UNITE OR DIE ONLY SLIM GOP HOPE VS. TRUMP
I’m not sure that an assembly of presidential candidates has ever given off stronger loser vibes, if I may use a word favored by the 45th president of the United States, than the Republicans who recently debated at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
A snap 538/Washington Post/Ipsos poll and a CNN focus group showed Ron DeSantis as the night’s winner, and that seems right: After months of campaigning and two debates, DeSantis is still the only candidate not named Donald Trump who has a clear argument for why he should be president and a record that fits his party’s trajectory and mood.
On the stage with his putative rivals, that makes him the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. Against Trump, that’s probably going to be good for an extremely distant second place.
The path that I (and others) once saw for the Florida governor, where he would run on his political success and voters would drift his way out of weariness with Trump’s destructive impact on Republican fortunes, has been closed off. The path other pundits claimed to see for non-Trump candidates, where they were supposed to run directly against Trump and call him out as a threat to the republic, was never a realistic one for anything but a protest candidate, as Chris Christie is demonstrating.
So what remains for Trump’s rivals besides loserdom? Only this: They can refuse to simply replay 2016 and figure out a way to join their powers against Trump.
This is not a path to likely victory. Trump is much stronger than eight years ago, when the crowded battle for second and third place in New Hampshire and South Carolina helped him build unstoppable momentum and the idea of a Ted Cruz-Marco Rubio unity ticket was pondered but never achieved. He’s also much stronger than Bernie Sanders four years ago, when Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar traded the ego-inflating satisfactions of delegate accumulations for a place on Biden’s bandwagon.
But unity has been the road not taken for anti-Trump Republicans thus far.
One problem, of course, is that unity still requires a standard-bearer — it would have been Cruz first and Rubio second in 2016, for instance, which is probably one reason Rubio didn’t make the deal — and DeSantis’ edge over his rivals isn’t wide enough for them to feel they need to defer to him.
Another problem, central to Trump’s resilience, is that the different nonTrump voters want very different things. Some want DeSantis’ attempts to execute populist ambitions more effectively or the novel spin on Trumpism contained in Vivek Ramaswamy’s performance art. Others want the promise of a George W. Bush restoration offered by Nikki Haley and Tim Scott; others still want the Never Trump absolutism of Christie. Would Ramaswamy’s voters go for Scott and Haley? Doubtful.
Would Scott’s or Christie’s voters accept DeSantis? Probably, but he hasn’t made the sale.
If the non-Trump Republicans were serious enough about their larger cause, they would be planning now for the morning after Iowa. If Haley or (less plausibly) Scott comes in second and DeSantis falls to third, the Florida governor should drop out and endorse the winner. If DeSantis wins but Haley is leading in New Hampshire, then he should offer a place on his ticket, and she should accept.
Since this maneuvering could still just lead to Trump winning primaries by “only” 60-40 instead of 52-21-14-7-6, a final impediment to consolidation is just the fear of looking a little bit ridiculous — like Cruz and Carly Fiorina campaigning as supposed running mates in the waning moments of the 2016 primaries.
And that, too, is also part of how Trump has always steamrollered his Republican opponents. They tend to hesitate, Prufrock-like, on the brink of boldness, while he rolls the dice without a single qualm or doubt.