Trump the primary candidate is strong. Trump the general election candidate is weak

This article in the New York Times discusses the problem non-Trump Republican presidential candidates are having in dethroning him. The main issue is that there is essentially an unwritten rule that other candidates should never say anything bad about him. The latest example of that came on Tuesday. Trump was found civilly liable for sexual abuse and defamation and ordered to pay $5 million in damages. The response from most other Republican candidates and potential candidates was either to say nothing or to defend him. The only two candidates who criticized him were Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, neither of whom are serious contenders.

After the midterms, Trump looked badly wounded. His preferred candidates lost in nearly every competitive race. Ron DeSantis won reelection by nearly 20 points and looked like he would be the one to beat. Since then, his fortunes have plunged while Trump’s have surged.

As the Times article notes, it can seem like 2015-16 all over again. The belief back then was that Trump’s lead in polling was illusory and that he would come back down to earth. Eventually, the thinking went, he would collapse and his supporters would go elsewhere. Now, the assumption (more like prayer) seems to be that voters will get tired of him and go somewhere else. How that will happen is unclear and those hoping for it don’t seem to have any idea.

The primaries are a long time from now. Voting will not begin until next year and many candidates haven’t officially entered the race. There is also plenty of time for other candidates not currently seen as presidential contenders to enter. Those caveats notwithstanding, the race is Trump’s to lose as of today. He has a commanding lead in polls and endorsements. The unwillingness of other Republicans to attack him makes it very hard to dislodge him from the top.

In the case of DeSantis, he has plenty of time to recover, but he looks more like a one trick pony rather than a political phenom. His one trick was opening schools and not imposing mask mandates. He got a lot of good will from that. Compared to blue states that were mandating masks and closing places down even after vaccines were available, life in Florida was much closer to normal. That, and Florida now being a red state, made him popular and allowed him to win reelection easily.

The problem he has now is that the pandemic is over. There are almost no places that have restrictions still in place. The importance of that to voters now is close to zero and by 2024 it will be ancient history. Without that selling point, he’s just another Republican and much more right-wing than Trump. I have written before about his many general election vulnerabilities and am not going to repeat it here.

Whatever opening there was in the primary to attack Trump looks to have closed. That may change in the future, but, for now, anyone who attacks him will find themselves isolated. It’s a serious collective action problem. The other candidates know Trump is vulnerable in a general election and that he has a lifetime supply of liabilities. While it’s in their collective interest to attack him, they’re not going to coordinate it and their individual incentive is to stay quiet. The result so far is that he has been left untouched despite his many glaring weaknesses.

It may be obvious how weak of a general election candidate he is, but to most Republican primary voters it’s not at all. In their eyes, he won the 2020 election. The news sources most of them watch or listen to don’t talk about his lies and scandals or about how he hobbled Republicans in the midterms. That’s part of why other candidates won’t attack him. Republican primary voters like Trump and the sources of information they get aren’t going to tell them anything that goes against that. Any Republican saying Trump is bad would be swimming against the tide.

While it’s a problem that Trump is liked by most Republicans, non-Trump Republicans don’t help their cause either by rushing to his defense when he gets into trouble. The response of Republicans when he was indicted in March was to rally around him, including from those who claim to want to move on from him. His getting indicted looks like an inflection point where even the mildest criticism of him from other Republicans ended and his lead in the primary was solidified.

The bad news for non-Trump Republicans is that more indictments may be coming up soon. The prosecutor in Georgia has said her office will make a decision about what to do in the coming months. Recently, several fake electors in Georgia were given immunity from prosecution by her office. It is not known for sure why, but immunity isn’t something prosecutors agree to give someone unless they’re going to provide evidence against someone bigger. In addition to Georgia, there is the federal investigation into January 6.

