On paper, “electability” looks as if it might be Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s ace in the hole in the 2024 GOP primaries. While Donald Trump and the GOP suffered a third consecutive disappointing election in 2022, DeSantis cruised to a 19-point reelection victory in what was until recently a swing state.
The circumstances instantly injected DeSantis’s potential 2024 bid with vigor, and he soon signaled that a campaign would make superior electability a calling card.
The application of this strategy has been anything but smooth. Not only has Trump — even after his indictment last month — regained ground he had lost to DeSantis, but despite polls regularly showing DeSantis performing better in the general election, they also suggest electability is no longer much of an asset for him.
A recent Wall Street Journal poll showed DeSantis retained an edge on the issue, with 41 percent saying he was more electable, compared with 31 percent for Trump. But that’s a lot closer than it should be, especially considering Trump obviously cost the GOP dearly in 2022, might have cost it the Senate in both 2020 and 2022, and even his best election (2016) involved a significant popular-vote loss.
Other recent polls also suggest Republicans are plenty willing to turn a blind eye to Trump’s obvious electoral problems.
A Marist College poll this week showed 63 percent of Republicans said they would still want Trump to be president even if he is found guilty of a crime (just 27 percent overall said that). And in an NBC News poll this week, just 26 percent of Republicans agreed it was more important to nominate a candidate who won’t be distracted and could beat President Biden, versus 68 percent who said the charges against Trump were politically motivated and the party must stand by Trump because nobody else is like him.
That last poll is a binary choice between two complex options, and it’s easy to oversell such findings. Perhaps Republicans merely don’t like the idea of giving in to what they view as a political effort to take Trump down.
But that’s also kind of the point.
Republicans as a party have been conditioned for this moment by Trump and the acquiescence of party leaders. By building a pronounced persecution complex and failing to engage in difficult but necessary conversations about their electoral defeats, they’ve created a permission structure for people to both doubt Trump’s electability problem and disregard its importance.
That starts with the blame-shifting.
After the 2020 election, Republicans declined to embrace most of Trump’s and his campaign’s most far-flung voter-fraud conspiracy theories. But they did almost nothing to check them, either, and they offered watered-down claims that played into the idea that Trump was wronged in some way. The effect: 63 percent of Republicans still don’t think Trump actually lost that election, even though half of those people acknowledge there’s no “solid evidence” of that.
Combine that with the fact that analyzing the 2022 results involves knowing which underperforming candidates Trump endorsed and how much they mattered, and it should be no surprise that many Republicans haven’t internalized just how poor his electoral record is.
The story was similar after Jan. 6, 2021. While Trump allies instantly and often privately acknowledged that Trump was the catalyst for that day’s events, party leaders have stood by as Trump, some lawmakers and conservative media types moved to retcon what happened. Ultimately, the GOP base came to believe not only that it wasn’t an insurrection, but that it wasn’t even a “riot.” One of the ugliest chapters in American political history was refashioned as a legitimate political protest, with an assist from the Republican National Committee.
Perhaps that served the party’s purposes in averting its own blame for what happened. But it also served to dilute one of the most powerful arguments against renominating Trump — even as the issue could well remain an albatross for Trump in the general election.
Most recently, this has involved the GOP’s efforts to home in on the idea that the government has been “weaponized” not just against conservatives but against Trump specifically. These theories are often poorly constructed and rely upon a mischaracterization of the available evidence. But the idea that the system is conspiring against Trump suits him exceedingly well for this moment. Standing by Trump becomes an emotional and principled pursuit against the alternative: letting the “deep state” win.
And the available evidence suggests that Republicans are very interested in not letting the “deep state” win. In addition to the NBC poll mentioned above, a CNN poll last month showed 59 percent of Republican-leaning voters saying it was more important to support a candidate who agrees with you on the major issues, versus 41 percent who say it’s more important to back a candidate with a strong chance of beating Biden.
It’s a mirror image of where the Democratic Party was late in the Trump years. Across nine polls in 2019 and 2020, electability never fell behind as a priority for Democratic-leaning voters. Sometimes it led by a more than 2-to-1 margin.
That pragmatism resulted in the nomination of Biden, who rewarded it by defeating the president whom Democrats were so invested in unseating.
That doesn’t mean it will always be thus for Republicans. DeSantis’s unsteady start appears to have led to legitimate doubts about how much more electable he is, even as polls show he still performs better in the general election. It’s also possible that Trump’s indictment has created a sugar high of principled defiance in his favor — these choices might land a little differently once they’re more consequential than telling a pollster in April 2023 that you don’t want to let New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg win.
The party saw very recently how happy its base was to support less-electable candidates and what that could cost — up to and including the Senate. But a series of choices suggest that it has greenlighted a sequel.