Though they’ve been planning their runs for months or even years, most of the 2024 candidates have a yawning gap where that fundamental rationale ought to be. In the first debate of the primary season this week, much of the discussion will almost certainly be about Trump (who is not expected to be there himself). Yet his opponents still haven’t managed to come up with a case against his renomination.
Plenty of previous presidential candidates have managed to construct plausible cases against the front-runners in their races. Some of them won, while others made a memorable mark on American politics before falling short of the nomination. In 2008, Barack Obama successfully linked Hillary Clinton to a hidebound Democratic establishment that knuckled under to Republicans, particularly on the Iraq War.
Four years earlier, insurgent Howard Dean attacked candidates preferred by the Democratic establishment by announcing that he represented “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.” In 2000, John McCain portrayed himself as a “maverick” who was fighting the “Death Star” of the GOP establishment, of which George W. Bush was a charter member.
And, of course, Trump himself had a critique of his entire party, including the candidates he ran against: They were all phony politicians, he said, while he was an outsider who would change everything.
You can see the pattern: Front-runners are often painted as the establishment that has driven the party into a ditch. Even after three straight political defeats — in 2018, 2020 and 2022 — this is hard to do against Trump, who built his political identity from recklessness and the violation of norms. He also tried to stage a coup, which is definitely anti-establishment behavior.
So, instead of arguing that Trump has been bad for the Republican Party, the 2024 field is mired in a futile argument over which of them is the most like Donald Trump.
Nearly all of the candidates seem to be saying they’re more palatable than Trump — but definitely still like Trump! “I give him credit, even though we’re competing, for the great things he did do,” Ron DeSantis recently said. “But one of the things he did not do was drain the swamp.” In other words: I’m just like Trump and have the same priorities as he does, and I can finish the job he started.
Mike Pence loses no opportunity to say “I’m proud of what we accomplished during the four years of the Trump-Pence administration.” He’s Trump but without the election-stealing.
Almost every candidate is offering themselves as Trump-plus-or-minus-something, with the “something” varying from candidate to candidate. Nikki Haley is Trump — but younger and female. Tim Scott is Trump in policy — but more friendly. Chris Christie is rude and combative like Trump — but with a respect for institutions and laws.
To be fair, Christie is one of a few candidates who aren’t afraid to take Trump on directly: former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson and former Texas congressman Will Hurd are the others. But Christie is the only one not struggling in the back of the pack. The other two haven’t qualified for the first debate.
Of all the candidates, Vivek Ramaswamy is the most curious. He seems to be running to be a Trump surrogate on cable news. Ramaswamy is essentially a Trump hype man, whose entire campaign is the political equivalent of someone standing a few feet away chanting, “Go Donald! Go Donald!”
If that’s a bit of a caricature, just wait until you see the candidates hem and haw when asked in this week’s debate why they and not Trump should be president. Whatever they say, it’s unlikely to amount to a coherent argument.
And it’s not because they haven’t tried to crack this dilemma. With all the millions of dollars they’ve raised and operatives they’ve gathered around them, they must have spent time brainstorming how to solve what would always be the central challenge of this race. Surely they’ve run polls and focus groups testing various attacks to see what works. Would primary voters be convinced by an argument that Trump is corrupt? That he’s incompetent? That he doesn’t believe in what real Republicans believe? That he’s a criminal who keeps getting indicted because prosecutors believe he is doing crimes?
It’s clear they don’t know the answer. As the New Yorker reports, the DeSantis campaign has “struggled to find a message critical of Trump that resonated with rank-and-file Republican voters” despite polling on this question. Strikingly, the research also found that “even attaching Trump’s name to an otherwise effective message had a tendency to invert the results.”
Focus groups run by “never Trump” operatives have found that many Republican voters think Trump has too much baggage, which is an understated way to describe his misdeeds and character flaws. That could be translated into an electability argument, and while DeSantis has said something similar, he’s reluctant to speak the full truth. He’ll say that Trump lost because “Biden is the president” but not that he lost because the election was fair and the voters preferred Biden. But as Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out, Trump’s opponents can’t say they’re more electable than Trump if they won’t admit he was rejected by the voters last time around.
