Was Trump’s nomination always inevitable?

Nikki Haley’s exit from the presidential race this morning all but secures former President Donald Trump the Republican nomination, in a battle that has produced remarkably little tension. But that wasn’t always the case.

Just a year ago, less than half of Republican voters were in FiveThirtyEight’s poll average called Trump their favorite candidate. Was that troubled landscape an illusion? Or were there moments on Trump’s path to victory that could have led to a different outcome?

I have presented this thought experiment to several political observers. They reflected on a number of moments that are deeply significant in retrospect, starting in the final days of Trump’s presidency, and discussed how things could have turned out differently.

Mitch McConnell’s impeachment decision

One scenario would have unequivocally changed the course of the election: a Senate conviction of Trump following his impeachment in the House of Representatives for his role in the January 6 Capitol riot, which would have paved the way for his disqualification from running for office. ever run for office again.

Initially, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell entertained the idea of ​​supporting impeachment. He told colleagues he was glad Democrats would move to impeach Trump, believing that would make it easier to purge him from the party. But when the decisive moment came, he voted to acquit Trump, who escaped conviction in the Senate by ten votes. (McConnell endorsed Trump today.)

The Senate vote was an important early indication that Republican elites, who would have been happy if Trump had disappeared from the political scene, would not take matters into their own hands, hoping that Republican voters would do the work.

“You need the party to coordinate at least to some extent to remove Trump from the stage and then identify a new leader,” John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, said in an email. “I think that would have made for a much tougher primary campaign for Trump, rather than the easy ride he had.”

Merrick Garland’s ‘bottom-up’ strategy

It appears increasingly unlikely that the most serious criminal case against Trump, federal charges of election interference related to the Jan. 6 riot, will be decided by a jury before Election Day. That’s potentially important for the general election: Recent poll suggests that a criminal conviction could turn a small but potentially crucial portion of voters against Trump in November.

Some critics blame Merrick Garland. The Attorney General reportedly decided in early 2021 to continue a “bottom-up” investigation into the riot, which slowly worked its way up from the participants on the ground to Trump and his associates, rather than starting with higher-level numbers. That approach may have delayed Trump’s indictment in August by many months.

“That was a very traditional choice,” says Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and editor-in-chief of Law. “But it was a choice.”

But as Wittes was quick to point out, even if Trump had been convicted of a serious crime by now, it might not have swayed a meaningful number of Republican primary voters, who broadly believe the charges against him are politically motivated. In a February NBC Poll81 percent of Republican respondents said they would vote for Trump even if he were convicted of a crime.

Ron DeSantis took his time

When Ron DeSantis withdrew from the presidential race in January, many of his political obituaries argued that the Florida governor, once Trump’s biggest threat in the primaries, had made the fatal mistake of waiting too long to enter.

The moment DeSantis began to generate excitement, in late 2022 and early 2023, was a period of real vulnerability for Trump. Republicans had performed poorly in the midterm elections, losing several high-profile races in which Trump supported extreme and inexperienced candidates. “Republicans have followed Donald Trump off the edge of a cliff,” one of his longtime advisers said at the time.

Sarah Longwell, the founder of the Republican Accountability Project and a longtime Trump critic, was conducting focus groups with Republican voters at the time. “We asked the question, ‘Do you want Trump to be the nominee in ’24, or run for ’24?'” she said. “That reached its nadir after the 2022 elections.”

Scott Jennings, a Republican political strategist and former adviser to McConnell and George W. Bush, said, “There was a lot of scrutiny within the Republican Party about losing — and DeSantis was the only guy who won. ”

However, instead of immediately declaring his candidacy, DeSantis waited a few crucial months. By the time he entered the race, Trump had been indicted in the first of several criminal cases. As Republican voters rallied around him, Trump began a steady consolidation of his lead in the polls.

“Politics is often about timing,” Jennings said of DeSantis. “And his timing was wrong.”

The ‘Trump is a loser’ tactic

Longwell argues that a candidacy like DeSantis’s, or Haley’s for that matter, was most likely doomed in the early days of Trump’s presidency, when Republican leaders and voters, initially divided over Trump’s role on January 6, gradually abandoned him came to defend.

That ensured that any candidate hoping to do anything other than a pointless protest candidacy against Trump would make his case not about Trump’s behavior as president, but about his chances of succeeding in November, she said.

“When Republicans made the case against Trump as a candidate, they didn’t say it was because Trump was bad,” she said. “They just said he couldn’t win.” And when polls this fall consistently showed Trump leading Biden in a close contest, that argument quickly disappeared.

The rematch is here and the Americans are processing it

After weeks of campaign ads, political speeches and voting in more than two dozen primaries, Americans are coming to terms with a reality many had tried to avoid: President Biden and former President Donald Trump are once again battling it out for months.

Large segments of Democratic, independent and moderate Republican voters have gone through familiar emotional phases. They have faced denial, in the belief that other candidates would emerge, and bargaining, with fantasies of last-minute newcomers, viable third-party candidates, and swift legal action. They fought the depression because the options were not available.

And now, slowly but surely, acceptance is starting to come.

“Have you ever heard people say, ‘You choose, but that’s not the choice you want’?” said Shalonda Horton, 50, as she walked into a polling station in Austin, Texas, on Tuesday to vote for Biden. “When I get in there, I’ll say, ‘Lord, help me.’”

In Los Angeles, Jason Kohler, who calls himself a progressive Democrat, said he would only vote for Biden with resignation. But he made peace.

“Lesser of two evils right now, you know?” said Kohler, 47. “Voting is already a duty for a citizen, so I feel like you have to do it.”

Complaints about politicians are as old as American politics itself. But pollsters and strategists believe something different is happening this year. Rarely have so many Americans been so unhappy with the direction of the country for so long. Rarely have so many voters said for so long that they want different leaders. Voters who hate both Biden and Trump are talked about so much that they now have their own political name: double haters.

And yet, as the primary calendar progresses, it is becoming increasingly clear that these voters can double, even triple, the hate, and yet their choices will not change. The rematch is here.

— Lisa Lerer

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