One case other Republicans could try to make against Trump is that they’re more electable. Normally, that’s a compelling message. It was almost the entirety of Biden’s case for himself in the Democratic primary. This is where having voters living in a fantasy world is a big problem. Since most Republican primary voters believe the 2020 election was stolen, Trump has never lost an election and is the more electable candidate. For another Republican candidate to make the case that they’re more electable, they’d have to acknowledge that the 2020 election was legitimate and that Trump is lying about it being stolen.

Even if another Republican could somehow make the case that they’re more electable, it’s not clear that it would matter that much. As I have written about before, the main thing Republican primary voters want is to fight. Winning elections is great, but fighting is more important. Trump is the best fighter of them all. Unlike DeSantis, he can do it without reading from a teleprompter.

Trump has certain strengths that work great in a Republican primary that other candidates don’t have. His having no limits to how low he will go lets him call anyone anything and accuse anyone of anything. It’s not possible to win by going into the gutter with him. Those who try quickly discover that they have limits and wind up looking like chumps.   

It’s always possible that Republican primary voters could decide to go with someone else. That said, I have a hard time seeing it happening. Trump has had their loyalty for more than seven years now. At this point it may be close to impossible for them to go with anyone else. Republican primary voters have stuck with Trump no matter what. There is no reason to think his latest lie, scandal or indictment will be a game changer. If anything, it’s more likely to strengthen him.

I could very well wind up being wrong on this, but if Trump isn’t going to be nominated next year, he will have to somehow collapse on his own. Other Republicans running are not going to do that. Events may happen that cause him to no longer be the front runner, but those are outside the control of other candidates. Only if other candidates smell blood in the water will they start attacking him and by then he will already have been wounded.

Unlike the other candidates, Trump can credibly claim to not support another nominee in the general election. Lots of Republican pundits, consultants, donors and elected officials say they won’t support him in the primary, but if he is nominated they will vote for him. If another candidate said they wouldn’t support him if he is nominated, they’d be buried alive and nobody would believe it anyway.

Trump is much weaker than he was in 2016 and 2020

It should go without saying that winning a primary and winning a general election aren’t the same thing. What can be an asset in a primary can be a liability in a general election and vice-versa. Although that problem isn’t unique to Republicans, it’s a much bigger issue for them than it is for Democrats.

Trump is a great Republican primary candidate. He fights like nobody else does and he has the same perceived enemies as Republican primary voters do. He acts however wants and doesn’t care about anything but himself. Integrity, morality, decency and civility are completely foreign concepts to him. For many Republican primary voters, those are all features, not bugs and are the most important things they’re looking for.

Contrary to what many seem to think about Trump, he is a terrible general election candidate. It’s important to understand the context of when he ran for president before. The situations he was in then are different from where he will be next year.

In 2016, he ran for an open seat. Obama was term limited and couldn’t run again. Democrats had been in the White House for eight years. That’s a long time to be in office and many people naturally just want to see change. It has only happened once since the 22^nd Amendment was ratified that a party has won the presidency three times in a row. In other words, getting elected president twice weighs heavily against that person’s party the third go around.

It is also important to remember that while Trump was unpopular, Hillary Clinton was close behind. She made it easy to paint her as a creature of coastal elites who was corrupt and condescending towards working class people. Having regular news cycles of email coverage didn’t help her cause either. Her handling of that situation and the fallout from it validated nearly every negative perception of her, i.e., secretive, dishonest, arrogant. Her approach to dealing with problems in general reinforced perceptions that she had something to hide. Despite having an opponent who did everything she could to lose, Trump barely squeaked by in the electoral college and lost the popular vote. 

In 2020, Trump was the incumbent. Had it not been for his non-stop jackassery, he would still be president. Before the pandemic, the economy was thriving. Even when the pandemic hit, because of the massive aid provided, the damage was substantially mitigated and he still got high marks on his handling of the economy. Biden wasn’t supposed to win.

Come 2024, Trump won’t be the incumbent nor will he be running for an open seat. He will be challenging the incumbent, something he hasn’t done before. He has always been unhinged, but has only gotten worse since 2020. Since then he has incited an insurrection, is under indictment with maybe more to come and can’t move past the last election. Republican primary voters don’t care about that, but general election voters do.

