And, Trump briefly ran for the Reform Party’s presidential nomination in 2000.
If he were to attempt to do so after primary elections start happening (and he starts losing them), he could run afoul of the sore loser laws that most states have.
I had never heard of these: interesting. Wikipedia suggests that they don’t apply to presidential candidates, but the source for that seems to be one individual’s opinion, and I don’t know how reliable he is as a source—the same site identifies him as “an advocate in the United States for minor political parties,” so he might have a bias. Do you happen to have a more authoritative source handy that says these would apply to presidential elections? (I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t, but since I had never heard of them three minutes ago, I can’t claim to have thought it through.)
This paper from the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy (published last week) indicates that, according to the authors’ analysis of the various states’ sore loser laws, they believe that such laws in 28 states would apply to presidential elections. Those include 20 states that Trump won in 2016 and/or 2020, and account for 225 electoral votes.
However, they also note that it may come down to whether the individual states choose to enforce their laws, in the case of Trump.
Thank you: interesting, and much more useful than wiki’s cite.
He can just make the MAGA Party.
Or maybe the Truth Party (as a callback to Truth Social). He already has a ripped-off logo for it.
Won’t happen though. These are people that couldn’t organize a two car funeral.
The legal & administrative process to get a party onto the general election ballot is long and arduous. And each state does it differently. The Rs and the Ds over decades have made sure it’s difficult.
If Trump was serious about having a MAGA party on the ballot in more than a handful of states, that would already be very obviously well in progress. It costs serious money and we know whose money he’d prefer to spend: fired-up donors’ money. Creating the MAGA party, or at least the MAGA presence on ballots, cannot be a secret project revealed as an ambush or contingency plan later.
To get his name on the ballot he’ll need to hijack an existing party, or win the R nomination. If neither of those work, as the ultimate sore loser himself, he might well choose to “order” his fans to write him in for Prez. It’s pretty obvious how that probably ends up giving the national win to the D candidate.
To run an old joke into the ground-he’ll have it up and running in two weeks.
They could always resurrect the Tea Party.
He’ll try for the Republican nomination and fail. then announce to the rubes in August that if you just send $45/450/4,500 he’ll run as an independent in all fifty states, and fail miserably after pocketing most of the money.
He’ll then spend years afterward complaining how the Deep State™ has taken over the Republican party as well and if you’ll just send more money he’ll save America from it.
Saying “Can’t” doesn’t really make sense. In both cases whether he has a chance depends on things outside of either Trump or DeSantis’ control.
In the primary DeSantis stands a good chance if the field remains small, if the same thing happens as in 2016, and you get a huge field of “Trump vs a million other non-remarkable Republicans” then Trump’s chances improve massively.
In the general election (assuming Biden runs again) you have an incumbent so its basically all down to the economy, everything going OK economically Biden is overwhelming favorite, the economy goes south then DeSantis (or whoever wins the primary) stands a good chance.
Given his legal situation, I’d also give decent odds of him trading a promise of a pardon in exchange for not running as an independent.
This is believable.
In recent weeks, I have not seen anything that makes DeSantis look better in the primary or the general:
*He said stupid shit about Ukraine (i.e., not supporting them) and got pushback from GOP senators. Meanwhile, Trump claims he can end the war in 24 hours. This claim is horseshit, of course, but it plays better than what DeSantis said, both to the base and the country at large, IMO.
*I saw a straw poll on Fox News today (my mom watches it all day! Not sure of the poll’s origin…) that had GOP voters favoring Trump at 47% to DeSantis at 43% IIRC.
*Trump is beating up on DeSantis openly more and more, but DeSantis has as yet not tried to punch back. He is, after all, in a very difficult spot with regard to dealing with Trump.
IOW, things continue to go pretty much as I had expected (not that my take is especially contrarian or clever).
This strategy may pay off big if Trump is actually convicted or even indicted for anything serious. I’m pretty cynical about this, but DeSantis might be counting on others doing the dirtywork for him.
I think that’s exactly what he’s doing.
However, I’m not sure he can overcome the nauseating mental picture of him eating chocolate pudding with 3 fingers on a flight from Tallahassee to Washington DC a few years ago. I keep hearing about this but am not quite ready to credit it.
Still, when I think about it, I feel a little sick.
I have little doubt he’s hoping for that at this stage, though it’s a double-edged sword IMO: Trump entering the slammer will also cast a further shadow on the politics he represented, making it harder for DeSantis to sell himself (whether explicitly or not) as the “new Trump.”
Kos story today:
DeSantis’ “All culture wars all the time” campaign will certainly fire up a bunch of the RW base. There’s a lot of overlap with the MAGA base, so those folks will be forced to choose.
I think the “hold my nose and vote R because I always have” brigade that doesn’t greatly like where the Disgraced Former Politician took their party since ~2014 will be doing a LOT less nose-holding for DeSantis. And a bunch of former Rs who voted for Biden over criminal DFP will revert to their R roots.
Answer is no. These polls are normal fluctuation, not flameout.
If DeSantis is seen to have tried hard to prevent Trump’s extradition to NY, and Trump then goes to jail, that might help DeSantis. Or there might be a tremendous pro-Trump sympathy vote. I think Republicans would vote for a jailbird, but we do not know.
They’d totally love to vote for a persecuted martyr whose charges somehow didn’t stick.