There are all kinds of scenarios you can read about late challenges to Donald Trump’s very likely Republican presidential nomination. I decided to rain on one such parade at New York:

Among the Republicans who are scheming to prevent Donald Trump’s third straight presidential nomination, there seems to be a notion that if the GOP presidential field him can be winnowed in Iowa and New Hampshire, some savior of the party will emerge and beat him in a one-on-one fight. The argument seems to go back to a highly debatable (I’d actually call it wrong) proposition: The large field of rivals was the crucial factor in enabling Trump to win his first nomination in 2016. But even if it were true that a smaller field could have vanquished Trump in 2016, he’s arguably a much stronger candidate right now than he was eight years ago. For example: He’s currently at 55.8 percent among Republican voters nationally in the RealClearPolitics polling averages. In 2016, he did not hit 50 percent in any national poll prior to nailing down the nomination in May.

Still, some say we should ignore the national polls and just focus on the early state races that could produce a Trump-vanquishing champion. That’s exactly what New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu argued Monday in a New York Times op-ed:

“The best indicator of Mr. Trump’s strength is looking to where the voters are paying attention: in states where candidates are campaigning, television ads are running, and there is a wide range of media attention on every candidate.

“In Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states that will vote in the 2024 Republican primaries, Mr. Trump is struggling. In both Iowa and New Hampshire, he is consistently polling in the low 40 percent range. The floor of his support may be high, but his ceiling is low.”

I wouldn’t call a candidate who has a 26-point lead in Iowa (again, per the RCP averages) and a 30-point lead in New Hampshire one who is “struggling” in those two states. Sununu appears to assume anyone who is not for Trump now will never support him, which wasn’t true in 2016 (when he gained strength every time a rival dropped out) and isn’t much supported by the evidence of Trump’s high favorability numbers among Republicans today.

At some early point, if Trump keeps winning big, he’s going to become unbeatable. No Republican candidate who has won both Iowa and New Hampshire has ever been denied the presidential nomination. Will Trump be the first? It sure sounds like another of those Establishment Republican fantasies whereby Trump is regularly underestimated.

Indeed, the bigger question about the early states in 2024 is whether Trump will have nailed down the nomination before the field is small enough to give anyone a clean shot at the heavy front-runner. Several candidates (notably Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy) are focusing mostly on New Hampshire; they aren’t going to drop out after an underwhelming performance in Iowa. Tim Scott and Nikki Haley are likely to hang onto their candidacies fanatically until their home state of South Carolina — the fourth state to vote — holds its primary in late February.

Even without the post-Iowa winnowing Sununu is counting on, it’s true there is a history of New Hampshire voters interrupting the premature victory celebrations of Iowa winners in both parties. Is it possible an Iowa win by Trump would be Pyrrhic, dooming his candidacy?

That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense once you examine the recent Republican candidates who have won Iowa and then quickly succumbed in New Hampshire and beyond. In 2008, 2012, and 2016, Iowa was won by Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Ted Cruz, respectively. Huckabee barely had two nickels to rub together; Santorum and Cruz upset national front-runners (Mitt Romney and Donald Trump) who came back to crush them in New Hampshire and later primaries. None of these doomed Iowa winners are in anything like the position Trump is in right now.

Anything’s possible in politics, and Trump’s legal troubles could in theory extend the contest for the nomination even if he’s winning initially (though so far those legal troubles seem to be helping him among Republicans). Candidates should definitely plan beyond the earliest states even if they are unlikely to be around for, say, Florida (where Trump and DeSantis could wage a dual home-turf battle) or Georgia (where Trump’s rivals are angling for an endorsement by Trump’s nemesis Brian Kemp).

But the odds say Trump’s rivals better beat him or at least give him a scare in Iowa, where it’s possible to punch above your weight with a superior ground game. It’s also a state the 45th president lost in 2016. If he romps there, he’s probably all but a lock for the nomination, barring crazy developments. And all those pleas to candidates to get out of the way of a fictional Trump-slayer will represent a waste of time and energy.

