obtained by McClatchyDC. Still, Trump now leads DeSantis by twenty points in the 538 polling average for the 2024 election. Two other polls — A Morning Consult poll last week and a Reuters/Ipsos poll, also last week — also show Trump now leading DeSantis by double digits. It should be noted, however, that Rudy Giuliani was ahead at a similar point in time during the 2012 primary and his candidacy came to naught. So there’s that, on the question of polling roughly nine months away from the first primaries and caucuses. But even the notion of the inevitability of a Trump-DeSantis battle to the nomination seems, at the present, to be clearly outdated.
Trump is not as invincible as he once appeared in the Republican party, thanks to DeSantis and the second half of 2022 and the midterms. One of Trump’s greatest weak points within the Republican Party is his relationship with white Evangelicals. He was never, to put it kindly, quite one of them. No one would ever accuse Trump of having a Christian temperament. But the former President was tolerated in those circles because largely he gave them the great gift of a majority on the Supreme Court and the toppling of Roe v Wade. But, as Chris Homans described it in the Times:
White evangelical voters were central to Mr. Trump’s first election, and he remains overwhelmingly popular among them. But a Monmouth University poll in late January and early February found Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida who has not declared his candidacy for president but appears to be Mr. Trump’s most formidable early rival, leading Mr. Trump by 7 percentage points among self-identified evangelical Republican voters in a head-to-head contest.
It was an early sign that as he makes a bid for a return to office, Mr. Trump must reckon with a base that has changed since his election in 2016 — and because of it.
Trump got a “mulligan” in 2018 after it was widely reported that he had an affair with a porn star and Playboy Playmate, but 2023 is another chapter and verse altogether. Evangelicals are reflecting on their relationship with Trump going forward. This uncertainty as to who is their guy in ‘24 has left a yawning chasm with Evangelicals, one which former Vice President and evangelical radio host Mike Pence — as well as DeSantis and Senator Tim Scott — clamors to close. Tim Alberta writes, further, in The Atlantic of Trump’s fraught relationship with white Evangelicals:
Trump’s relationship with the evangelical movement—once seemingly shatterproof, then shaky after his violent departure from the White House—is now in pieces, thanks to his social-media tirade last fall blaming pro-lifers for the Republicans’ lackluster midterm performance. Because of his intimate, longtime ties to the religious right, Pence understands the extent of the damage. He is close personal friends with the organizational leaders who have fumed about it; he knows that the former president has refused to make any sort of peace offering to the anti-abortion community and is now effectively estranged from its most influential leaders.
If Trump can keep a double-digit distance between him and DeSantis and once again project inevitability it is not inconceivable that white evangelicals will fall in line. The next few weeks will be crucial to the DeSantis campaign, which still has more than $100 million to spend on the 2024 election. Can DeSantis project strength? Can DeSantis close the gap with Trump? Can DeSantis continue to raise big donor money — the mother’s milk of American politics (yuck)? Former Governor Chris Christie — who appears to be running for a full time job at ABC News and not President or Vice President — doesn’t seem to think so and is firing away, with extreme prejudice, at DeSantis.
In other words, DeSantis, once the de facto frontrunner (as recently as November 2022), appears to have stalled. He is now getting tagged by a journeyman candidate with no constituency, a punk. And that is good news for the Trump campaign, which, as expected, is hitting the DeSantis campaign at maximum velocity and getting little, if any, blowback, despite the indictment. From Alex Shepherd of The New Republic:
DeSantis, wary of alienating Trump’s base, has responded tepidly. But he’s hardly alone. Everyone is struggling to compete with Donald Trump right now. Mike Pence and Nikki Haley can barely scrounge 10 points between them in FiveThirtyEight’s polling average. Mike Pompeo, Trump’s former secretary of state, announced on Friday evening that he wouldn’t be running at all. Other Republicans, looking at Trump’s dominance, seem to be wary of entering the race. The GOP primary hasn’t even begun, yet it looks like it’s already over.
It isn’t of course. Yet. Chris Christie, Asa Hutchinson and Mary Cheney — all minor players within the GOP — have yet to take their shots at Trump. But even if they do, very little damage will likely occur because all three are marginal figures within the new, populist, MAGA Republican Party. Until the field of actual-possible candidates — Haley, DeSantis, Pence, Scott — overcome their abject terror at the rabid Trump vote and starts throwing actual haymakers at the frontrunner, the contest is indeed over before it ever even really began.
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