In 2016 and 2020, Roe v Wade was still the law. Now it’s not and abortion is a live issue with real stakes. During his townhall on CNN Wednesday, Trump got a ton of attention for his lies, conspiracy theories and being a horrible person. But what I think was much more significant was his celebration of the overturning of Roe. He has all but endorsed some kind of federal ban on abortion. It’s not clear how far he would go with it, but if he won’t say where that point is, Democrats will happily do it for him.

Many supporters that he gained in 2016 and 2020 are pro-choice. They could overlook that then because it wasn’t an issue, but now it is. In the midterms and in the Wisconsin supreme court race in April, Democrats made inroads in working class areas where Trump had thrived. Voters there liked him for his stances on things like trade, immigration and entitlements, not because they’re socially conservative. Previously, Trump wasn’t associated with the religious right and social conservatism, but now he is. With abortion now being a major issue, that changes things.

Compared to where he was in 2016 and 2020, Trump is now more right-wing on abortion and is even more obsessed with conspiracy theories. His novelty has worn off. He’s no longer a shiny new object that everyone wants to see. A solid majority of voters believe the 2020 election was legitimate and what happened on January 6 was an attack on democracy. As we saw last year, candidates who are election deniers and associated with January 6 were heavily penalized for it. No candidate is more associated with those things than Trump.

No, this doesn’t mean he can’t win in 2024 if he is nominated. The country is very polarized, which makes landslide wins in presidential elections largely a thing of the past. When someone is the nominee of a major party for president, whatever their chances of winning are, they’re much greater than zero. Biden is not without liabilities of his own. One of the biggest problems he has is his age, which he can’t do anything about. Trump isn’t young either, but, for now, he hasn’t been penalized for his age.

Even if Biden does everything perfectly, there are forces beyond his control. If the economy collapses it won’t be because of something he did nor will it be something he could have prevented, but he will bear the brunt of it anyway. He could have health issues that make it harder for him to campaign and to do his job. He could have stumbles that reinforce perceptions that he’s too old for the job.

Still, if it comes down to a rematch of 2020, Biden should have the edge absent a bad recession, health issues or some kind of implosion. He isn’t especially popular, but he doesn’t need to be. Trump is vastly more unpopular. There is no guarantee that he will be able to assemble the same electorally efficient coalition he had in 2016 and 2020. His presence on the ticket will almost certainly drive suburbs more towards Democrats.

Don’t underestimate Trump, but don’t overestimate him either. He pulled a rabbit out of a hat once, but that doesn’t mean it will happen again. He may be the Buster Douglas of politics. For those not familiar, Buster Douglas is a former boxer best known for handing Mike Tyson his first loss. It was the biggest upset in boxing history. In his next fight, he lost the belt to Evander Holyfield, never won it back and the rest of his career was uneventful.

Trump was the beneficiary of many things that no longer apply. In 2016, virtually every star lined up just right. In 2020, he ran as the incumbent. None of that will be true next year. He could win again but he could just as easily lose in a landslide. Polarization today makes 1972-like landslides all but impossible, but maybe Trump loses by ten points. He helped Democrats defy history last year and set a whole new precedent. He could be the one who breaks the cycle of close-ish presidential races. I’m not predicting that will happen, but people should spend at least as much time thinking about that possibility as they think about the possibility of him winning.

On a final note, be wary of polls of head-to-head matches pitting Biden against Trump right now. They sometimes get a lot of press coverage, but they are meaningless at this point. November 2024 is lightyears away. Polls taken today are worth next to nothing and tell you nothing about how an actual Trump-Biden rematch will go. If you hear someone say something along the lines of, “historically, polls taken at this point are predictive of X, Y and Z,” remember that they’re talking about a very small sample size. Polls taken today could coincidentally wind up being right next year or they could be way off. Just ignore them and go on with your life.