The field of Republican presidential candidates is now nearly complete, and surprises are likely between now and the first caucuses and primaries early next year. But one thing is clear as the summer season of campaigning begins: The nomination is Donald Trump’s to lose.
This is odd to contemplate considering the year Trump has had. In the past few months, the former president has been found liable of sexual abuse and indicted on charges of falsifying business records. He faces possible indictments in three additional investigations that involve more serious matters. He lost the 2020 election to President Biden and continues to claim falsely that the vote was rigged. Meanwhile, his position inside the Republican Party has only gotten stronger.
In the weeks after the 2022 midterm elections, the party had a new darling: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Trump drew criticism for his contribution to the Republican Party’s underwhelming performance in the midterms. His endorsements of flawed Senate candidates allowed Democrats to keep control of that chamber. DeSantis was seen as a strong alternative, a governor with a record of success who won reelection in a megastate by a staggering 19 percentage points after winning in 2018 by less than a point. For those in the GOP hoping to leave the Trump era behind, he was the great hope.
At that time, the 2024 contest was shaping up as a two-person race: Trump versus DeSantis. Today, it’s more like a three-tiered competition, with the top tier occupied only by Trump. DeSantis, who remains unproven as a national candidate, is alone in the second tier. Everyone else — including a pair of South Carolinians, Sen. Tim Scott and former governor Nikki Haley — fills out the third tier. Since winter, Trump’s lead over DeSantis in national polls has more than doubled, from about 10 percentage points in February to 28 percentage points in May, according to averages compiled by The Washington Post. No one else has broken into double digits.
Trump’s profile is unique, one not seen before in this kind of competition. He is both the establishment candidate, by virtue of the fact that he is a former president and one who transformed the Republican electorate in his own image, and also the anti-establishment candidate, whose message of victimhood and grievance casts him as the outsider battling on behalf of those who feel left out or left behind. The Economist magazine describes him aptly as “insurrectionist and institutionalist.”
Despite all that, he has not managed to clear the field in his bid to return to the White House. His vulnerabilities — his overall unpopularity has cost Republicans in three consecutive elections — have drawn plenty of challengers. Five others are in the race against him with a handful more on the cusp of candidacies. One of those expected to enter soon is Mike Pence, the former vice president now seeking to take down the president he once loyally served.
DeSantis formally announced his candidacy last week. He is a big-state governor with a record of accomplishment (as was Ronald Reagan) and an image as a bruiser against anything woke. His preseason went poorly and his launch on Twitter Spaces on Wednesday evening was a technical meltdown. Months from now, that moment could be remembered as the low point in the DeSantis campaign, but only if he proves to be a better candidate than he has been to date.
Springtime was cruel to DeSantis. Early in the year, in some head-to-head polls, he led Trump among Republicans. But since Trump’s indictment by a Manhattan grand jury in the case involving hush money paid to an adult-film actress and DeSantis’s tentative steps as a would-be candidate, Trump has retaken the lead.
Substantively during this early period, DeSantis has been muddled on Ukraine; extreme on abortion, having signed a six-week ban approved by Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature; and anti-corporate with his attacks on Disney, one of his state’s largest employers. The DeSantis team continues to see the fight with Disney as a net plus for the governor, though the longer it has dragged on, the more others question that. He talks about his record keeping Florida’s economy humming and schools open during the pandemic, a potentially attractive message to Republican voters, but he has yet to deliver a full-scale speech about himself, his values and his vision, let alone make the case against Trump.
Trump used the time before DeSantis formally entered to do what Bill Clinton’s team did to Bob Dole in the spring of 1995, which is to pummel him with statements and ads in an effort to destroy DeSantis’s candidacy before it really gets going. The DeSantis and Trump teams now are battling constantly on the airwaves and elsewhere.
Trump has outflanked DeSantis on endorsements by elected officials. Endorsements don’t matter all that much in presidential campaigns, but it was telling that DeSantis failed to lock down the bulk of the Florida congressional delegation, considering he was a member of it only five years ago. Nor does DeSantis enjoy strong support of fellow governors, as then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush did in 2000. There seems little affection for him among his peers, even if they respect his political success in Florida.
Two recent trips, one to Iowa and another to New Hampshire, have gone reasonably well, as DeSantis has tried to shake the criticism that he lacks the people skills of other successful presidential candidates. He is likely to have buckets of money with a super PAC that could raise $200 million. But a flush super PAC did not help Jeb Bush, another Florida governor, in 2016. Trump took him down anyway.
