The Oddly Cautious Challengers to Trump
On the menu today: The first Republican presidential debate of the 2024 cycle is about five weeks away, and there’s a strange, inverted dynamic at work in the GOP field. Usually, the frontrunner runs a cautious campaign, while the underdogs and longshots take bigger risks, attempting to stand out, gain ground, and peel away supporters from the frontrunner. But so far, it feels like the opposite is happening, with a lot of the longshots running generic, predictable, cookie-cutter campaigns, while Donald Trump is his usual erratic, unpredictable, winging-it self.
A Peculiar Primary
An odd dynamic is at work in the 2024 Republican presidential primary. Some of the candidates who are so far behind, with the least to lose, are campaigning very cautiously and predictably, almost afraid to make waves. Meanwhile, frontrunner Donald Trump, who you would think would have the most to lose, is campaigning with his trademark wild abandon and sudden reversals, throwing caution to the wind.
A slew of candidates entered as underdogs and are offering, at least from my perspective, something of a generic, cookie-cutter GOP agenda. Secure the border. Increase domestic energy production. Cut taxes. Build up the military. Roll back or undo “Bidenomics.” Stop “woke” indoctrination in our schools.
There’s nothing wrong with those agenda items, but they are indistinguishable from what every other Republican candidate is promising. Getting up on stage and pledging to enact those policies doesn’t stand out, and a lot of GOP primary voters have heard it all before.
It seems the non-Trump candidates are still struggling to figure out what the modern Republican presidential-primary voters want. About half the party wants Trump again and doesn’t seem interested in any alternative. The candidates competing for the rest can’t quite figure out whether they should try to emulate Trump, try to be different than Trump, or offer a bit from column A and a bit from column B (and if so, in what proportion and what combination).
If everyone sticks to the generic laundry list of priorities, it may well reflect that the campaigns have concluded that Republican presidential-primary voters don’t care about the details of policy, and laying out their agenda in broad strokes is all that is needed to win votes.
I notice quite a few of the GOP presidential-campaign websites do not have “issues” or agenda sections yet. Some of these candidates do feature their most recent media appearances, which sometimes give a sense of their policy proposals. But they don’t have any set-aside section that lays out their to-do list in detail. They all have ways to contribute, and almost all have online stores for campaign merchandise. If you want to peruse them yourself, here are the campaign websites for Chris Christie, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Tim Scott, and Francis Suarez.
You know which GOP candidates do feature an issues page on their websites? Doug Burgum, Will Hurd, Asa Hutchinson, Vivek Ramaswamy, and — I’ll mention him just because we shared a stage in Memphis this weekend — Larry Elder. Oh, and . . . Donald Trump!
I wonder if some campaigns have calculated that putting out specific policy proposals just gives the other rival campaigns targets to snipe at and language to exaggerate, misconstrue, and demonize. I hope this isn’t the case, as “trust me, we’ll work out the details later” is a promise that Republicans have heard many, many times before, often with disappointing results. I agree with Christie’s campaign slogan that “the truth matters,” and the truth is that there are still some of us nerds and geeks out here who actually want to see a policy agenda with specifics from presidential candidates.
“The devil is in the details” is just a saying, people. You don’t make the devil go away by refusing to go into any details.
The campaign websites all have “biography” sections. I think voters ought to really scrutinize a candidate’s history and record, particularly when they’ve had to run an institution and build coalitions to enact changes in policy. But so far, the evidence suggests that GOP primary voters aren’t that interested. Back in 2015, Henry Barbour, a committeeman for the Republican National Committee and an informal adviser to Rick Perry’s campaign, lamented, “We are into an age where it seems like your ability to get yourself on cable news and be a rock star in a reality-TV era matters more than what you’ve accomplished in a state like Texas or New Jersey or Florida. . . . It’s tough, and it’s not good, but it is reality. And campaigns have to deal with what the voters are looking for.”
How much has changed since 2015? The non-Trump candidates spend a lot of time emphasizing their experience, offering it as proof that they know how to get results. But about 45 percent of GOP primary voters in 2016 didn’t care that Donald Trump had never run anything in government before. This cycle, one of the few long-shot candidates who has shown any sign of catching fire is Ramaswamy, who hit 8 percent in a Morning Consult national poll, good enough for third place. At best, Republican primary voters seem uninterested in a candidate’s experience and accomplishments. At worst, maybe they see experience and accomplishments as liabilities, signs that a candidate is part of the dreaded “establishment.”
