Trump Looks Like He’ll Get the 2024 Crowd He Wants

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Officially entered Gov. Florida’s Ron DeSantis in the presidential race last week, but he’s coming out ahead in the one-on-one matchup his allies believe he needs to wrest the nomination from former President Donald Trump.

Former Vice President Mike Pence is deeper in Iowa, crucial to his effort to unseat Republican front-runners, even before he announces his bid. Former Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey is ramping up preparations for another campaign, with an expected focus on New Hampshire. And Republican donors and leadership on Capitol Hill are showing renewed interest in Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who kicked off his campaign last week. Even candidates who were barely mentioned suddenly expressed interest in 2024.

The rapidly ballooning field, combined with Trumps seemingly unbreakable core of support, represents a grave threat to DeSantis, jeopardizing his ability to consolidate the non-Trump vote, and may reflect the dynamic which boosted Trumps takeover of the party in 2016.

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It’s a matter of math: Each new entrant threatens to steal a small piece of DeSantis’ potential coalition, whether it’s Pence with Iowa evangelicals or Scott with college-educated suburbanites. And these new candidates are unlikely to eat into Trumps votes. The former president is based on more than 30% of Republicans remain strongly committed to him.

President Trump should go to the casino, he’s a lucky man, Dave Carney, a veteran Republican strategist based in New Hampshire, said of the former casino owner, Trump.

This is a huge problem for DeSantis, added Carney, who has worked on previous presidential campaigns, because whatever percentage they get makes it difficult for the second-place man to win because there simply aren’t enough votes available.

Trump advisers have almost gleefully greeted each entry as part of a divide-and-conquer strategy his team has touted since 2021. And many of the candidates seem more comfortable punching DeSantis than Trump. .

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The DeSantis campaign sees the landscape differently.

We don’t believe it’s 2016 again, Ryan Tyson, a senior adviser to DeSantis, said in an interview.

And in a private briefing for donors this week, Tyson described a Republican electorate split into three parts: 35% as Trump-only voters, 20% as never Trump and the remaining 45% as the DeSantis sweet spot .

Tyson told donors, in audio leaked and published online, that every contestant besides the two front-runners was isolated from the never-Trump segment. If your name isn’t Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump, you’re dividing this segment of the electorate, he said.

In the months leading up to his campaign launch, DeSantis and his allies have been framing the 2024 primary as a two-man race. But as he has stumbled in recent months, amid questions about his personality and political prowess, rivals have emboldened. And some have the money to stay relevant on the main calendar.

Scott entered the race with nearly $22 million on hand, and he raised another $2 million on his first day as a candidate. North Dakota’s wealthy, obscure governor, Doug Burgum, is now eyeing a 2024 opening, making ads recently to prepare for an imminent campaign, according to two people involved in the planning.

Vivek Ramaswamy, a businessman, invested $10 million of his own money in his campaign. Like DeSantis, Ramaswamy sells a similar anti-woke sentiment, but he does so with the charm of a natural communicator.

Trump has welcomed non-DeSantis into the race. In January, when Nikki Haley, who served as Trumps ambassador to the United Nations, called to tell him she planned to run, Trump didn’t rant about his infidelity, as some had expected. He sounded unbothered, telling her to do what you have got to do, according to two people briefed on their conversation.

And in the days leading up to Scott’s announcement, Trump was watching Fox News in his Mar-a-Lago office when he said, I like him. Will only say nice things about Tim, according to a person familiar with his private comments.

The conventional wisdom at the start of the year was that the field would be pretty small, maybe as few as five people running. Republican anti-Trump donors are trying to thin the herd to avoid a repeat of the divided field that guaranteed Trumps victory in 2016. Now, after DeSantis’ early stumble, there are likely as many as 10 candidates competing. for attention and vying for the debate stage.

For DeSantis, the squeeze was evident the day he entered the race.

In New Hampshire, Haley mocked him on Fox News as merely copying Trump, down to his mannerisms. If he becomes just an echo of Trump, people will just vote for Trump, he said.

In Iowa, Pence sat down with the kind of mainstream media outlets DeSantis avoided, including The Des Moines Register. Pence also met with Bob Vander Plaats, the same evangelical leader DeSantis recently brought to Tallahassee, Florida, for a private meal.

The split screen is a reminder that DeSantis is being pinched both ideologically and geographically, as the field expands.

Pence and Scott have announced their plans to compete for influential evangelical voters in Iowa. In New Hampshire, both Christie, who is focused on his 2016 state campaign, and the state’s sitting governor, Chris Sununu, a moderate who has left the door open to run, have threatened to siphon votes from DeSantis. . And in South Carolina, he will be sandwiched between two statehouse candidates, former governor Haley and Scott.

Many Republicans who want to defeat Trump have been shocked by the imploding field with DeSantis underperforming in recent months. DeSantis slipped in the polls and now trails Trump in every state and by an average of more than 30 percentage points nationally.

All Republicans need to hit Donald Trump, said Sununu, who described himself as 50-50 about entering the race. Any Republican who doesn’t take a shot at Donald Trump right now is doing the entire party a disservice because if only one or two people are willing to take a shot at Donald Trump, it looks personal. It looks small.

So far, Christie has garnered the most attention for his direct attacks on Trump, which he has indicated will be crucial to his candidacy. But he also took pleasure in jabbing at DeSantis at times, a nod to the Florida governor’s position in the race.

The reluctance to go after Trump, for many Republicans, seems like a repeat of 2016. Afterward, Trump’s rivals left him alone for months, thinking he would implode or was set to defeat him in once they narrow the field. in a one-on-one matchup, a situation that never happened.

The two Florida-based candidates in that race, Sen. Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, a former governor, spent millions of dollars strafing each other. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who finished as Trump’s leading rival, privately boasted to donors that he was hugging Trump while patiently waiting for the moment to pounce. It never came.

Trump’s current rivals seem furious at their collective inability to crack his foundation: Trump’s supporters have been trained for years to defend him whenever he is discredited.

Trump has another asymmetrical advantage: Current and potential rivals have sought to avoid criticizing him too harshly so as not to alienate Republicans who still like Trump and are automatically suspicious of anyone who attacks him. In contrast, the other 2024 contenders showed no hesitation in going after DeSantis.

His team is probably good at putting on the show of courage without actually delivering the real thing, Ramaswamy said in an interview last month. And that can work across TV and even social media, he added. But as soon as you poke a little, it’s like a little bubble in the air: A little touch, and it bursts.

Ramaswamy, who has criticized Trump, aimed most of his fire at DeSantis. A close friend of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Ramaswamy dined with Trump and Kushner at the former president’s New Jersey club, Bedminster, in 2021, according to two people familiar with the event.

And while the field widens, there’s the matter of the debate stage, where Trump trounced his opponents in the 2016 primaries.

The chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, said earlier this year that she did not expect to need two rounds of debate as the party required in 2016, with the ranks of candidates determined by polling. .

But there could be as many as a dozen declared candidates in August, and many are already racing to collect the 40,000 donors and 1% polling threshold the party has indicated will be needed to take the stage. This pool includes longer-shot candidates such as Larry Elder, the talk radio host who was walloped in the California recall election.

Everyone said, We have to stop people from getting in. Sununu said. That’s the wrong message, the wrong mindset, and it won’t work.

But he acknowledged that eventually it will take unification to defeat Trump.

Discipline, Sununu added, comes through.

c.2023 The New York Times Company

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