GOP Elites Should Blame Themselves for Trump’s Popularity
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons
Ron DeSantis fans got some disappointing news yesterday. A graphic from MSNBC floating around the Twitterverse showed the relative state of the endorsement race between Donald Trump and DeSantis, who I should note is not yet officially running for president. The bad news for Ron DeSantis is that the Florida governor has garnered a measly three endorsements to Trump’s 61.
It’s true that DeSantis will likely pick up quite a few endorsements quickly when he formally begins his campaign (if he ever does), but Trump’s lead in the endorsement race should be of concern to DeSantis backers. The fact that Trump has any endorsements at all from Republican politicians should be of great concern to everyone.
Of course, quantity and quality are not the same things. I wanted to see exactly who endorsed Trump. The most complete list that I could find was on Wikipedia and to a great extent, it’s exactly who you would think. There are Steve Bannon and Mike Flynn. Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene are also on the list.
But it goes beyond that. There are 24 former executive branch officials, nine senators, and 51 congressmen, plus a smattering of state and former officials. I don’t know which ones NBC focused on to get their total of 61, but Trump obviously has more endorsements than that.
And not all of them are loons. Gen. Keith Kellogg, Mike Pence’s national security advisor from 2018 through 2021 is among the Trump supporters. So is Lindsey Graham who said, “Enough is enough” on January 7, 2021, but whose attitude now seems to be “I wish I knew how to quit you.”
To be fair, since I looked up Trump’s list of endorsements on Wikipedia, I did the same for DeSantis. The governor has three former executive branch officials and three current congressmen. As I write this, no senator has endorsed DeSantis, but he does have Elon Musk’s endorsement to offset Mike Lindell’s support of Donald Trump.
What is most astonishing at this point is the lack of support for DeSantis from within Florida. While members of his administration and Republican legislators in the Sunshine State may be holding their fire until his official announcement, many members of Florida’s congressional delegation have no such compunctions about delaying their declarations of support for Donald Trump. NBC News noted that Trump now has the endorsement of at least six members of Florida’s 20-member congressional delegation. That includes Rep. Byron Donalds, who introduced DeSantis at his Election Night victory party less than six months ago.
Defections like that of Donalds, a prominent DeSantis ally, raise the question of how many endorsements the governor can expect when and if he finally does declare his candidacy. Like Republican primary voters who are flocking to Trump, a lot of Republican politicos will realize which side their bread is buttered on and choose to make the voters happy with a Trump endorsement. This is the same pattern that we’ve seen for years now in which Republicans are afraid to cross their own base.
And there are probably more Trump endorsements to come. Steven Cheung, a campaign spokesman for the Trump campaign, said, “We’re strategically rolling out endorsements to coincide with events that we put on. There’s a strategic way to do it to get the most bang out of your buck. We’re being very cognizant of that; we’re being very deliberate. There’s a plan for all of this.”
In the past, endorsements have mattered. FiveThirtyEight points out that endorsements have been more predictive of primary winners than polling since 1972. When a candidate leads in both polling and endorsements, the odds are very good that he will win the nomination.
The people most surprised and dismayed by all this may be the Republican elites who have attempted to coronate DeSantis as the heir to the MAGA crown. Many of the same people who endorsed Trump very early in 2020 in an attempt to freeze out any challengers have now decided that Trump is now so damaged that he is no longer useful. These people want DeSantis to pick up his mantle and they’d still prefer that their candidate not face any meaningful opposition.
But the problem, illustrated not only by Trump’s lead in endorsements but Republican primary polling as well, is that Republican voters don’t want DeSantis. It’s not that they don’t like him, it’s just that they want Donald Trump. They’d prefer that DeSantis wait until 2028.
If the Republican establishment backers of Ron DeSantis are disappointed in their candidate’s failure to catch on, they have no one to blame but themselves. After all, these same people have spent most of the past six or seven years rationalizing away Trump’s flaws and telling their base that Trump was all that stood between them and socialism/authoritarianism/The Apocalypse/[insert disaster here]. As it turns out, the base believed what the elites were telling them, even if the elites didn’t believe it themselves.
The Republican leadership and political class had a transactional relationship with Trump. He gave them votes and occasionally some policy wins while they rescued him from impeachment twice and pledged their loyalty to him. They laid it on so thick that the Republican base came to see Trump as a winner. More than a winner. The base considers him to be a messiah.
And at some point between 2016 and 2023, the Republican base ceased to follow the Republican leaders and started to follow Trump. As I described earlier this week, the GOP was already headed down that road before Trump arrived on the scene, but Republicans got the worst of all worlds in the deal.
In handing the party over to Trump, they got someone who isn’t conservative, who isn’t competent, and who isn’t likely to hand the party back over peacefully when his time is done. Trump’s loyalty is primarily to Trump and he won’t have any problems going scorched earth against the Republican Party when the party ceases to benefit him.
Just this week, Trump fired a shot across DeSantis’s bow with a video warning that if he decides to run, he “would hurt and somewhat divide the Republican Party, which we don’t need. He would lose the cherished and massive MAGA vote and never be able to successfully run for office again.”
