Trump to GOP: Fuggedaboudit

Donald Trump appears determined to insure that no Republican nominee for president in 2024 wins.

Remember the date: February 2, 2023. Why? Because it is the day Joe Biden — or whomever the Democrats nominate, should Biden not run again — won the 2024 presidential election.

And, you may ask, why have the Democrats become a lock to win the presidency? Because on that date former President Donald Trump — the only announced Republican candidate for president, so far — was asked it he would support the GOP nominee if that person is not named Donald Trump. “It would depend,” Trump said. “It would have to depend on who the nominee was.”

Translation: The only nominee Donald Trump will support is Donald Trump.

No surprise here! Trump said the same thing in his first run for the presidency. The only surprise is why anyone would be surprised. Trump — ever the supreme narcissist — demands unquestioning loyalty from everyone around him, but returns none of that loyalty. His message to the GOP is clear: If you nominate anyone other than me, you can forget about winning the White House in 2024. (Of course, Trump could win the nomination, but that is also a nightmare scenario for Republicans since he is a proven loser.)  And, as for the Senate and the House, you can probably forget about those, too, no matter who is the nominee. Just fuggedaboudit!

Republican leaders are about to pay the price for their cult-like loyalty to Trump. They stood with Trump though every malignant action he took and objectionable insult he hurled. All that blind loyalty now will be paid back by a former president who has no loyalty to his party and is willing to torpedo its electoral chances out of childish revenge. It is as if he were saying, “If you don’t let me win, I will take my toys and go home.”

If he is not the nominee, Trump has two potential courses of action, both ruinous to the GOP. He could attack the eventual nominee as insufficiently MAGA and urge his supporters to sit out the election. Trump’s favorability rating among all Americans still stands at roughly 40 percent. Given that number, it is reasonable to assume that more than enough Republican voters would heed Trump’s request and stay home on election day to prevent the party’s candidate from winning.

Trump’s other possible course of action would be to mount a third-party challenge and siphon off enough Republican votes to insure a Democratic victory. A poll released by The Bulwark two days before Trump declined to support the Republican nominee shows that more than a quarter of likely Republican voters would follow Trump into a third party. Trump has flirted with third-party runs before. In 2000, he considered — and ultimately decided against — a run under the banner of the Reform Party. In 2015, Trump declined to rule out running as an independent if he lost the Republican 2016 presidential nomination. If he were to run in 2024 on a third-party ticket, Trump likely would draw enough Republican votes in key battleground states — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, North Carolina — to affect the outcome.

Third-party candidates are doomed to lose in America’s winner-take-all electoral system. In almost every state, presidential candidates get all of a state’s electoral votes even if they win only a plurality of the popular vote. Since there is no prize for a party winning even 20 percent of the popular vote in a state, most voters stick with one of the two major parties.

Of course, that does not mean third-party candidates cannot influence the results of an election. In 1844, for example, James Birney, the nominee of the new antislavery Liberty Party, deprived Whig Party candidate Henry Clay of enough votes to allow the Democrat, James Polk, to carry New York, giving Polk a slim margin in the Electoral College. Both Clay and Polk were slaveholders, but since Clay, if he had been elected, would not have annexed Texas, there would have been no war with Mexico, thus no territories gained in the southwest potentially open to the spread of slavery. With no Mexican Cession, the Compromise of 1850 would have been unnecessary and a whole string of events that culminated in the Civil War would not have occurred. Elections do, after all, have consequences! (This is not to say that the nation would not have split apart over slavery at some future date.)

Similarly, in 1848, former President Martin Van Buren’s Free Soil Party candidacy probably decided the electoral results. Only this time, the Whigs were the beneficiary of an antislavery party’s presence in the race. As a former Democrat, Van Buren probably drained voters from his old party in the mid-Atlantic states, allowing Zachary Taylor, the Whig, to defeat Lewis Cass, the Democrat.

Only one third-party candidate has managed to finish among the top two vote getters. In 1912, former President Theodore Roosevelt challenged William Howard Taft — his hand-picked successor — for the Republican nomination after concluding that Taft had failed to advance Roosevelt’s reform program. Taft was renominated, and Roosevelt then formed the Progressive Party, popularly known as the “Bull Moose Party.” Roosevelt and Taft split the GOP vote, allowing Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win. Taft finished a distant third in both the popular and Electoral College vote.

Though no future independent candidates did as well as Roosevelt, several have affected the outcome. In 1992, Ross Perot received 19 percent of the vote, enough, some partisans of President George H.W. Bush thought, to prevent Bush’s reelection. Eight years later, another Bush benefited from the presence of Ralph Nader in the presidential race. George W. Bush won Florida by fewer than 600 votes, while Nader received about 100,000 votes in the Sunshine State. If some of those Nader votes had gone to Al Gore, the Democratic nominee, Gore would have won Florida and a majority in the Electoral College. The same dynamic was at play in New Hampshire, where Nader’s 22,000 voters was three times the margin of Bush’s victory in the state. And, finally, Trump may owe his 2016 victory in the Electoral College to Jill Stein of the Green Party, who may have pulled enough votes from Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to put those states in Trump’s column.

The Bulwark’s poll referenced above shows that a substantial majority of Republican voters are ready to jettison Trump. Unfortunately, for the Republican Party, Trump probably will not abide by the decision of the voters. Since Trump was willing to destroy American democracy on January 6, 2021, why would anyone think he would be unwilling to blow up the Republican Party in 2024?

His message to the Republican party is clear: If you do not nominate me, I will insure the person you nominate loses. If the Republican Party bows to his blackmail and nominates him, it still loses since Trump is unlikely to win in the general election.

Either way, the Republican Party can fuggedaboudit!

Posted February 7, 2023