Other candidates hope Trump and DeSantis will destroy one another. Scott entered the race last week the old-fashioned way, with a big rally and speech that made clear who he is and what he stands for. He joined the others already in the race: Haley, who served as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations; former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchison; and Vivek Ramaswamy, a tech entrepreneur who at 37 is the field’s youngest candidate. Still to come are Pence and perhaps former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who relishes attacking Trump despite a long friendship with him, as well as New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who earlier this year seemed to rule out a run, is now said to be reconsidering for a possible entry late this year.
The 2024 field is smaller than the 2016 field that Trump defeated, but it is big enough to split the anti-Trump vote, which would allow the former president to win primaries with a plurality of the vote. Republican rules award delegates on a winner-takes-all basis (in contrast to the proportional distribution of the Democrats). Given Trump’s current standing, someone will probably have to win several of the early states to prevent the former president from running away with the nomination.
Right now there is a heavy focus on Iowa, which hosts the first Republican caucuses (Democrats moved the Iowa caucuses later on their calendar) and whose impact this cycle could be even larger than usual. The DeSantis super PAC, Never Back Down, is handling the organizing and mobilization efforts for the candidate, which no previous campaign has done at this scale. The New York Times reported that the group plans to hire 2,600 organizers by Labor Day. A DeSantis Pac staffer said they have nearly 200 people working in Iowa with more to come. Winning Iowa appears to be a top priority for the DeSantis operation.
Hiring so many people by this fall is an extraordinarily ambitious goal given the record of past campaigns. The 2,600 number would be twice as many as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had at the peak of his 2020 campaign for the Democratic nomination, according to Sanders adviser Faiz Shakir. In the 2008 campaign, the Clinton and Obama teams each had about 200-plus people on the ground in Iowa.
But Paul Tewes, a Democratic strategist who ran Barack Obama’s Iowa operation, said in a text message that if a super PAC “is attempting to build an organization, it will inherently not be as strong as a candidate campaign-driven organization. Strong organizing requires candidate time and attention — clutches at events, meetings, conference calls, bus rides, office openings.”
Iowa Republicans who participate in the caucuses historically have favored candidates with evangelical roots and appeals. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee won in 2008 and former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.) in 2012. Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) defeated Trump there in 2016. Many people associated with the Cruz campaign are now working for the DeSantis super PAC. But Scott and Pence, given their religious beliefs and messages, will try to stake a claim to that part of the Iowa electorate.
Nomination contests have become increasingly nationalized, but national polls can be misleading. State-by-state polls are more meaningful, but not until late into the year. Surveys of Republican caucus goers, taken by J. Ann Selzer for the Des Moines Register, underscore that polls in the states shift and often shift dramatically once campaigns intensify and more voters pay attention.
In May 2007, according to Selzer’s surveys, Huckabee was at 3 percent in the Iowa poll. By November, he was at 27 percent. He won in January 2008 with 34 percent. In June 2011, Santorum was at 4 percent. Even in November, he was still at 6 percent. At the January 2012 caucuses, he won with 25 percent, nipping eventual nominee and now Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah). In May 2015, Cruz was at 5 percent and in the late fall he was at 10 percent and still running well behind both Trump and Ben Carson, who later served as housing secretary in the Trump administration. Cruz won in February 2016 with 28 percent.
Now that he is a formal candidate, DeSantis plans an early state blitz next week along with a serious amount of fundraising after that. For all the candidates, the summer months will be occupied with both. Then comes the first debate in late August in Milwaukee, which will host the 2024 GOP national convention. The debates will give Trump’s opponents the first real opportunity to draw contrasts and force comparisons and could be especially important for DeSantis. Trump has given signals that he might skip early debates. But he loves the spotlight, and in 2016 he was formidable on the stage.
Meanwhile, everyone is waiting to hear whether Trump will be indicted in the classified documents case or for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia or his role in the events that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. And if he is indicted, what if any will be the political impact on his candidacy? Past evidence suggests it will not hurt him, but these cases could be different.
The question in Republican circles is whether DeSantis will truly become a threat to Trump’s renomination or, by virtue of unfulfilled expectations, slip back to allow another alternative to rise. As one Republican strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely about the field of candidates, put it, “There are two sides to the primary, a Trump side and a non-Trump side. Someone has to emerge — a couple of months ago, we all thought it would be DeSantis — and I think someone will, and that’s what the race will become about.”