Trump’s message is simple: If you oppose me, I will destroy your career. That message can also be extended to the party as a whole.
I think that the Republican elites are right to try to find an alternative to Trump, but there are two problems. The first is that they are seven years too late. Back in 2016, they should have done what the Democrats did in 2020 when faced with a strong insurgent campaign from Bernie Sanders and coalesced around a compromise candidate. That option is no longer viable with polling showing that Trump outperforms all other Republican candidates combined.
The second problem is that the Republican elites are paper tigers for whom the party trumps all else. If Trump can win the nomination, he knows the elites will fall in line. They’ve done it before. Over and over.
How many times have we heard a variation of the line, “I believe that Donald Trump is unfit to be president, but I’ll vote for him over any Democrat?” Expect to hear it a lot in 2024.
The Republican elites missed their chance to stop Trump and they don’t really want to stop him anyway if it means a Democrat will win (again). The political and thought leaders of the GOP turned their party over to Donald Trump when they should have been holding him accountable. They have been paying for their deal with the devil ever since and all signs point to another installment coming due in 2024.
Ron DeSantis will probably have more endorsements coming his way if he ever decides to formalize his campaign, but I don’t think it will matter. The endorsements of the Republican elites won’t matter much to the GOP base because most of the people who endorse DeSantis will be dismissed as RINOs. They have become outsiders in their own party.
Boring. Trite. Timeless.
Pick two.
Here’s a not so boring schpiel:
Hilary Clinton should blame herself for Trump’s popularity. She invested a lot of time and money and resources in ensuring that the worst Presidential Candidate ran against the second worst Presidential Candidate.Report
Yes sir, your schpiel is those things. Secretary Clinton had precisely ZERO to do with Donald Trump’s selection as the GOP nominee in 2016. She had even less to do with all the GOP elites willingness to rally round him, and then double down in 2020. And she certainly has zero to do with tier continued fealty.
Yes, she ran what turned out to be a sub-par campaign who completely missed how Trump tapped white conservative male backlash to 8 years of a black man in the White House. But the GOP has and had agency, and they are continuing to use it to march toward authoritarianism to preserve white male minority rule.Report
For ever American conservative, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it is still that November evening in 2016 when Hillary has just surrendered and the red hatted MAGAs are jubilant and it’s all in the balance, Biden hasn’t happened yet, Biden hasn’t even begun yet, Biden not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for Biden not to begin against that position and those circumstances…Report
They won’t vote for Democrats anyway in any timeline. Because Democrats won’t dismantle the regulatory state, nor will they cement white male rule.
Its really that simple. All this is just window dressing.Report
Well, to be fair, she did say they were part of a “basket of deplorables.” And they, in turn, pretended to be offended by her having called racists “deplorable” and we then spent more than a year debating whether people who never, ever, ever were ever under any circumstances going to vote for Hillary Clinton were somehow “forced” to vote for Donald Trump because they were so deeply offended that she deplored their racism.
[Wistful sigh] Good times…
For the record, racism is deplorable, and we ought to deplore racists. And it turns out, opposing racism is popular with voters, most of whom are opposed to racism.Report
I used that Faulkner quote because 2020 utterly decimated the pundit myths of 2016, as completely as Pickett’s charge.
But for a certain breed of conservatives it’s always that November evening, when Trump was the dove and Clinton the hawk, Trump was the working man’s friend and she was the elite and the GOPs future was shiny and bright, before everything started going downhill.Report
As much as I yearn for the day where we can stop relitigating 2016 I would complicate this a little. There was a moment in the 2008 primaries where IIRC Hillary got caught doing retail politics, taking a shot of whiskey with a bunch of deplorables to be in coal country. The narrative then was that, despite losing, she had found her constituency and it very much included them. Some thought it was cringe and I believe candidate Obama made a mildly sarcastic comparison to Annie Oakley, but I think smarter people saw it as a good play.
Now, things had of course changed by 2016, and it’s possible that path just wasn’t open to her anymore. But when the whole thing turned on what, 40 or 50,000 of them? I’d say her most important job was not to write them off.Report
There are so many layers to HRC’s 2016 loss that it can be maddening to pare back. Particularly since the narrowness of her fingernail’s breadth failure means that eliminating even one factor probably puts her over the top.
The factor you’re musing on currently, InMD was partially a result of HRC’s scare from Bernie and partially from HRC and her staff “drinking the koolaid” of identity politics so to speak. First off, Bernie didn’t come enormously close to winning the nomination but he came a lot closer than anyone expected him to and he drew a huge amount of internet noise which made his threat seem to loom even larger to HRC’s campaign. She reacted by running to his left on identity and social justice issues and where you position yourself in the primaries can have a large impact on where you go in the general.
Secondly, HRC was running at the end of Obama’s second term and the “Democratic demographic destiny” stuff was running strong in left wing veins. HRC was never what anyone would call a political visionary and her staff was all in on these ideas so she merrily went along with them. The HRC campaign focused on the so called “coalition of the ascendant” voters and it worked pretty well in getting them to turn out and vote for her. Problem is that those voters are concentrated in urban redoubts and thus are enormously inefficiently located for winning electoral college votes even as they count towards raw (useless) voting totals.
