Trying to decide which political party has the bigger headache moving into the presidential election season is like trying to decide which bloated-payroll baseball team stinks worse, the Mets or the Padres.
Although the Democrats now hold the White House, they are saddled with an incumbent whose advancing age calls his continued fitness for the job into question. In addition, President Biden’s approval ratings are abysmal, largely because of the perception that the economy is faltering, despite low unemployment, easing inflation, and the absence of the recession that most economists, especially on the right, predicted. It is difficult to see how he can overcome either of these. He can’t get any younger and if voters are convinced that a good economy is actually a bad economy, changing their minds will be a tall order.
As serious as are these impediments for the Democrats, the Republicans’ problems may well be more intractable. They are saddled with a frontrunner whose approval ratings are also abysmal and who will potentially be facing four separate trials for serious felonies while Republican voters and party operatives are choosing their candidate to run against Biden. (That conservatives feel the need to try to paint Biden as corrupt while portraying Trump as the innocent victim of overzealous prosecutors is a combination of gall and desperation.)
Regardless of the depth of his legal troubles, however, or what is a fairly easy to discern unfitness for office, Trump commands the fierce loyalty of a major chunk of his party. For exactly the same reasons that his supporters love him, a growing number of moderates and even conservatives have announced that they will find it extremely difficult to vote for him a second or third time.
Thus, unless a suitable replacement can be found, one either sufficiently odious or sufficiently antidemocratic to win the support of Trump’s legions, while at the same time appearing palatable enough to attract the disaffected, the party will remain cleaved in two going into November 2024.
This dilemma is not lost on a significant segment of the smart money in the Republican donor class. The Koch brothers, for example, will commit perhaps $100 million to preventing Trump from gaining the nomination, and then to supporting an alternative, assuming they can find one.
That is the rub. At the moment, there is no alternative.
Ron DeSantis’s abortive (an apt phrase for conservatives) early campaign epitomizes the problem. In order to appeal to the Trump wing, he moved so far to the right that he descended into caricature, to say nothing of being dubbed the man being bested by Mickey Mouse. In addition, in an era where optics often matter more than substance, he generally strikes a pose similar to what one would expect from a funeral director trying to convince the bereaved that the super-expensive solid walnut casket with gold trim is the least they can do for the departed.
Nor does the electoral map do Republicans any favors. The website 270 To Win gives Democrats a likely total of 241 electoral votes and Republicans 235. The remainder are in five states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, all of which went for Biden in 2020. Three of them have Democratic governors and four have Democratic secretaries of state. In addition, the Wisconsin supreme court now has a democratic majority, as does Pennsylvania’s.
These two states are particularly significant in that, if the 270 To Win map holds, they are all Democrats need to hold the White House. With Democrats much in control of each, all the little tricks Republicans have employed elsewhere to hold down the Democratic vote—restrictions on early and mail-in voting, purges of voter rolls, enhanced identification requirements, exact signature matches—will be unavailable to them.
They will, then, be forced to win on merit, which Republicans seem to view as a terrifying prospect.
Savvy operators like the Koch brothers are all too aware that Trump’s negatives could easily doom them nationally, in addition to perhaps costing them the Senate, with Trump-backed candidates losing in Ohio, Montana, West Virginia, and Arizona.
But the Kochs don’t have an easy path. Other than throwing money at the problem or hoping either a white knight, such as Glenn Youngkin, appears, (more about that in the next piece) or that a third-party candidate can siphon off enough votes from Democrats, there is only one avenue open to preventing Trump from bringing the party down with him.
They can try to change the rules.
Ordinarily, Republicans have proven themselves adept at such actions—some would call it cheating—as witness Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett’s presence on the Supreme Court. In this instance, however, it will be more difficult to, for example, make anyone under indictment for a felony ineligible to enter a primary, without causing a pro-Trump rebellion.
Since his election in 2016, Republican leaders have had only limited success in balancing the No-one-but-Trump and the Anyone-but-Trump factions. As court cases in Florida, DC, Georgia, and New York loom, their task does not promise to get easier.