Since the latest Trump indictment dropped in my home state of Georgia, I offered some thoughts at New York about the Peach State being his nightmare jurisdiction:

There’s an old saying among southerners that “you can’t go to hell without going through Atlanta,” which is a reference to the many, many air passengers who have to transfer from plane to plane at Atlanta’s Jackson-Hartsfield Airport to reach their destinations. Donald Trump’s journey through criminal courtrooms near and far is taking him through Atlanta, too, we learned on August 14, as a Fulton County grand jury indicted the former president on a variety of charges stemming from the Georgia edition of his plot to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. And unless he gets very lucky, Trump’s legal experience in Atlanta will be as hellish as a layover headed nowhere, as the charges force him to relive some of his least favorite moments of the last three years.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, and likely the jurors called forth to judge Trump, can and will be demonized by Team Trump and his MAGA supporters as Democrats “weaponizing” the legal system to take down the 45th president before he can return triumphantly to the White House. But many of the key witnesses testifying to Trump’s criminality will be his fellow Republicans in a state that has defied his wishes again and again. Trump’s losing streak in the state began in 2020, when he lost the state narrowly to Joe Biden in an election result certified by Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, who administered the election, and recertified by Republican governor Brian Kemp.

All Trump’s efforts to change that result represented challenges to his own party’s power structure in the state, which refused to back down on the conviction that it was an honest election honestly counted and duly confirmed before God and the federal government. Trump and his allies had to lie like madmen to keep Georgia’s electoral votes contested, and from the president on down, they ensnared themselves serially in fraudulent charges and felonious pressure campaigns, most notably in Trump’s own plea to Raffensperger to manufacture some votes for him. And while their high jinks from fake-elector schemes to made-up fraud incidents echoed what they were doing in other battleground states, it’s the solid phalanx of Republican statewide elected officials fighting the election coup that made Georgia special.

Trump’s humiliation in Georgia didn’t end with Raffensperger’s refusal to “find” him some votes or with the refusal of Georgia’s Republican legislature to certify fake electors. His obsession with his attempted election coup was widely blamed for the defeat of two Republican U.S. senators in a January 2021 general-election runoff that cost the GOP control of the upper chamber. But worse yet, Trump sought to purge Raffensperger, Kemp, and several other GOP officeholders who didn’t bend the knee during the 2022 Republican primaries, and he and his surrogates had their asses handed to them. In the midterm election, Kemp, Raffensperger, and other Republicans romped to victory. The conspicuous loser was Trump’s hand-picked Senate candidate Herschel Walker, again robbing the GOP of a shot at Senate control.

Suffice it to say that as Trump faces a potentially devastating criminal proceeding in Georgia, there are very few of his fellow partisans willing to defend him, and some of the biggest names in the state GOP have already testified against him before the grand jury and are likely to incriminate him in open court (a very open court since the proceedings may be televised). Such sympathy as Trump demands as the putative 2024 Republican presidential nominee may be eroded by racketeering charges, which will surely make potential co-conspirators keep their distance. And if Trump is found guilty by a Fulton County jury at trial, he not only cannot pardon himself as he might do with a federal conviction but cannot even throw himself on Brian Kemp’s mercy. In Georgia, pardons are administered not by the governor but by an appointed state board that in the past has limited pardons to offenders who have already done their time.

All in all, Georgia is the last place in America where Donald Trump wants to face the music for his misdeeds. He should have skipped committing election-related crimes in his nightmare state even as wealthy travelers find ways to fly around Atlanta.

 

It can be oddly fascinating to watch a presidential campaign implode, particularly if you don’t like the candidate. That’s where I am with Ron DeSantis, as I explained at New York:

Ron DeSantis remains, for the moment, the most formidable rival to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. But it’s been a long, long time since he’s gotten any particularly good news in the polls. A new Emerson College survey shows him dropping into single digits and third place in New Hampshire, behind Chris Christie. In the RealClearPolitics averages of national GOP polls, he’s dropped from 30.1 percent at the end of March to 14.8 percent now. He looks relatively strong in Iowa, where it appears he is making a desperate all-or-nothing stand, but mostly just by comparison. Trump only leads him by 27 points in the first-in-the-nation caucus state, though sparse Iowa polling may disguise a less positive environment for DeSantis.

Polling aside, recent news emanating from the DeSantis campaign has been generally quite bad. He’s had three campaign leadership shakeups, a big round of staff layoffs, and at least one major “reboot” of his message and strategy. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign is still building steam, and its main problem is that too much of his vast financial resources are going into legal costs in connection with indictments that aren’t hurting him at all among Republican voters. Another bad development for DeSantis is that a large field of rivals has remained in the race, spoiling his hopes for a one-on-one battle with the front-runner.

