Prepping for the Republican Debate
There are many ways to determine the beginning of an election cycle. It could be said that the campaign season begins with the first candidate’s announcement or the first primary (or caucus since it’s Iowa), but even though the candidates have been sniping for a while now, the first debate gives the campaign season an official feel. For Republicans, the first debate is tomorrow night. (Here is the AP guide on how to watch.)
It has been about eight years since Republicans had a debate of presidential candidates and things have changed a lot since then. In 2015, I was optimistic when I looked at the Republican bench, filled with prominent senators and governors, and considered the fact that Hillary Clinton, a very weak candidate, was almost certain to be the Democratic nominee. It seemed to be the time for a new conservative dawn.
I turned out to be badly wrong, and now, seven years later, I don’t feel one iota of optimism for the Republican Party.
For starters, with a few exceptions, I would have been happy with most of the 2016 candidates. Sadly, almost to a man they have debased themselves over the past eight years. My preferred candidate in 2016, Marco Rubio, has been one of the biggest disappointments. Almost no one from either party has emerged from the Trump years with their reputation enhanced and that goes double for the GOP hopefuls from two cycles ago.
This year, I look at the Republican candidates and think to myself, “Is this the best we’ve got?”
Here are the current standings based on FiveThirtyEight’s average of polls (an asterisk indicates that the candidate has qualified for the first debate):
- Donald Trump* – 52 percent
- Ron DeSantis* – 15 percent
- Vivek Ramaswamy* – 8.9 percent
- Mike Pence* – 4.2 percent
- Tim Scott* – 3.5 percent
- Nikki Haley* – 3.4 percent
- Chris Christie* 3.3 percent
- Asa Hutchinson* – 0.7 percent
- Doug Burgum* – 0.4 percent
- Will Hurd- 0.3 percent
- Francis Suarez – 0.2 percent
- Perry Johnson – did not register in polling
I can’t get excited about any of them. Nevertheless, here is my rundown of the Republican field. I separate the candidates into four broad categories:
MAGA
Donald Trump Anybody who has read anything I’ve written should know how I feel about Donald Trump and, since he’s skipping the debate, let’s just move on.
Vivek Ramaswamy A candidate for people who like MAGA but want to lose with a fresh face. Ramaswamy is an entrepreneur and the son of Indian immigrants. He is wealthy and popular on the speaking circuit, but he is not very knowledgeable and some of his policy positions are inconsistent and far out of the mainstream. Among these are 9/11trutherism, demonizing the FDA, and rationalizations about January 6. Having never run for office, Ramaswamy, like Trump, is a ticking time bomb that will likely blow up in Republican faces before the election if he becomes the nominee.
Ron DeSantis There is some debate about whether Ron DeSantis is a MAGA candidate. I tend to think that if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck then it’s probably a duck, and DeSantis has spent the last three years competing with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to see which of them can veer farther right in search of Donald Trump’s base. DeSantis, who was once touted as an establishment conservative, seems to have won the race to the fringe right (although Abbott put up strong competition), but Trump’s lock on his base has proven impossible to crack. DeSantis had a chance at the nomination by capturing Republican voters who were Trump-fatigued, but instead, he tried and failed to become a mini-Trump. DeSantis’s campaign is faltering and he has a lot to lose on Wednesday night. Considering his high burn rate on campaign cash, a disappointing showing could end his campaign quickly.
Disappointments
Mike Pence Pence has no shot. He did the right thing in resisting Trump’s orders on January 6, but in so doing, he ruined his reputation with the MAGA crowd. In legitimizing Trump for the previous four years and then rationalizing and protecting him after January 6, Pence made sure that anti-Trump voters couldn’t trust him either. In straddling the train tracks, he got hit by the train and now Pence’s base, Christian evangelicals, have largely deserted him for The Former Guy. Pence’s political fate was sealed when he agreed to be Trump’s vice president, a decision which turned out to be a major error in judgement and one for which he will probably never recover.
Nikki Haley Nikki Haley had promise. I thought that she might be a candidate who could unite the party by bringing MAGA and traditional Republicans together. But like Pence, she seems to be unable to stop reflexively defending Donald Trump. Haley started the campaign with a lot of potential but she has been unable to break out of the pack and unwilling to challenge the frontrunner. I think she’s more interested in being Trump’s VP candidate as a precursor to 2028. That disingenuous approach is bad for both the country and the party, and it’s a good reason for Republicans to reject her.
