Trump looks strong for 2024

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People who think Donald Trump’s influence on the Republican Party is often harmful are always looking for signs that it is fading.

Matt Lewis, who writes for the Daily Beast, sees few such indicators, from vacant seats in recent Trump events to the struggles of some of the candidates he has endorsed. Josh Kraushaar, a columnist for the National Journal, thinks Trump has given his party opponents a chance by supporting the former Sen.’s main challenge. David Perdue to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp. If they help Kemp cope with this, they will free other Republicans from the need to stay lying before Trump.

Too many anti-Trump Republicans took heart in November, from Glenn Youngkin winning the Virginia gubernatorial race because it suggested their party recoup some of the voters Trump expelled from the party while holding recruits. he here.

The clear bad news for Trump’s opponents – something neither Lewis nor Kraushaar denies – is that Trump maintains great strength in the party and remains its most powerful leader. The less obvious bad news is that he is also stronger than he looks.

There are two reasons for this hidden strength. The first has to do with the interest of Republican voters to win the 2024 election.

Anti-Trump Republicans will try to persuade them that they will lose to the Democrats if Trump is re-nominated. Trump continues to be unpopular, he lost re -election, and he is more focused on his personal grievances rather than issues that are of direct concern to most voters.

Losing a presidential election, and especially a re -election, often hurts a candidate’s political reputation so much that he or she can no longer try to return after four years. Trump’s nonsense about winning the last campaign in a landslide, only for it to be stolen from him, is partly about avoiding an exile in defeat.

But it’s not just myths about 2020 that will lead Republican voters to think he’s a viable candidate for 2024. There’s also the fact that, well, he’s a viable candidate for 2024.

A poll in the Wall Street Journal in December only put him one point behind Biden in a rematch. Another poll put Trump ahead of the two last month. Of course, it’s too early, and Democrats may be in a low fall.

The take-away from these polls is not necessarily defeating Trump. If the Democrats struggle in 2024, his ardent supporters could reunite with voters who are reluctant to prefer him over the Democrats to give him an electoral majority.

The second reason why Trump has more power over Republicans than it looks is that his influence depends as much on the depth of his support as on its extent. Some Republicans wishing to lose Trump have relented in polls showing that voters are more likely to call themselves Republicans than Trump supporters. (In October 2020, Trump’s first-time voters outscored Republican-first-voters 59-30; this month, the split is 42-50.)

Let’s say, however, that the Trump-first number is dwindling, to 10% of right-leaning voters. If Trump is willing and able to convince 10% not to vote for Republican candidates he doesn’t like, Republicans won’t win races in many areas. And we knew he was willing to do it.

ABC’s Jonathan Karl reported that on the last day of his presidency, Trump threatened to destroy the Republican Party by starting a new one. That was two weeks after he gave Republicans two seats in the Senate and as a result he controlled the chamber by attacking Georgia Republican officials and doubting about whether the elections were administered honestly.

Since then, Trump has openly discussed how Republican voters won’t turn out in 2022 or 2024 if Republicans don’t “solve the 2020 Presidential Election Fraud”-which can easily be read as a threat against unscrupulous Republicans. . his landslide fantasy. If Kemp defeats Perdue in the primary, Trump is likely to campaign against him in the general election without worrying that a Democrat will benefit from it. If Kemp loses, Republicans seeking lessons about Trump will pay more attention to the end of his governorship than to his major success.

Trump, in other words, is well-protected against the electoral argument that his Republican opponents prefer to make, and he stands out from his would-be rivals in his disregard for anything other than his self-interest. . Like it or not – and I really don’t – it’s both political assets for him to have a good chance of enduring.

Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor at National Review, is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.

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