And this is infuriating, of course, because HRC came so close. You pull any stick out of the Trump 2016 Jenga tower and HRC would have eked out a win:
If Hillary herself had been a more politically astute politician or a more viscerally appealing retail politician.
If the media hadn’t entirely vanished up their own posteriors about Emails or horse racing or .
If Comey hadn’t insanely violated generations of rules about disclosing info on candidates so close to the election (or if he’d stomped hard on the threatened leakers instead of knuckling down to them).
If if if.
But they happened, she lost, it was awful and she’ll always be the politician who lost to Donald fishin’ Trump. It’s bitter for me especially because I have always genuinely liked her and that seems like a cruel fate.Report
Her vote for invading Iraq is a policy blunder I find so, so hard to forgive. Obviously I still would have much preferred her to Trump. Watching that train wreck made it way easier to get over Biden’s vote for the same.
But I agree generally, that the stars aligned and if any number of little things went the other way she probably wins. My take on the last ~7 years of politics is that everyone took away all of the wrong lessons from what was in fact a really flukey event. As nice as it is for Democrats to have the Republicans believe they can win running charlatans and just straight up whackos it’s quite clearly terrible for the country. And the center in American politics is still there if Democrats want it. It’s even a little more liberal than it was a decade ago. The best thing for all of us would be another term of boring old Biden, which I am hoping the lord grants us.Report
Regarding Biden, you and I agree on that. Ol’ Uncle Joe has done a yeoman’s job and if he can handle a second term I think he deserves it.
As for the GOP running charlatans, I think this gives entirely too much credit to what remains of that party. The GOP didn’t think “let’s give a charlatan a try” they simply accidentally created, through fecklessness and grift, a party eco-system that rewarded charlatans, were astonished when a foreign charlatan slithered in to take over and, then, decided they’d rather try and win with said charlatan, at the meager cost of selling out the tattered remnants of their principles, than risk losing to a Democrat. The GOP and conservatives richly deserved Trump; pity the rest of us don’t.Report
Oh I’m in total agreement with you on the GOP situation being one of their own making and the predictable end result of a cynical game doubled down on over and over and over again. I’d be a lot more inclined to laugh at the total dysfunction but for the fact that the nature of the system virtually guarantees that they will win some of the time even with the most absurd and outrageous people.Report
It’s shaping up to be Trump v Biden again. Odds are Biden crushes him.
Biden is now the safe choice as the sitting President.
Trump created 1/6 (etc) on the way out.
So the first one is much stronger and the 2nd much weaker.Report
But with our divided politics a mistimed geopolitical event or a recession at the wrong/right time could swing a Trump vs Biden match despite those substantive difference. And, of course, the actuarial dice are always a-rolling.Report
I still remember a quotation from 2015 or 2016.
“I want to (eliminate) the GOPe. Trump is the (elimination) weapon.”Report
Since when is Lindsey Graham NOT a loon?Report
100% agreed.Report
Related:
The (Republican) Party’s Over
We asked four recovering Republicans if the GOP is salvageable. Hint: They laughed.
https://newrepublic.com/article/171722/republican-party-deadReport
I’ve often thought someone ought to sit down with what I call MSNBC Republicans, open up adult beverages, talk with them about what their program would be — in reasonable detail, not just cliches — if they were the opposition party, and explore whether we could do business with each other.Report
We have those sorts of MSNBC Republicans here in California, but they are called Democrats.
As in, there is a vast constituency for fiscally prudent, socially liberal people, but they are currently served by the Gavin Newsoms and Karen Basses of the Democratic Party.
If you are, say, a real estate developer or media executive or tech company, you can sit with a Democratic state legislator, mayor, or state official and have a very productive conversation about ways to help your business or streamline the process of getting approvals.
If you sit down with Republican officeholders in the places where they hold office like Shasta County you will find yourself listening to diatribes about Hunter Biden’s penis or Constitutional Sheriffs or the urgent need to secede from the state and set up a Biblical state where everyone knows which bathroom to use and Antifa types are shot on sight.Report
Jesus travels to the Biblical State of Shasta County and wonders why there is so much pork and other non-kosher food in the supermarkets. He also remains perplexed at the lack of animal sacrifices.Report
That was a really interesting conversation to read. Despair-inducing, but interesting.Report
Agreed. They prove beyond a doubt that there aren’t enough “reasonable Republicans” left to do much of anything. And only one of them openly said they’d vote for a Democrat to vote against Trump. Which means we can’t count on any of them to do anything to actually save democracy.Report
Pity they represent, probably, even less actual voters than libertarians do. *sad sigh*Report
Very helpful piece. There’s been a lot of back and forth on the endorsements mini-tempest in the last week with predictable maximizing and minimizing of the story in the respective quarters. This is the best summary that I’ve seen of who’s done what on endorsements so far and with what significance. Thanks for the write-up.Report