Tim Scott My criticisms of the second South Carolina candidate (how weird is it to have two candidates from South Carolina and neither of them be Lindsey Graham?) are much the same as for the first. I wanted to like Scott and I like a lot of what he has to say, but when I hear Scott politicizing the Trump indictments and (falsely) saying that the Biden Administration’s Department of Justice has been “weaponized,” I consider it disqualifying (for my vote at least, not in the same sense that Trump may be disqualified under the 14th Amendment). Nevertheless, Scott has picked up a reasonable amount of support from evangelicals and is within striking distance of being within striking distance of second place.
The Anti-Trumps
Chris Christie Chris Christie is a meme. Literally. The former New Jersey governor is mainly remembered for three things: His 2012 pre-election bromance with Barack Obama, the “Bridgegate” scandal, and a series of viral memes based on a photo of the gov in on a closed public beach during a budget impasse. Make no mistake, Christie isn’t in the race to win it. Christie is in the race to take out Donald Trump the way he destroyed Marco Rubio in 2016. With Trump ducking for cover on Wednesday, it will be interesting to see if Christie goes after another candidate or attacks Trump in absentia. It will also be interesting to see whether Trump eventually confronts the New Jersey hitman or whether continues to skip debates.
Asa Hutchinson A former Arkansas governor, Asa Hutchinson entered the race last April and promptly disappeared. Seriously, I think I saw his face on a milk carton. Hutchinson is a real conservative with good experience in governing, but he has no chance because he says mean things about Trump. Even beyond that, he has a name recognition problem because he was not a showboat governor. Hutchinson would be a good candidate in the general election, but he won’t make it that far.
The Why-Are-You-Here? Crowd
Doug Burgum Doug Burgum may be the best candidate in the race. Unfortunately, the North Dakota governor also has a name recognition problem. Burgum is a successful businessman and billionaire who qualified for the debate using a promotion in which he gave a $20 gift card to everyone who donated $1 to his campaign. (For the record, a $19 net profit was not worth giving Republicans my contact information.) With no discernible opinion on Donald Trump to alienate either faction of the party, the debate may be Burgum’s chance to wow the voters and move up in the polls.
Will Hurd Former Texas congressman Will Hurd is another candidate I can respect. He was critical of Donald Trump but nevertheless failed to support the first impeachment. Hurd did not run for re-election in 2020 after voting to condemn a Trump tweet that was widely considered racist.
Francis Suarez Francis Suarez is the mayor of Miami. Suarez previously said that candidates who didn’t qualify for the first debate should drop out of the race, so look for the mayor to end his campaign if he wants to maintain his credibility.
Perry Johnson Johnson is a businessman from Michigan who ran an unsuccessful campaign for governor in 2022. I guess he figured if he could lose a gubernatorial race, he could lose a presidential one as well. I wouldn’t know Johnson was running if I didn’t keep seeing his ads on Facebook. I think my research for this article probably noticeably impacted the number of web searches for him.
And that’s about the size of it. Are you as underwhelmed as I am?
The debate will probably shake things up a bit. Donald Trump will probably remain on top despite being a no-show. DeSantis will struggle to assert dominance while the others will likely be gunning for him in hopes of bringing down the Number Two and narrowing the field.
In the end, I think it’s going to be a competition for the runner-up position. As I‘ve said all along, Trump owns the Republican Party. The nomination is his if he wants it, and he seems to want it. That’s true whether he’s indicted or not. Trump can’t lose the Republican primary and he can’t win the general election. And that’s true whether he was indicted or not.
I think that most of the candidates have the same attitude as Nikki Haley. Campaigning for 2024 is more about name recognition and building support for 2028 than any real attempt to win the current nomination. For most, it’s a sensible strategy, but Nikki Haley could have done so much better.
As to who I’ll ultimately vote for, I’m undecided. I plan to see how things shake out over the next few months, but right now, it would be easier to tell you who I won’t vote for.
I think Trump, DeSantis, Scott, Haley, and Christie have a shot at the nomination. Haley might have the most to lose tonight. If she comes off as a Trump ad, she’ll lose any chance of nomination, and she should know better than to think that Trump will be loyal to her when he chooses a running mate. Christie or Scott would need a good night to build to become the voters’ backup plan. DeSantis still is that backup plan, but hasn’t made the jump to contender. He doesn’t need a good night. People want him to step up, but there’s nothing wrong with being a solid, consistent conservative in the GOP, and there’s nothing he could do in one night to overtake Trump, so he may be better off slow and steady.
