Politics

ATLANTA – Republicans have quietly been coming to grips with the likelihood that Donald Trump will keep winning the Republican nomination until he dies if he doesn’t retake the White House next year — and either outcome could cost the GOP down-ballot.

It’s a grim sort of arrested development for Republicans, with Trump positioned as a modern-day Adlai Stevenson, Democrats’ losing nominee in 1952 and 1956. The worry is that Trump’s baggage and bombast will disincentivize center-right and independent voters from participating in general elections, with repercussions down the ballot — reversing the old coattails rule of politics, which holds that a strong name at the top of the ticket lifts all boats in the party.

But in the inverted world operatives are bracing for, it’s Trump’s name forever sinking their boats in statewide battles by depressing voter turnout. “’24, ’28, ’32. Probably until he dies,” said one veteran Republican strategist, bearing a glum look.

Polls have repeatedly shown that a majority of voters don’t want either Trump or President Joe Biden to run in 2024. Sixty percent of respondents to a July Harris-Messenger poll said they didn’t want Trump to run, as did 70% of respondents (and 44% of Republicans) in an April poll by the Associated Press and the University of Chicago NORC.

Pollsters are still exploring this enthusiasm gap. But Mark McKinnon – a veteran of George W. Bush and John McCain’s White House bids – has identified what he called the new Trump “ghost voters” in Iowa. While Republicans in 2016 were afraid to announce their support for Trump because he was too untoward, they are now afraid to say they don’t support him for fear of being chastised in the new Trump-loyal GOP.

“There’s a lot unknown,” said one veteran conservative activist who is supporting Trump, but also has a keen sense of Trump’s weaknesses. “It’s all going to be a question of turnout.”

The veteran activist cited the ritzy suburb of Atlanta, Johns Creek, as one example where otherwise solid Republicans who soured on Trump after January 6th will probably just stay home this election. “They voted for Biden and (Georgia Gov. Brian) Kemp. They don’t like Biden, but he is less icky (than Trump). But if they don’t have Kemp (on the ballot) maybe they don’t turn out at all.”

Conversely, the veteran conservative strategist said, Biden could suffer from a lack of fervor from his own base of supporters. Where MAGA-diehards will always show up for Trump, Biden doesn’t have a similar “fan base” on the left at his disposal.

ATLANTA, GEORGIA – AUGUST 24: Former U.S. President Donald Trump arrives to depart at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport after being booked at the Fulton County jail on August 24, 2023 in Atlanta, Georgia. Trump was booked on multiple charges related to an alleged plan to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. […]Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Looking for cash to fill the gap

Conservatives and veteran Republican strategists are trying to combat this expected dip in Republican turnout by quietly pushing mega-donors who have sat out the presidential race to engage in Senate and governor’s races across the country. Their hope is to create a buttress against what they expect to be another four years of President Joe Biden, according to more than a dozen Republican operatives who spoke with The Messenger over the past month. They include people who support Trump but worry about his effects on down-ballot races.

In a side meeting at a “cattle call” of Republican candidates in Atlanta last month, one conservative leader described gathering with other top activists discussing the 2024 playing field. At the outset, nobody mentioned the name of the former president, but once one person did, the worries poured forth: Trump will depress the suburban vote for Republicans. Women will stick with Democrats. Trump’s fired-up base of diehards and populists will keep carrying him over the line in Republican primaries and “normie” Republicans will keep staying home — they won’t vote for Democrats, but they won’t vote Trump either.

All of which could crush other Republicans running, these conservative operatives say.

“We’re worried about Cruz’s re-election chances,” the conservative leader told The Messenger. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz will appear on the ballot the same as Trump (most likely) in Texas. The group that gathered in Georgia is concerned that swaths of moderate and center-right voters in the state’s expansive suburbs will take a powder, leaving Cruz and other Texas Republicans hanging.

It’s the same problem Republican veterans stared down seven years ago when it became clear Trump would be their nominee — movement conservatives and quieter Midwestern evangelicals, unlike their fiery Southern Baptist cousins, wouldn’t vote for Clinton, but they wouldn’t vote for Trump either. The falloff in support would have hurt GOP chances across the board, trying to win control of the House and Senate and governor’s races across the country.

To avert that pending disaster — which many pollsters at the time saw as imminent as a Hillary Clinton win — then-campaign manager Paul Manafort and then-RNC Chairman Reince Priebus pushed Mike Pence onto the ticket. The move helped drive turnout in 2016 and produce better than expected results.

