Three way race in 2024--your view?

Politics & Elections
#1

Let’s say Trump runs in 2024–a leap, I know, but the alternative is he doesn’t, and then he screws the race up for whoever does by dithering and attacking other candidates and teasing, etc.

So GOP: Trump.
Dems: Let’s assume Biden runs for now.
What happens if Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger or some Old Formula GOPer runs?

I’d speculate Dems get 45%, trump-GOP gets 30% and 3rd Party gets 25%. Biden cleans up in the EC.

My thinking is that Liz Cheney (say) will draw some votes from Biden (GOPers who hate to vote Democratic) but mainly draw votes away from Trump.

I think she’ll view it as a suicide mission, but one that will doom Trump so it’s OK with her.

But do you see this scenario playing out otherwise? It’s a long ways off, I know, and anything can happen, but if you assume my scenario how does it play out?

#2

Evan McMullin ran as an independent in the 2016 election specifically appealing to “Never Trump” Republicans. Nationally, he got 0.5% of the popular vote (although he only qualified for the ballot in about a dozen states).

I expect that Cheney or Kinzinger would obviously do better, but I can’t see either drawing more than 5% of the popular vote. I also think that it is likely that they would pull more votes from Biden than Trump.

#3

I don’t think it’s a leap that Trump would run again (and succeed in getting the nomination) in 2024. Currently, according to a Reuters poll, 54% of respondents said they would support Trump in 2024. The next closest is DeSantis at 11%, and 14% undecided. So it appears to be his for the asking.

Of course, things could change in the next 2 years, but all those people clinging desperately to the myth that Trump won have at least that to look forward to, righting an epic wrong by making sure he runs and wins.

I don’t think Biden can run again. He looks and acts too tired much of the time. So find another candidate.

Finally, I would say it takes more than someone with a modest amount of name recognition saying they are going to run as an independent or 3rd party (what party?) candidate to get 25% of the vote. They would need to be backed by an organization and a lot of money just to get on the ballots. Ross Perot only got 5% of the vote, and he spent a lot of (his own, mostly) money, and he was on the debates. So the way I see it is, Trump vs. any Democrat vs. any 3rd party candidate means Trump wins.

#4

I don’t think it’s a likely scenario. Trump might be willing to run as an independent to wreck the Republican nominee if he isn’t chosen. But I don’t think any other high profile Republican is likely to run as an independent if Trump’s the nominee. They’ll fall in behind Trump like they did in 2016 and 2020 for party solidarity. Anyone planning on a future in Republican politics would see the danger to their career in wrecking a party’s nominee.

#5

Two years before the election, these polls mostly are a product of name recognition. Trump is obviously the best known of the potential Republican candidates. But past candidates like Clinton and Obama and Trump himself weren’t polling big numbers two years before their elections.

#6

Precisely because they were new and relatively unknown, and they were facing no-one very well known for their nominations. If you are suggesting a new and relatively unknown Republican candidate is going to come along and challenge Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination, I just don’t see that happening. I think Trump’s lock on the nomination, if he wants it, is just as solid as Roosevelt’s on the Democratic nomination in 1944, sick as he was.

If he is actually in jail by then, that changes things. But I don’t see that happening either, in spite of all our wishful thinking.

#7

Respectfully, we already have a thread where we’ve argued at length about whether Trump will be the 2024 Republican nominee. Let’s not fight the OP’s hypothetical in this one.

#8

The third party gets zero electoral votes and essentially has no effect on siphoning net voters away from either side.

#9

Does Liz Cheney have a future in GOPolitics? I don’t see it. I think she takes her fight to reclaim the Grand Old Party to the wall, and if she wrecks Trump’s political future, that’s a feature not a bug.

#10

This is not close to what would happen.

3rd party only raises enough money to get on the ballot in a handful of states and doesn’t come close to making a difference in any of those states.

#11

Here in Missouri, sane conservative (at least in comparison) Senator Roy Blunt isn’t running again in 2022, leaving the field wide open for five declared Republicans, all of which are declaring themselves to be more Trump than Trump.

