Already in this early stretch of the Republican presidential primary campaign, there are nearly as many candidates in the field as there were in 2016, when Donald Trump bested a slew of the Republican party’s most prominent figures on his way to the White House. But unlike 2016, of course, Trump has been the race’s perhaps prohibitive favorite from the jump – over the last three months, Trump has moved from plurality to outright majority support from the Republican electorate in the polls.
Far from damaging his candidacy, his two indictments have, if anything, encouraged more and more Republican voters to rally to his side. And, unfortunately for those hoping he loses the nomination, the sheer size of the field will make it difficult for any one of his rivals to consolidate enough of the non-Trump vote to mount a real challenge to his candidacy. Each of his long-shot competitors had to have known that their entry into the race would only make his renomination likelier. Yet they jumped in anyway. Why?
Charitably, we might want to set aside the numerous financial and professional incentives candidates have to run even losing campaigns for the presidency these days and choose to assume that the candidates in the field are offering policy agendas so robust and compelling – are so on fire about what they actually want to do as president – that they couldn’t help but throw their hats into the ring. Ron DeSantis, for his part, has shoved rightwing paranoia about education and the rollback of LGBTQ+ rights onto the party’s center stage; Florida has become the crucible for a cultural agenda social conservatives are plainly eager to advance from Congress and the White House once they get the chance. But nearly everyone else in the race seems intent on making it a pure referendum on Donald Trump. Chris Christie, for instance, now up for his second try against Trump for the nomination and currently averaging less than 3% in the primary polls, spent the bulk of his announcement speech last month disparaging Trump’s character; his slogan, a rather audacious one for someone who left office mired in legal controversy and scandal, is “because the truth matters”. At the opposite end of the field, Francis Suarez, the mayor of Miami – a mostly ceremonial office – has suggested he might pardon Trump if elected; he’s also about as attentive as Trump to matters of policy substance. When asked by the conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt about the persecution of the Uyghur people in China recently, Suarez confessed ignorance. “I will search Uyghurs,” he said. “I’m a good learner. I’m a fast learner.”
In fairness, Trump – or at least his team – has been notably more thoroughgoing in advancing a policy agenda this time around than his rivals. He made headlines earlier this year with proposals to invest in the development of flying cars and to construct up to ten new “Freedom Cities” – state-of-the-art megalopolises of the future – from scratch on federal land. All this was good for a few laughs, but the bulk of the Trump campaign’s public platform on the issues at the heart of Republican politics are both more plausible and more alarming, though nearly all of them would be very heavy lifts legislatively.
On crime, the next Trump administration will pursue tighter penalties for violent offenders, more funding for police departments and a strengthening of qualified immunity. On education, Trump promises to “cut federal funding for any school or program pushing critical race theory or gender ideology on our children” and give states incentives not only to achieve longstanding conservative priorities like abolishing teacher tenure and implementing merit pay, but introducing parental bills of rights and measures like the direct election of school principals.
On LGBTQ+ rights, Trump wants to ban gender-affirming care for minors and prohibit the federal recognition of transgender identity. And on immigration, the next Trump administration will revive the “Remain in Mexico” policy and other measures aimed at frustrating asylum seekers and continue the militarization of the border.
The absence of fleshed out platforms from the other candidates as yet means that Trump remains not only the tonal but the substantive center of the Republican race thus far. And even those running the campaigns most explicitly aimed at resuscitating the pre-Trump GOP establishment have shown a willingness to follow Trump to the extremes. It might surprise many American voters for instance – though neither President Biden nor most of the political press has made much of it – that there’s a consensus among Republican candidates, as Reason’s Matt Welch has noted, that the next administration should launch a new war in Mexico, with American troops on the ground if need be, against the drug cartels. This was an idea Trump first put forward four years ago; in his current platform, it survives as a pledge to order the Department of Defense to “inflict maximum damage” on the cartels and to take them down “just as he took down Isis”. The majority of the major candidates in the field are on board with this, including South Carolina’s Tim Scott and Nikki Haley, who are still routinely framed as comparatively moderate figures by much of the political press. In his very announcement speech, in fact, Scott went as far as to call cartels terrorists and promised to “allow the world’s greatest military to fight” them. Haley has also echoed Trump directly – the cartels, she said in the spring, are to be dealt with “just like we dealt with Isis”.
This is the same Nikki Haley who noted correctly and with some candor in her campaign announcement video that the Republicans have lost the popular vote in “seven out of the last eight presidential elections”. That’s an insight that can cut two ways. On the one hand, it should be plain to all running that neither Trumpism nor a mere return to the unpopular Republican platforms of old will broaden the Republican base – a conservatism that can reliably win popular majorities in 2024 and beyond has yet to be discovered or forged and none of the candidates in the running seem especially interested in paving novel ground. On the other hand, it should similarly be plain that next Republican nominee will not actually need a popular majority to win the White House in 2024 – dusting off Trumpism and missteps and malaise within the Democratic party may well be enough to deliver victory again, no platform innovations necessary. As it stands, Trump himself seems likeliest to carry the party’s mantle again next year – his rivals remain too numerous; his gravitational pull on the party’s discourse and agenda remains too strong.
Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist
