Time to cheer DeSantis. And Haley. And the others
The longer they stay in, the more they hurt Trump
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To be absolutely clear, I think Ron DeSantis is a really bad politician and I share none of his values. I think Nikki Haley is a more skilled politician but I don’t share her values either. And my view of some of the other GOP primary contenders is unprintable in a family newsletter.
But as the first primary dates loom, all of these people ought to be appreciated for their ability to unintentionally harm Donald Trump’s chances in the general election.
Barring some shock medical or legal event, Trump’s victory in next year’s GOP primary is foreordained. As I’ve written before, by some measures the Democratic primary is more contested than the Republican one is. But because it contains Donald Trump, the GOP primary is likely to attract a lot of media attention and loom large in the public consciousness for much of next year. And if Trump’s opponents manage to hang around in that primary for long enough, they should be able to land some lasting blows.
There’s pretty conclusive evidence from political science literature that divisive primaries harm the winning candidate’s chances in the general election. There’s not a large enough sample size to test this at the presidential level, but studies have found that divisive primaries drastically reduce the winner’s vote share in House and Senate elections, particularly if they get a lot of media coverage. One study found the reduction in vote share to be about 6% and the winner’s chance of prevailing in the election to be reduced by 21%. It’s a very fair assumption to think that the same effect occurs in presidential elections, even if we don’t know its magnitude.
Primary campaigns tend to be very negative because it’s hard for one member of a party to distinguish themselves from another member of the same party through feel-good fluffy messages. Rather than focusing on what they agree on, primary opponents need to focus on where they differ - and that can quickly get personal and ugly. The opposing party gets to sit back and watch as their opponents spend tens of millions of dollars attacking each other with negative messaging. This inevitably draws attention to flaws which will stick around in the public’s mind by the time the general election rolls around. Divisive primaries also place candidates under a lot of pressure, making them likely to make gaffes and retreat to throwing red meat to their base. The result is a a goldmine for oppo researchers, who can harvest video that will be useful come November.
The importance of managing divisive primaries can be seen from the Democratic experience in 2016 and 2020. In 2016, Bernie Sanders chose to stay in the primary long after it became clear he couldn’t win, harming Hillary Clinton on the assumption that she was going to easily beat Trump and the most important thing to do was make sure she felt pressure to tack to the left. We’ll never know the exact impact that this had, but it seems fairly indisputable that turnout cost Clinton the election, and disaffected Democrats contributed to that. In 2020, Sanders certainly acted like a divisive primary could harm Biden, dropping out speedily and helping broker a truce between the progressive and liberal wings of the party in order to prevent a rerun of 2016 and the onward march of American fascism.
In turn, DeSantis, Haley and the others can certainly harm Trump. Encouragingly, DeSantis has recently begun to rake Trump over the coals for his verbal gaffes and seeming decline in mental competence. DeSantis says that Trump is not the same guy as he was when he ran in 2016 and that age is making his performance slip - a key point which I think will become apparent to many voters when they are re-introduced to Trump in the coming months. It should also help to counter concerns over Biden’s age - not because it will make voters view Biden any differently, but because they’ll realize that Trump has problems of his own.
For her part, Haley is running as more “moderate” than Trump and can hopefully drag down his standing among swing voters. It’s hard for anyone in the Republican Party to really be moderate nowadays - and Haley is herself a former Trump sycophant - but even someone just playing the part of a moderate semi-convincingly should create a useful contrast with Trump and remind voters how turned off they are by Trump’s extremism. Although I’d hate to see the primary go in this direction, it’s also pretty likely that Trump will let out his inner misogynist as he pushes back against Haley, harming him with female voters.
A long primary is also likely to see Trump issue more and more extreme statements in an attempt to lock down the Republican base. And it should push the famously unhinged former president into more absurd and abusive public statements. Trump might try to row back from this persona between winning the primary and going into the general, as he made a crude attempt to do in 2016. But extremism and verbal abuse will fit so easily into the narrative that voters remember from his first presidency, and the impression will be hard to undo.
So let’s not be churlish. Any one of these candidates would be a much worse president than Joe Biden, and none of them have laudable motives in this primary. But the least we can do is cheer them on as they help to tear down Donald Trump and increase the chances of their party suffering defeat in 2024.