Last night’s town hall showed that Trump remains a high-risk, low-reward option for Republicans.
Last night’s CNN townhall indicated why Donald Trump remains the Russian-roulette candidate. In his “Flight 93” argument for Donald Trump in 2016, Michael Anton wrote that “a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.”
In terms of electoral politics, Trump in the 2024 Republican primary might still be a game of Russian roulette — after fumbling five bullets into the cylinder, giving it a spin, and hoping that you’ve somehow landed on the one empty chamber as you place the cool steel against your temple. I think it goes too far to say that Trump cannot win the presidency in 2024. American politics is full of many surprises. But Trump barely won in 2016, his presidency depending on fewer than 80,000 voters across three states. More people go to a Penn State football game. And many signs indicate that Trump’s position in the electorate has weakened since then.
Joe Biden flipped five states in 2020: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The 2022 midterms gave some grim tidings to Republicans about where voters in those crucial states stand. Throughout the 2022 cycle, Trump attempted to remake the GOP in his own image by denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election and making flattering him the litmus test for his endorsements. Swing-state voters almost uniformly rejected a Republican Party based on this kind of personality politics.
In those five Trump-to-Biden states, every single gubernatorial candidate endorsed by Trump lost. Every single attorney-general candidate endorsed by Trump lost. Every single secretary-of state-candidate endorsed by Trump lost. In those states, Ron Johnson was the only U.S. Senate candidate endorsed by Trump to win — and he was a two-term incumbent facing a challenger vulnerable to “soft on crime” messaging. And Johnson won by the lowest margin in his career (a single point). There was major down-ballot bleeding, too. Democrats control the Michigan legislature for the first time since the early Eighties. Doug Mastriano’s blowout loss to Josh Shapiro in the Pennsylvania governor’s race helped hand the state’s house of representatives to the Democrats.
In 2016, Trump had a somewhat distinctive policy platform. But the CNN town hall was just the Trump Show: focused on overturning the 2020 election, January 6, and his many personal scandals. Trump himself often leaned into those controversies in order to distract from his policy failings. When pressed about why he did not build “the wall,” Trump immediately pivoted to an accusation about a “rigged” 2020 election — the Trump Show as a shiny object to distract from the failures of the Trump presidency.
And that brings up the essential question for a Russian-roulette campaign: Why play? I guess in the actual game you have the thrill of not dying, but not dying is a pretty low bar for a political coalition. Trump’s presidency was full of policy frustrations. Unable to work with Congress, he allowed many of his signature domestic-policy promises (on immigration, infrastructure, and health care) to wither on the vine. When Joe Biden took office, he was able to harvest some key low-hanging policy fruit (such as infrastructure) on Democratic — not Republican — terms.
One of the iron tendencies of American politics is that it is thermostatic. No party gains permanent power. To put the matter even more starkly: The instant a party wins the White House, the clock starts ticking for it to lose power. So a party needs to make the most of its time in the sun. Trump’s allies often portray him as the last redoubt against an identity-politics Left, but the forces of “the reckoning” dramatically expanded their influence during his presidency.
In the 2024 primary, there are other potential Republican candidates who have shown the ability to move populist and conservative policy priorities. Executing a policy program in American politics often relies on big coalitions and candidates who can win convincingly.
Republican voters will have to ask themselves whether they want to settle for Russian roulette — or, instead, whether they want to win and govern.