Meanwhile, over in Illinois, if Adam Kinzinger thought he’d have a chance of winning in his own district, he would have already bolted the Republicans and tried running as an independent.

If Trump doesn’t run in 2024, a Trumpist will. Sane conservatives will have to wander in the wilderness for a while longer.

#12

I’ve probably overstated the third party vote total.

But what does a rational GOP voter (assuming there are any left) do, given a choice between Trump, Cheney and Biden? I assumed that they’d go for Cheney. They can’t vote for Biden, and Trump strikes them as insane and dangerous.

She has little motivation to stay on the reservation, to my mind. He had her kicked out of a safe seat in the House, and she is pissed, so I’d imagine that screwing Trump out of a chance at the White House would motivate her.

#13

Bill Weld ran against Trump in the 2020 primary and the rational Republicans voted for him. He received 454,402 votes to Trump’s 18,159,752.

Liz Cheney’s motivation is not the issue.

#14

My barometer there is how little the Lincoln Project and its ad campaign affected the election.

#15

But a “rational GOP voter” had other options in both 2016 and 2020. I mentioned Evan McMullin, both races also featured a Libertarian candidate who was on the ballot in all 50 states. The Johnson/Weld ticket in 2016 was the most successful third-party candidacy since Ross Perot in 1996. They got 3.6% of the popular vote.

It’s just really, really hard for a third party or independent candidate to make much of a dent in a Presidential race, even when one or both of the major party candidates are deeply unpopular. As @Roderick_Femm notes, running for president is an enormous logistical operation. Without a party structure and significant resources in place, just getting on the ballot is a challenge for most third-party candidates.

Americans also don’t have the same experience with strategic voting present in some other multiparty democracies. Americans are much more likely to view voting third-party as simply “wasting their votes” since the candidate has no chance of prevailing in the election. Given the extremely polarized views most voters have of Trump and Biden, I think very few would want to risk their vote “not counting” in what everyone realizes is the only real choice among candidates.

#16

I think so. I feel the current wave of Trumpist lunacy is a short term feature. I know people disagree with me on this but I think he’s already passed his peak and is sliding downhill. But worst case scenario, his movement has another ten years. If nothing else, Donald Trump is seventy-five years old and not in great shape.

Then the more normal Republican movement will reassert its control and go back to quieter forms of corruption, law breaking, and subverting democracy. The kind of Republican politics Dick Cheney practiced. And when that happens, Liz Cheney can rejoin the GOP mainstream.

#17

Big disagree on this. The past six years have shown us that there is a large market in America for the kind of overt white nationalism / anti-intellectualism / trolling libs / trashing Constitutional norms that Trump spearheaded. After they’ve injected the hard shit through their veins, they’re not gonna go back to two tablets of Tylenol.

Even after Trump dies, someone else will rise to serve the needs of this market. Your guess is as good as mine on who that will be. Could be Ron DeSantis, Tucker Carlson, MTG, or maybe a dark horse candidate. What I do know is that untapped markets don’t stay that way for long.

#18

As I’ve said, I disagree. Trumpism worked once. Barely. Trump managed to get carried across the finish line by the Republican party in 2016. When he tried the same tricks in 2020 he failed.

I see Donald Trump as being like another Joe McCarthy. They can make a big splash and attract a lot of followers. But then the general public gets a chance to take a look at them and their movement collapses. The professional career politicians step in and pick up the pieces. And the professionals know enough to keep things quiet and not upset the voters.

#19

This isn’t the 1950s anymore. Like flurb mentioned in another thread, you’re assuming Republicans to be rational actors when in reality a substantial portion of them, I’d even venture to say a majority, have devolved into outright insanity thanks to Fox News and the information bubbles created by social media.

#20

But the modern Republican party has no principles except one; success. They stuck with Donald Trump when he won. But then he failed to win a second time. So they will abandon him without a look back and move on.