Can the GOP avoid nominating Trump in 2024?

Politics & Elections
21

Why should it be so clear to them? I’d say the opposite…Trump will be re-elected in 2024, more easily than some mythical rational Republican, if such a thing exists.

Trump’s cult will stay loyal to him.
Due to the voter suppression laws, there will be maybe 5% fewer voters who turn out for the Democrats in the critical states. That’s enough for Trump to win the electoral college, even if he loses the popular vote by more than 2020.
, And I’m guessing that many of the sane Republicans who have now decided to abandon the party because of disgust over the June 6 insurrection live in blue states anyway.

Trump will run, and will win.

(side issue: I assume that the reason Trump has not yet announced officially that he will run is for his own personal financial gain. As long as he is a private citizen, all the money he makes from appearances and speeches can go straight into his pocket, without the limitations on political donations. Am I right?)

22

ONE MORE TIME …

This is not a thread to debate Trump’s chances in 2024. (There are plenty of other threads to do that.) It’s a thread about how the GOP can try to deny him that chance if they decide to.

23

For the reasons already described (mostly, that a significant majority of GOP voters are still in love with Trump), it would be damned difficult, if not outright impossible, for party leadership to avoid his nomination if he chooses to run, without fracturing the party entirely.

24

I don’t know if Trump will actually run in 2024, but in the 2020 election he lost with 74 million votes, which was the second highest national popular vote count in the history of US presidential elections, right behind Joe Biden. Although it was the largest voter turnout in absolute numbers in US history and the largest percentage of eligible voters in the modern era, the actual margins aren’t all that impressive; Biden carried the popular vote by 4.45%; by comparison, George H.W. Bush (the last one-term president) won in 1988 by a margin of 7.72% and the lost the next election to Bill Clinton by a margin of -5.56%. All of that is to say that there are (or at least were as of 3 November 2020) a massive number of people who support Trump despite what can only be characterized as a presidential administration replete with open corruption and abject failure to deal with crises. Nobody should be blasé about the ability of Donald Trump to capture the Republican nomination (which he almost certainly would) and run a competitive campaign.

Stranger

25

I don’t think the GOP can keep Trump out. They failed in 2016 and they will fail again. The rules allow any idiot to vote in the primaries, and the primary voters tend to be the most enthusiastic (and Trump primary voters are very enthusiastic).

The party leaders can, of course, support other candidates or tweak the rules to keep out Trump, but large scale rules changes could not be tolerated. Their only hope is a single candidate who attracts educated Republican primary voters desperate to keep Trump out. I doubt that will happen: there will probably be multiple candidates splitting the anti-Trump vote.

26

They’re not gonna change any rules in an effort to defeat him in the primaries. Ronna McDaniel and the party apparatus are solidly behind him. Hell, there were state GOP parties that didn’t even want to bother holding a primary last year.

27

If DiSantis becomes more popular than Trump, Trump will squash him like a bug. He will run against him purely for 1) revenge, 2) money he can grift, and 3) the ability to give many, many speeches in front of huge audiences, which is the only thing that he can do well. DiSantis is far too popular to risk Trump asking him to be the VP candidate.

28

I think this is an important point. There’s no party leadership/party voters divide in the GOP anymore. The party apparatus is completely dominated by people loyal to Trump. There is no chance of Republican leadership trying to stack the deck against Trump if he runs.

Again, if Republicans got completely embarrassed next year in the midterm (I’m talking losing a dozen or more house seats, 3-4 Senate seats, Governor races in GA and TX, etc) as a result of Dems running hard against Trump, then maybe Republican voters would turn to someone else for sheer survival. I’d put this scenario at less than one percent.

29

If Trump is still alive, and wants to run, then if he doesn’t win the Republican nomination, he’d run as a third party. And of course, if that happened, the election would be basically uncontested.

The Republicans, of course, know that. And even if Trump would be a long shot to win, he’d be a heck of a lot more likely than a split party. So if Trump wants the nomination, he’s got it.

30

They can bribe him. He responds to money and sycophancy, so if they promise him enough money and exclusive contracts and the chance to put his name on things (which he really, really loves to do) they may be able to keep him out of the race. But no, they can’t block him.

DeSantis, Abbott, and Noem are all trying to prove their fidelity to the cause by killing off their constituents (Little is more lethal, but he doesn’t have the national presence). Trump will start playing his next version of the apprentice with the three of them in about 12 months and announce one of them as “hired” in March 2024 - unless he announces himself instead.

31

I hadn’t considered this! If the civil and criminal cases mounted against him get onerous enough, maybe they could even offer blanket immunity if he stands aside and lets someone else win.

Problem is, bribing him would require him to hold up his end of the deal, which he’s incapable of doing. So he’d probably throw in his hat just in time to fuck up the primaries for everyone else, claiming that they’re all sad and low energy and would never win anyway.

32

This assumes that both Trump and the GOP leadership are rational actors. Trump is primarily driven by his ego and need to win and preferably humiliating his opponent(s) as much as possible, and seems pretty convinced (with good reason) that he’ll never be held to account for his misdeeds, so blanket immunity isn’t much of a pitch.

The GOP leadership is primarily focused on stirring up fear and being as obstructive to as possible; obviously the leadership wants a candidate who has a good chance of winning an election and despite his built-in negatives, Trump brings a massive contingent of voters including people who may not normally vote or participate in the electoral process, and if rejected would almost certainly act as a spoiler for the Republican candidate. That alone argues for selecting Trump (assuming he runs) unless something radical happens to dim his popular support.

