HARBINGER OF DEFEAT?
Former President Donald Trump’s supporters are touting his victory in the Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll as yet more proof that their man is unstoppable. History, however, suggests otherwise.
It’s true that Trump demolished his closest competitor, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, 62 percent to 20 percent. One might quibble by noting that this year’s CPAC was much smaller than previous versions, suggesting that it drew only the truest of true Trump believers. Still, a 42 percentage-point lead over a man who often defeats Trump in national surveys of Republican primary voters is nothing to sneeze at.
In fact, however, this seemingly good news is a historic harbinger of defeat. The CPAC straw poll has been conducted regularly for decades. The winner of the poll conducted in the year just before a presidential election in which there is no Republican incumbent has always gone on to lose the primary contest.
Some losers do well before they drop out — take Jack Kemp in 1987 and Mitt Romney in 2007. Others become answers to trivia questions, like Phil Gramm in 1995 and Gary Bauer in 1999. Throw in the Paul family’s quick washouts after winning the poll in 2011 (Ron) and 2015 (Rand), and the CPAC pre-election year straw poll has a perfect record in prognosticating primary defeat by the time the actual voting begins.
Perhaps past won’t be prologue. But Trump’s CPAC speech and a brief video announcing a new policy agenda gave his opponents a lot of targets to shoot at.
His bizarre video started with an announcement that his next administration would promote building 10 “Freedom Cities.” Since roughly a third of the land mass of the United States is owned by the federal government, Trump said, it was time to start building “new cities in America again” — and apparently putting the federal government in charge of nationwide municipal planning and development. Do conservatives really want that? Not to mention that most of that federal land is in Alaska or the Western wilderness — not necessarily the top places Americans want to move to.
DeSantis in particular should have a field day ripping into Trump’s proposal. Florida was the fastest-growing state last year for the first time since 1957.
Private developers have been building new cities there for decades without federal subsidies or planning. They have been doing this because people and businesses want to live there.
Trump also veered into fantasy when he said he would make America the leader in developing flying cars. Okay, he technically said they would be “vertical takeoff and landing vehicles for individuals and families,” but that was rightly lampooned as proposing the type of air cars used by the family in the 1960s cartoon “The Jetsons.”
Flights of fantasy like these have sunk GOP wannabes before. Newt Gingrich surprised many by beating presumed frontrunner Romney in the 2012 South Carolina primary. The two then went to face off in Florida, with the winner expected to cement his top-dog status. Gingrich chose that period to tell Floridians on the Space