I’d like to see DeSantis get the nomination, but would vote for Scott, Haley, or Christie in the general.Report
When Trump is renominated what will you do?Report
I know we’ve talked about this before. I’ve never voted for him.Report
I’m not asking what you did before, since as you point out that’s well known; I’m asking what you will do. I highly doubt you will refuse to vote.Report
I’m consistent. I’m always consistent. If there’s someone I can vote for on the ticket, I’ll vote for him. I can’t vote for Trump.Report
I admit to some curiosity about what Burgum will do. He may be on a billionaire vanity campaign. My suspicion, though, is that he’s doing what Jay Inslee did in 2020. Inslee was a one-issue candidate. His presence on the stage forced the moderators to ask at least a couple of climate change questions, and the other candidates to make some “I’ll decarbonize the grid faster than Jay” statements. Burgum has tried a number of things to force states neighboring North Dakota to continue burning coal, oil, and natural gas. He may simply be trying to force that becoming an “official” Republican national policy by getting everyone else on the stage to endorse it.Report
He may not be in the debate. Breaking news about a sports injury and being in the ER.Report
USA Today is quoting him to the effect of anyone who wants to be President ought to be willing to stand on one leg for a couple of hours. He has apparently walked through the facility to verify he can manage it with crutches and a boot.Report
So, this was such a weird statement I had to google it, and it turns out he has managed to somehow settle on the absolute stupidest policy position: He says we should continue burning fossil fuels, but as climate change is real, we should _also_ somehow do things to pull CO2 out of the air, despite this not actually being something that even vaguely can impact anything yet. Right now, approximately 0.1% of CO2 is sequestered, and to actually implement this, we’d basically have to do the entire renewable energy push again, starting over with this tech instead, and also somehow start _making_ people pay to sequester.
And also…we do need to start doing this _anyway_, as much as we can. We do need to develop the tech, but not to counter out new emissions, but to remove the CO2 we already put there! Continuing to put CO2 there while we do this is utter nonsense, especially since this technology is going to take decades to get built, and, again, there’s no actual funding source for it. (Unless we implement a carbon tax, but, good luck getting Republicans on board with that.)
‘Yes, this truck is accelerating towards a cliff, and my solution is not stop accelerating, it is counter the acceleration with hard braking. And try to sue anyone who suggests we stop accelerating, because, again, our brakes are good enough to stop us…or, at least, they will be good enough to stop us before we go over the cliff, even if right now they aren’t working very well. Given time they’ll be good enough.’
Now, I understand that the fossil fuel industry likes this idea because they think they can continue misleading the world into using fossil fuels, but I find myself wondering what _voters_ like this idea? I mean, I’m sure there’s some very small amount of people who operate in the fossil fuel industry but also know climate change is real, but the right has spend decades convincing their own people it isn’t, and trying to flip to ‘It is real, but we can keep burning coal’ is…very silly. The right has no actual attachment to burning gas, except in the sense it pwns the libs about their lie of climate change.Report
2020-2022, and there’s no indication that we even stopped the global economy. What does that say to you about anthropogenic global warming?
Every contiguous trendline save one says that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than now.
The most accurate temperature readings show no increase in temperature at all (granted, this is a shorter timescale than Mann’s “edited” graphs that he won’t distribute the data for.)
Many people stand to make money/status by convincing us to go on the “Road to Zero” — do you really think it’ll do any good if we don’t fix China? Latest nobel prize winner in physics is saying that the IPCC itself says that all the risk on its models is downward (toward less warming, not more) because they themselves admit that clouds are the most uncertain bit of their analysis.
Are you really supporting Russia’s “Go Green, burn more Natural Gas” Initiatives, where they have suborned and bought out entire parties in Europe? (ETA: If you don’t understand why “go green” means more natural gas burnt, then you really ought to read about 4th power wind, and our total lack of batteries to store “unreliable green energy.” Nobody’s talking hydropower, which is actually a proven workable technology).Report
That anthropogenic global warming is due to CO2 in the air, which is something that ‘the economy’ that we ‘stopped’ has very little impact on…we still ran power plants and shipped goods, and despite what you might claim, we barely stopped any level of production. Oil use dropped by only _9%_ during the pandemic.
Also, we know global warming accelerated during those years due to adding particulate emission controls on ships, as evidenced by the fact it has _continued_ to do so. Ad drop that should have been visible would have been hidden because of that, a thing, I must point out, we knew and predicted in advance.
That talking point was true a year ago, but no longer.
Yes, this is a logical thing to say to me, a person who just made the post you are replying to.Report
I’m genuinely curious about your sources for your statements. For example, have you checked to see if Mann’s data really is unavailable?
Because I found it! Here it is, located at: https://web.sas.upenn.edu/mannresearchgroup/publication-supplements/
It’s actually been available for decades.
