Trump's presidential campaign, two very different views

Donald Trump’s entry to the 2024 presidential race hasn’t set the world on fire. He has held few rallies, gained few (if any) important endorsements, and seen his poll numbers decline steeply in relation to those of Ron DeSantis, who is likely to be Trump’s main GOP rival.

Nonetheless, Christian Schneider of National Review contends that it’s a “delusion” to think DeSantis will “free the GOP from Trump’s toxic embrace.” There is “scant evidence to suggest [DeSantis] has overtaken the former president in the eyes of GOP faithful,” Schneider declares.

The first of these sentence is revealing. The second is wrong.

Schneider, it seems, considers the GOP’s embrace of Trump a sin for which Republicans must pay for years. When he concludes his article by saying that DeSantis is not the main story of the 2024 presidential campaign and that “what matters most is the presence of the large orange shadow emanating from Mar-a-Lago,” I wonder whether this is an evidence-based assessment or the author’s preferred act in a morality play.

To be fair, Schneider cites evidence. He points to the Real Clear Politics poll average that has Trump leading DeSantis by a nearly 2-1 advantage and to a Wall Street Journal poll of likely GOP primary voters that, he says, had Trump ahead of DeSantis, 52-38.

But in the most recent WSJ poll, the numbers are reversed. It’s DeSantis 52, Trump 38.
Another very recent poll, this one from USA Today/Suffolk, has DeSantis ahead by an even larger margin of about 2-1.

There are other signs that Republicans increasingly view Trump as yesterday’s man. Conservative bloggers who once apologized for Trump’s bad behavior, or simply ignored it, are now openly critical. Sensing that the tide has turned, they no longer fear reader backlash.

Trump loves doing well in polls. How will he react to doing poorly in them, even among Republicans? How will he react to the fact that fellow Republicans, whom he believes (reasonably in some cases) owe their success to him, decline to provide an endorsement or even enter the race against him?

My guess is that Trump will lash out as, indeed, he already has to some degree. If he becomes more desperate, he likely will indulge in more and more counterproductive conduct — e.g. calling Florida’s popular governor “DeSanctimonious” and suggesting that the Constitution be suspended.

It’s probably true, as Schneider says, that the biggest reason for Trump’s decline in popularity among Republicans is his role in the GOP’s under-performance this November. Schneider seems disgusted that it took the midterms for Republicans to turn away from Trump as their preferred candidate in 2024.

I understand Schneider’s sentiment. I wish it hadn’t taken the third bad election cycle in a row to turn Republicans against Trump. However, the main thing is that the turning seems well underway.

Park MacDougald at UnHerd presents a view of Trump’s 2024 prospects that differs radically from Schneider’s. He argues that we’re seeing “the end of Trump.”

It is a dangerous business to predict the political demise of Trump, who has been making pundits look stupid since he stepped onto the national stage. Few took him seriously as a candidate when he first declared in 2015, few believed he could defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016, and few believed he could come within a few tens of thousands of votes of re-election in 2020. But this time is different. Trump really is done. 

As you can tell, my view is closer to MacDougald’s than to Schneider’s. However, I think MacDougald is underestimating Trump’s appeal and his potential to remain relevant.

MacDougald attributes most of Trump’s hold on Republicans to his status as GOP standard bearer — a status he no longer holds:

Most Trump supporters — aside from a numerically small but electorally important slice of Obama-Trump voters in the Midwest — liked him because they were Republicans and he was the Republican candidate. Recall that Trump won a plurality, not a majority, of the GOP primary vote in 2016, and that was against a fatally crowded establishment field — similar to what Bernie Sanders accomplished in 2020 before Barack Obama intervened to unify his party’s establishment behind Joe Biden. But the voters who backed other GOP candidates were not about to cast a vote for Hillary Clinton, no matter what Trump did or said. 

Once Trump was the nominee and, later, the president, the most powerful force in American politics, negative partisanship, was there to do the heavy lifting.

There may be more truth to this against-the-grain assessment than many suppose. Yet, I think it underestimates the extent to which Trump gained popularity because he was a different kind of Republican candidate.

Following his 2020 defeat and even the events of January 6, a high percentage of Republicans identified more with Trump than with the GOP. To me, this suggests that there was considerably more to Trump’s popularity than his party status and “negative partisanship.” Trump spoke to a great many Republicans in important ways that others in his party hadn’t, and this created a huge amount of loyalty.

The other possible weakness in MacDougald’s analysis is that it ignores the prospect that Trump might run as an independent. I don’t want to overstate this concern. It’s not easy for an independent to get on the ballot in the various states, and the low-energy nature of Trump’s current campaign (to date) raises questions as to whether he’s up to such an effort, given it’s extremely low probability of elevating him back to the presidency.

And let’s not forget Trump’s legal difficulties. Surely, the former president would rather see a Republican-appointed Attorney General than Merrick Garland or whichever Trump-hating leftist would succeed him in a Democratic administration.

Nonetheless, I don’t think we can rule out Trump running as an independent. Therefore, even if Trump fails to secure the GOP nomination, we can’t say with a high degree of confidence that we’re seeing the end of him as a political force.

But it’s starting to look that way.