DeSantis and Abbott both have high levels of popular support in their own states but neither are really demagogue material and both have been in conflict with Trump. Of the Republican governors, Kristi Noem is the one who hews closest to the Trump model and would potentially get an endorsement from Trump if he decides not to run himself.

Stranger

33

Which is where I usually go astray …

Depends on the timing. I suspect (okay, hope) he’ll be in deep financial and/or legal trouble long before 2024, but if the cases drag out to where the sharks aren’t truly circling until then, he’ll be a less viable candidate and have a greater need for that protection. Maybe a President Noem will be the only thing between him and oblivion.

34

I’ll make a prediction (which might as well be a guess, this early) - if he’s still in good health and not in prison, he will either run in 2024 or he will work to sink the Republican candidate (and would probably succeed in that case). His ego and personal grievances will never allow him to step back from politics. He will devote the rest of his life to regaining power and getting revenge on those he thinks betrayed or victimized him.

35

Well, again, that assumes that Trump is a rational actor and doesn’t continue with the mental fiction that he can pardon himself or is immune from prosecution while in office. I suspect the only thing that would keep him from pursuing the nomination would be health poor enough that he could not appear in rallies, which quite frankly was always his primary motivation in running for office to begin with. If Trump can’t stand behind a podium and ramble stream-of-consciousness for forty minutes, then and only then might he decide to endorse someone who he believes would elevate his reputation. More than likely, he’ll just try to burn down any other candidate the GOP would select purely out of pique.

Which, at last count, is essentially everyone who has ever interacted with him, even the people who tried to help him but offered any kind of criticism or disagreement. I’ve never seen an adult—even a pathological narcissist—spend so much time and effort whining about how mistreated he is. He’s like a three year old stuck in permanent meltdown.

Stranger

36

If he wants the nomination, it is his. The party belongs to him. They’ll probably cancel the primaries if he runs, just give him the nomination on a silver platter. The party has sold their soul to Satan, there is a no return policy.

Changing from winner take all to proportional makes no difference. All the proportional method does is make the guy who gets the early lead unstoppable. But seriously, does anyone think the GOP base would choose someone else in the event he runs again? It’s unthinkable.

37

Well, to the Archangel Gingrich, anyway, but he’s close enough.

Stranger

38

Not sure who else caught the CBS Sunday Morning segment yesterday about Mayberry, but they filmed it at Mayberry’s real world counterpart, Mt. Airy, NC (where Andy Griffith grew up). Ted Koppel asked people on a tour bus how many of them thought there was widespread cheating in the 2020 elections and the results did not reflect who actually won. Virtually all of them said the election was stolen. All of the people on the bus appeared to be white, and over 60 years old. I’ve seen polls before claiming a majority of GOP voters believed the election was stolen, but after seeing this segment on CBS Sunday Morning it suddenly became real. I am convinced the rank and file republican voter has bought into the big lie hook, line, and sinker, and the GOP can not avoid nominating Unindicted Co-Conspirator #1 in 2024.

39

I believe that not only will the party nominate him in 2024 but that he will win.

I used the gifting option for this link, so it might not be paywalled.

…
“We often think that what we should be waiting for is fascists and communists marching in the streets, but nowadays, the ways democracies often die is through legal things at the ballot box — so things that can be both legal and antidemocratic at the same time,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a professor at Harvard University and the co-author of “How Democracies Die,” who is working on a successive volume. “Politicians use the letter of the law to subvert the spirit of the law.”

Perhaps the most relevant modern example, several democracy experts said, is Hungary under the rule of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who returned to power in 2010 after a previous stint as Hungary’s leader about a decade before.

Tucker Carlson — who regularly articulates the intellectual heart of Trumpism — traveled to Hungary in August to broadcast his prime-time Fox News show from there, at one point lauding Hungary as “a small country with a lot of lessons for the rest of us.”

Upon taking power in 2010, Orbán “has steadily chipped away at the linchpins of a liberal democratic system,” said Michael Abramowitz, the president of Freedom House, a nonpartisan, pro-democracy organization.

“He stacked the courts, he engaged in gerrymandering, he had friends and allies take over the media,” Abramowitz said, referring to Orbán. “So while he has elections, they start from a very, very stacked deck. While it’s not impossible, it’s going to be very, very difficult for him to be dislodged in the normal democratic system.”
…

“Democracy depends on the belief of losers in a given election to trust the process, and to marshal support so they can win another day,” said Nate Persily, a professor at Stanford University and co-director of the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project. “If we have entered a phase where the process is simply not trusted, that is a dangerous situation to be in, where people do not trust elections as being the way that we replace authority.”

A number of Republicans have used Trump’s false claim as a catalyst for overhauling election and voting laws, even in states where the 2020 election ran smoothly. At least 250 laws being proposed in at least 43 states would limit mail, early in-person and Election Day voting, changes that Democrats say could especially disenfranchise minority voters. There are also some Republican-led efforts pushing to allow state legislatures to overturn election results.
…

There’s a lot more meat in this article than I’m allowed to quote. You might want to wait to read it until the cocktail hour. And keep the bottle close to hand.

40

I saw that article yesterday morning and stopped reading about halfway through, not because I disagreed with anything written in it but because I just couldn’t take any more reinforcement of my already-deeply entrenched cynicism.

Ugh. Can we just reboot the last…thirty years or so of US politics that brought us here?

Stranger