But ever since then Republicans have underperformed expectations three elections in a row now.

A “blue wave” of support in 2018 carried Democrats to power in the House, leading to Trump’s first impeachment. Two years later, just a day before Trump’s supporters sacked the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the 2020 election results, a pair of Republican senators lost in Georgia, handing control of the chamber to Senate Democrats. And in 2022, support for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis built fast after Trump’s handpicked candidates lost heavily in critical swing states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

Republicans who held their breath while Trump was in office have become increasingly exasperated, but there doesn’t seem to be any way of stopping him from winning. Trump’s strong plurality of MAGA voters appears unbeatable, and Trump’s tight-knit campaign team has been quietly rewriting the party rules in the states to make it even harder to challenge him.

“It’s a perpetual Ponzi scheme using the GOP,” said one Republican strategist working on an opposing campaign.
Glass half-full?

But not every Republican is sold on the fatalism which seems to have gripped at least half the party.

“Anyone worrying about anything but the coming cycle should get their priorities in order,” said Sean Spicer, Trump’s first White House press secretary and a veteran campaign operative who helped run the RNC’s 2016 operations before joining the White House.

He pointed to hyperbole and hand-wringing ahead of the 2016 election and how Republicans did far better than expected. He also noted that Democrats have a commensurate problem with depressed support from Black voters, which could just as easily offset the voter depression on the right.

And even as Trump himself continues pushing baseless claims that he didn’t lose in 2020 and attacks on prosecutors, judges and possible witnesses, his well-disciplined juggernaut of a 2024 campaign is pushing a concurrent message claiming the economy was better when the former president was in office (LINK).

Yet the nonstop drama of the Trump era of politics seems to have whittled away at general interest in anything remotely political. Spotify podcast star Joe Rogan rebuffed Trump’s entreaties to appear on his top-rated show, even though they share many of the same views. The author behind the viral populist ballad, “Rich men north of Richmond”, hit back at Republicans after he was featured in the first Republican debate.

Donors and professional operatives have been eyeing a staid and safe alternative to Trump, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, with his aw-gosh delivery which sounds remarkably like Owen Wilson and his Silicon Valley zip-up vests, as a last-minute savior who can win back center-right voters in the suburbs.

But their white knight increasingly looks like someone who couldn’t win the nomination.

A recent poll found Youngkin trailing Trump handily in a hypothetical matchup in his own state. And Youngkin told Fox News recently that he would miss a number of filing deadlines to appear on the ballot in early voting states if he did jump in near the end of the year.
Follow the (small) money

The day after Trump was arrested in Georgia and the first criminal mugshot of a former president was posted online – which Trump’s team said they then used to raise $7.1 million from their supporters – Erick Erickson, a veteran conservative radio host and Trump critic on the right, said Trump detracts from the party’s chances writ large.

“Sure, there’s a political agenda against him with these prosecutions, but also to help him secure the Republican nomination,” Erickson wrote in his newsletter. “The Democrats know for him to win, Republicans must spend money that could otherwise be spent to secure the Senate and save the House. The return on investment to get Trump across the finish line could be so high that we can’t take the Senate or hold the House. That, then, would cost us more.”

The proxy for these concerns has been a drying up of small-dollar donations to candidates not named Trump.

The Republican National Committee has seen a downturn. Other campaigns have been unable to turn on the spigot of digital donations which used to flow like milk and honey but now has turned into a desperate trickle. And infighting in state Republican parties between Trump loyalists and veteran party members across the country has undercut efforts to win back offices in critical battleground states from Arizona to Michigan.

When the GOP suffered sweeping losses in Obama’s 2012 re-election, it commissioned an “autopsy” with recommendations for how the party could get back in the business of winning. Much attention was paid to the longterm need for the GOP to win over conservative Latino voters, but the party also built a voter-turnout juggernaut which overhauled the way Republicans got their supporters to show up at the polls.

A decade later, after Trump’s handpicked candidates lost big to Democrats in critical battleground states, the RNC commissioned another “autopsy” — but this time the report was never released publicly and didn’t mention the name of its most powerful player, Trump.

"As the party becomes Trump-ified, you see it almost like a sun when it goes nova,” Matthew Continetti, a historian of the American right, said on MTP Now Thursday. “It collapses in on itself.”