Chris Sununu, the governor of New Hampshire and future presidential contender who previously joked that former President Donald Trump is “fucking crazy,” has suddenly backtracked and committed to support Trump if he is the nominee in 2024.
When given a comparable opportunity to disassociate herself from the former president, Nikki Haley said she does not “concentrate” on him. The most recent entrant into the campaign, anti-woke entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, went so far as to say he’s “not running against President Trump” at all.
Of course he is. Every candidate in the newly formed Republican field will be.
That they can’t quite admit it highlights one of the defining elements of this early primary and, more broadly, GOP politics over the last six years: Trump’s base remains staunch, and even his detractors fear it may be fatal to offend them.
Despite his struggles since leaving office, according to a recent NBC News survey, almost one-third of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters consider themselves Trump followers rather than Republican Party supporters. Many of them are not leaving. According to a national poll conducted last month by The Bulwark and longtime Republican pollster Whit Ayres, 28 percent of Republican primary voters are so dedicated to the former president that they claimed they would support him even if he ran as an independent. Indeed, the party’s “Always Trump” component is so strong that it’s influencing how Trump’s opponents act around him.
“All these people are basically hoping that Trump will have a heart attack on a golf course one day and that would solve their problem,” said Fergus Cullen, a former New Hampshire Republican Party chair. “Not much of a plan.”
It’s difficult to find fault with them. Republican campaigns have assessed that they cannot afford to anger a large portion of the GOP electorate who still support Trump. Instead, they’ve chosen to eat away at them in a non-aggressive manner.
Haley did not directly attack Trump in her announcement speech, but she did call for “mandated mental fitness testing for politicians over 75 years old” – an age that would include both President Joseph Biden, 80, and Trump, 76. Meanwhile, DeSantis has either disregarded or dismissed Trump’s comments, preferring to contrast himself with Trump’s 2020 results.
“I spend my time producing outcomes for the people of Florida and fighting against Joe Biden,” DeSantis explained. “I don’t waste my time smearing other Republicans.”
It has not gone ignored in the Trump universe. One Republican strategist close to the Trump campaign said possible contenders are afraid of losing Trump’s fans, whom they ultimately need to win.
“If the primary between Trump and DeSantis becomes too contentious, I could see a significant number of people rejecting to back DeSantis,” the strategist predicted. “What was the purpose of the ‘Never Trumpers’? Because of the primary’s ugliness. That is something I believe other candidates should be aware of. Trump supporters outnumber Never Trump supporters by a large margin.”
According to a source close to Trump, the former president and his team do not take their core network of followers for granted.
“He ran on a platform of America’s forgotten man and woman — they’ve been with him since he announced in 2015, and they’ll be with him in 2020,” the source said. “They’re not going to abandon him.”
Trump, for his part, is aggressively weaponizing his party’s dominance. While Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, stated on Sunday that participants in the Republican National Committee’s first primary debate this summer will be required to sign a pledge to support the eventual nominee, Trump has rejected the idea, saying, “It would have to depend on who the nominee was.”
Even if Trump signs a vow, Republicans know he will not be held accountable. In 2015, Trump made a vow to support the eventual nominee. But, like a Sitcom character telling the GOP, “it’d be a shame if something happened to it,” he was publicly discussing running as an independent just a few months later.
“That’s the threat,” said David Kochel, a six-time Republican presidential candidate. “That’s the continual threat that he brings to the race, that if he wants to go somewhere else, if he’s not nominated, what potential damage could he do?”
Trump might not even have to run as an independent to cause havoc. He might do it from the sidelines, casting doubt on the legitimacy of elections, as he did following his loss in the Georgia Senate runoff in 2020, lowering Republican turnout.
That’s one of the reasons why few Republicans are going for Trump directly. Even if Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, promises that “we’ll have better choices” than Trump in 2024, he’s cautious to praise “the policies of the Trump-Pence administration,” avoiding any direct criticism of his one-time running partner.
“What they’re frightened of is him getting out of the tent and shooting in,” said Sarah Longwell, a Republican political analyst and Bulwark publisher who backed Joe Biden in 2020. “That threat… begs the question of why people aren’t going after him sooner, trying to chip away at the ‘Always Trumpers.'”
It could be impossible. In recent weeks, Republicans have been debating how much Trump will profit from a projected huge primary field. Fearing a replay of 2016, when a significant number of more established and elected Republicans split the vote in early primary states, allowing Trump to advance with less-than-majority support, weaker contenders may drop out before the first caucuses in Iowa. Trump has conceded that a larger field of contenders might benefit his chances.
“The more the merrier,” replied Trump.
Several Republican strategists believe the field in 2024 will be smaller than it was in 2016.
“I think there’s a greater realisation among those who are going to go into this thing that there has to be an off-ramp at some time,” Kochel said.
Criteria to advance to the debate stage may eliminate those candidates who do not qualified. Those who poll poorly or perform poorly in the early state elections may learn from the mistakes of 2016 — or 2020, when Joe Biden benefited from an early consolidation around him after South Carolina.
If the field isn’t as crowded as it was in 2016, things could change. Scott Walker, the former governor of Wisconsin and an early frontrunner in the 2016 election, said DeSantis is in a better position to run against Trump than Walker was because “we weren’t perceived as the alternative or the one other person at the forefront, like DeSantis is today.”
Nevertheless, as divisive as Trump is, he can always broaden his support. Walker described Trump’s visit to the scene of a toxic train wreck in Ohio last week, which was scorned by the left and mocked on Saturday Night Live, a “great example of what got Trump elected in the first place.”
“If he keeps doing that, he’ll be the nominee and president again,” Walker said. “But, as you and I both know, he has times like that that are both great and brilliant politically, as well as just decency-wise. And then he’ll have other instances where other things happen, where he’s going up against fellow Republicans or God knows what.”