If you didn’t know that, where did you get the idea that it wasn’t available?
Does learning that something you have read or heard about this topic is wrong make you reassess the rest of your understanding? If not, why not?Report
Lots of GOP voters in Texas, Louisiana, the Dakotas, and even Washington state make their livings in the oil patch or because of it. Roughly 10.3 million Americans owe their jobs to oil and gas. Coal mining is down to just over 55 thousand. For decades it was a way to a middle class lifestyle on a highschool diploma. For them, continuing to burn fossil fuels means economic security. Even in areas beginning to move to offshore wind (like the Gulf of Mexico) there is real palpable fear of change.
So the GOP is not wrong to emphasize it as an economic issue. I’ll grant you they GOP does so from a place of fear mongering, and completely ignoring the pernicious and growing economic impacts from the global climate crisis.Report
No they don’t. The oil companies just claim that. They actually employ 2 million people.
And even that number is flatly ridiculous to use to argue to continue to burn fossil fuels.
A huge chunk of that, literally half of that 2 million, is people working at gas stations, which would continue to exist as car refueling stations regardless of how the new cars are powered (And will be selling gasoline for at least a decade regardless of anything, as existing cars exist, so employees would have to be expecting a permanent career there to care.), and another 40,000 of that is people working in lubricating oil and grease, or asphalt creation, both of which have nothing to do with burning fossil fuels at all.
And once you realize we’d still need to pump and ship and refine oil, just less of it, you notice the entire rest of the entire system will still exist, just scaled down somewhat, so only some of the remaining jobs would be lost.
We are talking maybe a half of a million jobs lost, and maybe about one million people who could legitimately _think_ they could lose their job.
I’m finding it hard to believe that this creates enough voters for Burgum to counterbalance the reflexive ‘climate change isn’t real and I’m not voting for a guy who says it is’ Republican voter…or, hell, the ‘We should actually do something about climate change’ Republican voter!Report
Officer, I saw the whole thing. There was an “owe their jobs to” standing right there, and something swooped down and turned it into an “employed by”. And then it just stood there defiantly, like it expected us to pretend we didn’t notice.Report
Um, if you’re going to complain about wording, maybe you want to complain about Philip’s which is factually not correct, as opposed to mine.
There is a study from 2015 that claims that the oil and natural gas industry _supports_ 10.2 million jobs, not that those people ‘owe their jobs’ to it. Or, as the report _actually_ calls it, ‘induced’ jobs.
The oil industry, and especially the people arguing _for_ them, likes to shorthand that into ‘owe their jobs to them’ (I.e, it’s not really Philip’s mistake) but that is not the same thing. Which I pointed out. The actual real measure is how many jobs are operated by them.
That is because induce is an incredibly vague claim, and includes things like environmental experts. Pretty sure those jobs would still exist too.
As would, in this specific example (Because we are not trying to figure out if that statement is true or not but how many people are risk from losing their jobs in the context of moving off oil for power), all the people who make plastics, which I think is included in this. (The study is very very vague.) We don’t care about them here, their job isn’t in danger, no one here is arguing we should stop pumping oil and making plastics from it(1), they are arguing we should stop burning it.
What we are trying to figure out in this context is if there are sizeable mass of people whose jobs are threatened by non-oil-based power.
1. There are people arguing that, but what we are talking about has nothing to do with that.Report
I’m not complaining about wording, I’m complaining about you switching concepts. I’m not sure there’s a difference between saying that an industry supports X million jobs or that X million people owe their jobs to the industry. Saying Y million people are employed by the industry is completely different though.Report
Independent estimates by the Department of Labor put the number employed by oil at gas at your 2 million figure. The rest comes from ancillary industries which participate in shipping, marketing, etc. Economically those folks owe their employment to this industry.
Which is an answer to your question “but I find myself wondering what _voters_ like this idea?” The answer is the ones whose livelihoods are tied to it. Who seem to mostly vote for the GOP.
Doesn’t mean they are right or he is right or I’m not really worried about the global climate crisis. Also doesn’t mean he’s just pulling this out his back side either.Report
Just a reminder with literally no bearing on anything, or any relation to what might be going on:
The leadership of a nation planning to invade another nation, or threatening to do so, which would include bombing them or operating military vehicles in their country without permission, not in response to any aggressive actions on the part of that other nation, (aka, a ‘war of aggression’) is a war crime under customary international law and the UN Charter.
Oh, also, another weird fact: Mexico is a _nation_. Many people don’t know that, they think it’s just, like, part of Texas, but it is, indeed, a nation.
I honestly have no idea why I just remembered those two facts, totally disconnected from everything else.Report