Republican voters embrace a disgrace in Trump
Don’t blame me. I’m from Vermont. Having picked Nikki Haley over quadruply indicted former president Donald Trump on Tuesday, Vermont residents can now offer that version of the Watergate-era exclamation Massachusetts citizens took pride in after opting for George McGovern rather than Richard Nixon in 1972.
But Vermont was the only win for the former United Nations ambassador, who exited the race on Wednesday.
Haley had presented her party with an off-ramp to political sanity, but Republican primary voters instead chose to barrel straight toward bedlam on Super Tuesday, handing Trump substantial wins in all but one of the 15 states at play.
With all the graphics, key-race alerts (introduced, of course, by dramatic bumper music), magic walls, and demographic analytics, the television coverage more or less normalized Trump, treating his victories not just as predictable but also as unexceptional.
In fact, Trump’s big night marks a further conservative slide into authoritarianism. Super Tuesday all but confirmed that one of America’s two major parties will nominate for president a divisive demagogue who, through relentless lies and agitation, provoked a violent storming of the US Capitol in an attempt to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election.
Equally alarming are the various surveys showing Trump with a narrow lead over Democratic incumbent President Biden in both national and swing state polling.
Tuesday highlighted the chasm that divides the American electoral middle, with a sharp wall of revulsion facing a steeply pitched slope of fear. Whoever proves best able to navigate that uncharted and treacherous territory will wind up as the next president of the United States.
The relevant revulsion is of Donald Trump by independent and moderate Republican voters. We saw that in evidence on Tuesday even as Trump took a huge step toward wrapping up the GOP presidential nomination.
Despite Trump’s dominance in primary contests across the country, significant percentages voted for Haley. Those votes, according to exit polls, were principally against Trump — and they were not just mildly opposed to him. In North Carolina, for example, 78 percent of Haley voters said they wouldn’t necessarily vote for the Republican nominee if it weren’t her. In Virginia, just 26 percent of Haley voters said they would be on board with the GOP regardless of the nominee.
Read that for what it is: a rejection of Trump. Normally, having such a polarizing challenger would be a huge advantage for the incumbent. But that’s where fear comes in, the fear that Biden, at 82, would simply be too old for the nation’s most grueling job.
That unease is rational but to some degree addressable. Biden can’t of course demonstrate that he’ll be fine in the years ahead, but he can at least demonstrate that even though he has slowed physically, he’s up to the mental challenges of the job.
If he’s unable to coax voters over that entry-level threshold, it’s hard to see how Biden wins a second term. That’s part of the reason we see Trump with a lead over Biden in national and Electoral College polls, though that lead is usually within the margin of error.
Persistent numbers like those would make a second term seem improbable — until, that is, you consider that Biden’s opponent is now all but certain to be Trump, who may well be on trial multiple times during this campaign. Even some Trump voters concede that a criminal conviction would disqualify him in their eyes.
Given the various legal appeals and the uncertain timing, it’s unclear how many verdicts we’ll have by Election Day. But Trump still faces the prospect of an array of unflattering headlines and revelations unspooling week by week during the fall campaign.
The thinking in the Biden camp is that the president will benefit in several ways when voters finally focus in a concrete way.
First, they will come to realize that Biden has accomplished a lot and that, despite the current gloominess, the national economy is actually very strong.
Second, voters who want their ballot to matter will, despite their misgivings, migrate toward the incumbent when they face the Biden or Trump choice they’d hoped to avoid.
Between the independent voters who revile him, the Haley Republicans who say they won’t vote for him, and the Democrats who are alienated about the civilian Palestinian deaths suffered in Israel’s war against Hamas but who will probably come home in the end, there is room for Biden to grow.
Trump, by contrast, has a floor and ceiling so close together there’s hardly vertical room for a floor lamp.
Compare the substantial advantage Haley has in head-to-head polls against Biden with Trump’s much narrower advantage and it’s easy to see how much potential advantage the GOP will give away by nominating him.
But make no mistake, we have eight whiteknuckle months ahead.