The early stages of the 2024 Republican presidential nomination contest are picking up steam. Former President Donald Trump continues to all-but-officially run for the 2024 nomination, although that doesn’t guarantee that he’ll actually run. The small anti-Trump faction of the party appears to have at least three candidates, the most impressive of whom is U.S. Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming — never mind that she may well lose her House seat in 2022. A couple of dozen others are testing the waters, ranging from solid Trump supporters to occasional Trump critics. They’re all waiting to see the shape of the contest. It’s possible that one or more would formally announce candidacies even if Trump enters the primaries and caucuses, but most of them would drop out.
Normally, we would call the early maneuverings the “invisible primary,” but that hardly seems appropriate this time around with a former president involved. Well, with this particular former president involved. Not too much that Trump does is invisible to begin with. But more than that, Trump’s method of wooing party actors is basically to go around publicly threatening everyone that he’ll drum them out of the party if they oppose him. So we have a more visible invisible primary than usual.
It’s also a more complicated nomination cycle than usual. A lot of pundits assume the nomination is Trump’s if he wants it, but it’s hard to be sure. Trump continues to poll well among Republicans, but that’s not especially meaningful; most party politicians are well-liked by party voters. He also does well in hypothetical match-ups against other Republicans, but early polls can be misleading. Once the primaries begin in February of 2024, the most serious contenders will be better known than they are now, and candidates tend to seem more “presidential” as the cycle goes along.
There’s no way to predict something for which we have no modern experience at all — an attempt by a defeated former president to win the party’s nomination. When Teddy Roosevelt attempted a comeback in 1912 after retiring three years earlier, and when Grover Cleveland won back the White House in 1892 after losing the 1888 election, nominations were decided by the leaders of the formal state party organizations. Not, as has been the case since 1972, by voters in state primaries and open caucuses.
Party actors like former and present elected officials, major contributors, interest-group activists and party-aligned media members are still important, because they can supply valuable resources to favored candidates, but on the Republican side in 2016, voters defied skeptical party actors and chose Trump anyway.
It’s probably a safe bet that party actors will be more favorably inclined toward Trump than they were back then, at least if he makes it to 2024 in good enough shape to be running. After all, plenty of people who idolize Trump have become active within the party since 2016, and many of those who loathe him have left. But whether they will prefer him to other candidates? We can’t know that yet, no matter how certain some pundits (and some Republicans) may be.
If Trump is defeated for the nomination, it seems unlikely that it will be by Cheney or any of the others running explicitly on a platform rejecting him. Convincing Republican primary voters that Trump was a mistake is unlikely to be a popular position, even if those voters are open to moving on. And we know what the bulk of Republican party actors think of Cheney; while some still support her, many others are doing what they can to kick her out of the party. It would take a massive turnaround for the party to swing that far against Trump, and there’s no sign that anything like that is going on. Most likely, their nomination runs will be mostly symbolic, with the real question being whether a high-profile Republican will run a third-party campaign dedicated to taking down Trump and a party that is no longer theirs.
Which leaves the large group of relatively normal candidates. It’s too early to guess which of them will do well as the cycle goes on.
Less important than the specific candidate, however, is what the party is deciding to be. That’s really what the nomination process is about. Trump, of course, is the exception; choosing him would be a decision to remain in thrall to him personally, just as choosing Cheney or another anti-Trump candidate would mean personally rejecting him.
But there’s a wide range of other possibilities. The candidates now are positioning themselves on public policy to some extent, but the key question is where the party stands on Trump, and where it stands on democracy. As the process moves forward over the next 18 months, and candidates formally declare or back out, we’ll see what party actors reward and what doesn’t spark their interest.
Which is why it’s worth paying attention to presidential nominations, even this early in the cycle. We may not learn who the next Republican nominee — and perhaps the next president — will be, but we’ll learn a lot about what the party will be.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