If you’re rooting for DeSantis, it’s a good sign that he’s shaking up his staff. No, his campaign isn’t collapsing, but his current approach and team haven’t gotten him where he wants to go. The pressure to perform in the upcoming debate keeps increasing, and as our Luther Ray Abel points out, fireworks in some mainstream-media interviews would probably help, too.
Some longshot candidates don’t appear to have much of a plan. Former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson endured some mockery for an image of him addressing a crowd of six people. He recently told the New York Times that his goal in Iowa is to finish in the top five, which is an insanely low goal and definition of success. The fifth-place finishers in Iowa in previous cycles were Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Ron Paul, John McCain, Phil Gramm, and Pete du Pont. A fifth-place finish may not even earn a single delegate. No one must try to marginalize Hutchinson because he’s doing a fine job of marginalizing himself.
If you’re a Republican presidential candidate currently polling at five percent or less . . . what are you being cautious for? Where has your current approach gotten you so far?
Longshot candidates, let me be the one to communicate the hard truth that apparently your campaign staff is afraid to tell you: You’re not going to get very far on your charm and good looks. You’ll be lucky if you get noticed on that debate stage amidst all the other candidates making the same promises. Very few voters will be wowed by your resume. Running for president is much, much harder than running for governor or senator. The hours and travel are a slog, the pressure to raise money is relentless, the press coverage and scrutiny are often brutal, and the competition is fierce. If you want the presidency, you must take some chances. Heck, if you just want attention, you must take some chances, too.
On the flip side, Trump keeps making decisions that would damage a normal candidate, but that so far have no sign of impacting his popularity. Remember Trump’s dinner with Kanye and Nick Fuentes? Apparently, GOP voters don’t find that worrying. Remember Trump declaring on Truth Social that “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution”? There’s no sign that post hurt Trump at all.
Trump called Nevada “disgraceful” and insisted he won the state in 2020. (Here in this dimension, Biden won the state by 33,596 votes, or about 2.4 percentage points.)
He trashed his own former press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany. He blamed Chris Christie for recommending Christopher Wray, Trump’s own appointee to be director of the FBI. He’s argued that disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo handled the pandemic better than his primary rival Ron DeSantis. He’s threatening to skip the debates.
In ordinary politics, these sorts of statements and blame-shifting backfire.
Trump skipped the 2023 Family Leadership Summit in Iowa entirely; we’ll see if this has any effect on his support in Iowa. During The Blaze’s coverage of the event, his biggest cheerleader, Kari Lake, declared, “There’s some lovely people that are on this stage, but I feel like we’re dealing with the B-team here.” More than a few conservatives on social media couldn’t believe that a woman who lost a race to Katie Hobbs had the gall to call multi-term governors and senators the “B-team” — and noted that her preferred “A-team” didn’t even bother to show up in Iowa.
Instead of going to Iowa, Trump stayed in Florida and spoke at the Turning Point Action conference. In that speech, he declared that he was only using the term “crooked” on Joe Biden now, and that “I took the name ‘crooked’ away from Hillary and gave her a new name, ‘beautiful.’ I don’t believe in the same name for two people.”
As far as we can tell, none of this has hindered Trump’s effort to win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination — in Iowa, New Hampshire, or nationally. Yes, it’s early, and Republican-leaning voters may not be paying too much attention yet.
In fact, Trump remains so erratic that he can switch positions on a dime. For much of the past year, Trump and his supporters have argued that U.S. support for Ukraine is a terrible mistake and waste, and that Volodymyr Zelensky is unworthy of American assistance. At one of Trump’s rallies, Ted Nugent declared Zelensky a “homosexual weirdo.”
Then, this weekend, in an interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, Trump outlined a scenario where he would dramatically increase U.S. military aid to Ukraine:
“I know Zelensky very well. I felt he was very honorable, because when they asked him about the perfect phone call that I made, he said it was indeed per- he said it was, he didn’t even know what they were talking about! He could have grandstanded, ‘Oh, I felt threatened. . . .’”
“I know Zelensky very well and I know Putin very well. Even better. And I had a good relationship, very good, with both of them. I would tell Zelensky, ‘No more. You gotta make a deal.’ I would tell Putin, ‘If you don’t make a deal, we’re gonna give them a lot. We’re gonna give them more than they’ve ever got, if we have to.’ I will have the deal done in one day. One day.”
So, Trump’s plan is to cut off arms shipments to Ukraine, and then see whether Putin agrees to a deal; if Putin does not, Trump would then ship even more arms to Ukraine.