Once an almost obscenely well-funded campaign, the DeSantis effort appears to have a high burn rate and some serious donor defections. And more generally, he’s no longer the darling of Republican and conservative elites, most particularly Rupert Murdoch.

The trajectory of DeSantis 2024 should remind political observers of another recent Republican presidential bid that at this point in 2015 was about to enter a dramatic plunge into premature defeat well before voters voted: Scott Walker.

Read my colleague Jonathan Chait’s description of Walker as he appeared at the beginning of that race and see if it doesn’t sound exactly like the image DeSantis had built until his recent troubles:

“Scott Walker won three statewide elections in Wisconsin, which has supported the Democrat in every presidential election since 1984. He led national Republican polling as recently as March. He led in Iowa by enormous margins as recently as August. The Koch brothers loved him. Walker had spent his entire adult life developing an almost superhuman fealty to the principles of the modern Republican Party, its Reaganolotry, and, above all, a ruthless commitment to crushing its enemies beneath his boot heel. If there was anything that gave Walker joy … it was the goal of wiping organized labor off the map. As Grover Norquist enthused in May, ‘when you meet him, it’s like seeing somebody who sits on a throne on the skulls of his enemies.’”

Like DeSantis, Walker was relatively young, in his 40s, and thus was able to generate a sense of generational change in his party (the two previous GOP nominees were 72 and 65 years old, respectively). Like the Floridian, the Wisconsin governor had found the absolute sweet spot of the GOP zeitgeist: the strident ideologue who somehow still appeals to swing voters, and who strikes fear into the hearts of liberals everywhere as he destroys their counterparts in his state. Walker’s very colorlessness (like DeSantis’s) enhanced his reputation as a methodical Death Star come to remake America in his own repulsive image.

The question now is whether DeSantis will also emulate Walker in the ultimate futility of his campaign. There are as many parallels in the decline of their candidacies as in their rise to national political celebrity. Margaret Hartmann’s timeline for Walker’s brief campaign shows some of the same weaknesses as DeSantis’s, and also how quickly his problems snowballed:

“According to Real Clear Politics’ polling averages, during most of the first half of 2015, Walker was among the top three GOP presidential candidates in national polls, and led in Iowa by a wide margin …

“Some outlets ran stories such as “How Scott Walker Will Win” and “Six Reasons Why Scott Walker Will Be Elected President,” but the Times raised the possibility that Walker’s shift to the right on issues like same-sex marriage, immigration, and ethanol subsidies to maintain his lead in Iowa was making him appear inauthentic and costing him elsewhere in the nation.”

Coincidentally or not, DeSantis’s Iowa-driven decision to run to the right of Trump also had less than ideal consequences for his candidacy. Also like Walker, DeSantis seems to have also underestimated Trump. Walker pretty clearly didn’t know what hit him, Hartmann suggested:

“With Trump dominating the political conversation and a crowded field of 16 other Republican candidates, Walker’s campaign began imploding in earnest. After months on top, a CNN/ORC poll found Walker had dropped to third place in Iowa behind Trump and Ben Carson.”

At this point, Walker’s lack of charisma started becoming a problem for him in the retail political environment of Iowa, just as it’s a problem for DeSantis, especially after he made the dubious decision to promise to appear in all the state’s 99 counties. But what actually did in Walker after his campaign lost its magic were mediocre debate performances, beginning in August:

“Walker’s appearance in the first GOP debate was unmemorable. Just before the debate, he had more than 11 percent in an average of the last nine national polls, but afterward he dropped below 5 percent.”

In the second debate, in September, Walker was all but invisible, struggling to draw questions and attention. And then he was done, with his support dropping to below one percent in national polls even as Trump soared and Ted Cruz replaced Walker as the “true conservative” in the race.

It’s entirely possible that Ron DeSantis is one poor debate performance away from the sad fate of Scott Walker. He’s supposedly been deep into preparations for the first candidate debate on August 23 for a while now, though he’s handicapped by not knowing if Trump is going to show. But his margin for error has disappeared. He’s hardly the political behemoth he appeared to be earlier this year, and if he can’t turn things around soon, impatient Republicans will either resign themselves to another Trump nomination or quickly find a new alternative.

