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Tonight a group of Republicans who stand no chance of becoming president will gather in California for a “presidential debate” which the media will cover as a thrilling and consequential event. We’ll probably be forced to endure days or even weeks of coverage about how the debate supposedly affected the race. After the first debate, we were even told to take Vivek Ramaswamy’s candidacy seriously, even as his numbers continue to echo around in the statistical noise that is the sub-10% range of polls. Unless you want to prepare yourself for the possibility that Donald Trump dies of a heart attack or goes to prison, you can spare yourself a lot of trouble by ignoring the entire spectacle.
The truth is that the GOP primary no longer deserves to be classed as contested. Contested is a strange word in the context of a primary - on one level, it simply means whether more than one person is running the race. In this sense, clearly there are multiple people running for the GOP nomination, so we ought to call it contested. But another definition of the word - one used more colloquially - is whether or not the primary constitutes a real contest. Joe Biden is opposed in the Democratic primary by Robert Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson, but the media isn’t covering that as a competitive event. And if you simply apply the same criteria to the Republican primary, it clearly isn’t a competitive event either.
You can start by looking at the primary polls, in which Trump is hardly in a worse position than Biden. Right now Trump is at 55% and his closest rival, Ron Somebody, is at about 14%. By contrast, Biden is at 63% and his closest rival, Kennedy, is at nearly 15%. Not only is that not a great difference, but Trump’s situation is arguably better because he faces not just a couple of challengers but many. That means that the anti-Trump vote inevitably splits among many different candidates, making it much harder for any one to break out of the pack.
Another factor favoring Trump is the relative popularity of the two candidates in their own parties. About 59% of Democrats tell pollsters that they want to see someone challenge Biden for the party’s nomination, exactly the same number of Republicans who say they want Trump to win their own. I’m addressing Democrats’ jitters about Biden in an ongoing series, but the point here is that this is another piece of evidence that it is absurd to continue to regard the Democratic primary as uncontested while covering the Republican one as some sort of breathlessly uncertain contest. Republican voters are firmly wedded to Trump, in fact much more so than Democrats’ typically more skeptical and questioning base are to Biden.
More evidence for considering the GOP primary a done deal comes from the so-called “invisible primary”, the jockeying for donors and endorsements which precedes any actual voting. The invisible primary is very important - candidates who fare poorly in it can be forced to withdraw before any actual primaries actually take place, as Kamala Harris was in December 2019. And as I write this, the invisible primary is pretty much all bad news for Trump’s rivals. Donors are giving up looking for an alternative to Trump, with one telling Politico: “Trump’s like 50 points ahead. Who wants to get involved and waste money?” Incredibly, even some GOP figures who have endorsed and donated to Trump’s rivals are going on the record in newspaper interviews saying that they consider him the likely nominee.
In a recent New York Times piece, the paper’s elections expert Nate Cohn discussed some ways that this situation might change and the Republican race might start looking competitive again. But neither of the two scenarios he discusses - a poor showing by Trump in an early state, or Trump’s support melting away amid a divisive criminal trial - seem likely to me.
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