You’d figure non-white candidates for president would be particularly unlikely to descend to old-school racist tactics. In at least one case, you’d figure wrong, as I observed at New York:

The record number of non-white candidates running for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination is a source of pride for Republicans who deny their party has become a MAGA white-nationalist cult. But the candidates themselves often seem to be walking a tightrope when addressing the overwhelmingly white Republican primary electorate. The two South Carolinians in the race are good examples: Black U.S. senator Tim Scott and Indian American former governor Nikki Haley have both touted their ability to overcome racial discrimination as a personal triumph while denying systemic racism is still a problem for the country.

Indian American tech tyro Vivek Ramaswamy hasn’t spent a lot of time talking about the discrimination he might have faced; his whole claim to fame, thanks to lavish attention from Fox News, is being a crusader against “woke corporations” and anything like anti-discrimination policies in the public or private sectors. Predictable as that stance may be, Ramaswamy is now blazing new trails as a non-white candidate peddling racist dog whistles. During an appearance in Iowa over the weekend, his gratuitous attack on Juneteenth as a “useless” holiday that should be replaced with an Election Day holiday drew chuckles and applause from the all-white audience.

Ramaswamy called Juneteenth a “made-up” holiday “imposed under political duress” after the killing of George Floyd.         This actually represented a two-cushion shot to the far-right side of the table. His suggestion that we make Election Day a national holiday was accompanied by proposals to get rid of early and electronic voting and impose a national voter-ID system. I’m pretty sure Ramaswamy is too smart to believe the various forms of convenience voting came out of nowhere in 2020 to thwart Donald Trump. They have been spreading state by state for many decades, often promoted by Republicans. So the premise for his dismissal of Juneteeth comes right out of the MAGA fever swamps..

But the idea of Juneteenth’s arising from nowhere after Floyd’s death is either deeply ignorant or malignantly cynical. Juneteenth commemorations of the last slaves to learn of their emancipation in 1865 date back to 1866; the first state Juneteenth holiday was established in Texas in 1980; and before Joe Biden made it a federal holiday, 49 states had official observances. Ramaswamy’s glib dismissal of Juneteenth as “redundant” is even more insulting. Yes, the emancipation of slaves was the first step in the struggle for justice and equality for which Martin Luther King Jr. died, but both the destruction of slavery and the end of Jim Crow were distinct and momentous occurrences in U.S. history.

As anyone with access to Google can establish, Ramaswamy was singing a different tune about Juneteenth when the holiday was commemorated less than two months ago, when he called it “a celebration of the American Dream itself.”

Even then, Ramaswamy was anxious to make sure no white folks imagined that Juneteenth provided any reason for self-examination or discomfort. But he didn’t call it “useless.” I guess he needed some attention that his vast personal wealth couldn’t buy. Or perhaps he wanted to show Trump, his much-admired role model, that he really was learning the ropes.

In the wake of yet another pro-choice ballot measure victory in Ohio, I offered some thoughts at New York:

During the half-century when Roe v. Wade was law, anti-abortion advocates and their Republican allies frequently complained that the right of “the people” to determine abortion policy had been stolen by the unelected Supreme Court. It became a classic “wedge issue” benefiting the GOP, as frustrated traditionalist Catholics and conservative Evangelical Protestants left the Democratic Party in droves, providing votes and grassroots muscle to the GOP for decades. This legacy culminated in the devil’s bargain that cultural conservatives struck with Donald Trump in 2016.

Well, in the 13 months since the newly reactionary Supreme Court created by Trump reversed Roe and “the people” regained that right (which in reality meant the right to deny other people reproductive rights), voters in red and blue states alike have wherever possible used this freedom to restore the rights the courts and Republican legislators have sought to steal. It happened again on Tuesday in Ohio, the Republican-trending former battleground state where voters decisively rejected a sneaky GOP bid to make it harder to write abortion rights into the state’s constitution through a ballot initiative in November.

This is the seventh statewide abortion-ballot measure since Roe was reversed, and pro-choice forces have won every one of them, even in conservative states like Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, and now Ohio. When Ohio voters (more than likely) enact the constitutional amendment Republicans failed to block, the tally will be 8–0. And in 2024, voters in at least seven other states will decide on measures to protect or deny abortion rights.

If the rout continues, giving “the people” control over abortion policy may be quite the pyrrhic victory for the anti-abortion movement and even more so for the GOP whose electoral fortunes could be caught in the powerful backlash to Roe’s reversal. That backlash is already the prime suspect in the disappointing 2022 midterm results for Republicans who expected a “red wave” that never quite materialized. But the depth and breadth of popular commitment to abortion rights going into what may be an apocalyptic 2024 presidential cycle remains significantly unclear.

It should be understood, however, that the option of using “direct democracy” to restore abortion rights via citizen-initiated constitutional amendments that circumvent Republican legislators (as has now happened in both Michigan and Ohio) is available only in a total of 16 states. Voters may also fight back in cases where GOP lawmakers are trying to abolish state constitutional abortion rights that have been recognized by state courts and need voter ratification of their handiwork (that’s what happened in 2022 in Kansas and Kentucky). But to a significant extent, the fate of the right to choose in many politically contested states will continue to depend on partisan control of major offices, including legislative chambers, governorships, and in some cases elected judges. And that’s aside from the power of Congress to preempt state abortion laws if one party or the other secures a trifecta and can overcome a Senate filibuster. So even in states with no abortion ballot test on tap in 2024, the subject will very much be on the ballot via the two polarized pro-choice and anti-abortion major parties.

The pro-choice state-ballot-measure winning streak, the impact of the subject on key 2022 races, and bountiful polling showing pro-choice majorities in all but the most conservative corners of the country have combined to convince many Republican operatives and even elected officials that the subject is a loser for the GOP. When Donald Trump said just that at the beginning of 2023, it produced a lot of consternation among anti-abortion advocates who had previously adored him for his successfully redeemed promise to appoint justices who would overturn Roe. The Ohio results will convince even more Republicans that the 45th president was right. Perhaps they will even whisper to their abortion-obsessed allies in and beyond religious conservative circles to show some patience, keep their mouths shut, and help the GOP obtain enough power to give their friends what they want when political conditions are more favorable.

But now that Roe is gone, abortion politics is a 24/7 business, and anti-abortion activists are out of patience; that’s particularly true among the newer and more militant organizations like Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and Students for Life. They are eager to use the competitive Republican presidential-nomination contest to increase, not hide, their leverage over the GOP, and Trump’s candid remarks on abortion politics have encouraged his rivals to pledge greater allegiance to the cause. Mike Pence and Tim Scott have both leapt to embrace the hard-core position of favoring a national six-week abortion ban. Ron DeSantis has punctuated his effort to run to Trump’s right by bragging to Iowans about the six-week ban (deemed “too harsh” by Trump) he signed in Florida.

It’s possible Trump will cruise to the nomination without renewing the vows underlying his marriage of convenience to the anti-abortion movement, and abortion will recede as a 2024 campaign issue. But national Democrats, who know a good wedge issue when they see one, almost certainly won’t let general-election voters who is pledged to protect abortion rights and who has worked hard to abolish them. We don’t have a partisan breakdown of the vote from Ohio (the state does not have voter registration by party), but there were clear indications the “No on Issue 1” coalition included quite a few Republican voters, as did the similar pro-choice coalitions in other states with previous abortion-ballot measures. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump has presented county-level data comparing 2020 partisan-vote margins to abortion-ballot measures in Ohio and five other states (California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, and Montana) and the results are striking:

“In Ohio, about one-fifth of counties that voted for Trump in 2020 opposed Issue 1. The same pattern held in the six states included above. Of the 510 counties included in the analysis, only two counties that voted for Biden in 2020 also opposed access to abortion. Among Trump-voting counties, 81 supported that access.

“To use the parlance of political observers, abortion, particularly when presented to voters directly, is an effective wedge issue for the left.”

In a hypothetical Biden-Trump general-election rematch, a significant number of anti-Trump Republicans and Republican-leaning independents will be under pressure to defect to Biden, as a decent number did in 2020. Abandoned pro-choice swing voters of every background will have another reason to conduct their own protest against the GOP, or at least split their tickets.

The prominence of the issue will be enhanced in the media and the minds of voters by conspicuous abortion-rights ballot measures that will face 2024 voters in DeSantis’s Florida, and perhaps in ultra-battleground Arizona. It’s a bad look for today’s allegedly populist, anti-elite GOP to deny people fundamental rights or even the power to determine policies affecting their fundamental rights. Abortion rights could be the populist cause of the next decade or so. That’s a real problem for Republicans.