What Might Have Been

As loathsome as American politics has become in the Trump era, it must be said: It’s pretty exciting.

The most exciting political development of my young adulthood during the 1990s was forensic analysis of a stained dress worn by one of Bill Clinton’s interns. The most exciting political development of my middle age was a mob of populist lunatics storming the Capitol in hopes of murdering the president’s enemies in Congress on live television.

Never a dull moment in the age of Trump. Except, weirdly, Super Tuesday 2024.

Believe it or not, younger readers, Super Tuesday was once an interesting day in the presidential cycle. The huge delegate hauls available across the map meant that the results would make or break candidacies, typically turning the big winner into a prohibitive favorite for his party’s nomination.

Four years ago, Super Tuesday transformed Joe Biden from an early-state underachiever into a juggernaut overnight. Four years before that, Super Tuesday confirmed that Republican voters would not, in fact, ultimately come to their senses about wanting a depraved game-show host to be president.

Super Tuesday is the day on which nominees are crowned, so normally it’s a day of suspense. The direction of the major parties, and thus the country, for the next four years is decided.

Normally. In 2024, with Nikki Haley facing a bloodbath of “Red Wedding” proportions that might drive her from the race, the most suspenseful storyline of Super Tuesday is whether Trump’s lone remaining challenger will manage to crack 20 percent in every state.

Could things have been different? In another timeline, had the American right zigged a few times instead of zagged, might we have had a Super Tuesday in the GOP primary that’s more suspenseful than the pitiable spectacle before us?

Fatalism is inescapable for a pessimist so I can’t quite convince myself that Trump ever might have been at real risk of losing. But even a staunch pessimist should be able to conceive of some set of facts that would have produced a tighter outcome than the travesty of 80-20 margins that await.

A few weeks ago we considered the great what-if of the post-election period: What if Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans had found the nerve to convict Trump at his second impeachment trial, disqualifying him from running for president a third time?

Today we consider three other what-ifs that could have changed the course of the Republican primary. Maybe.

A little.

What if prominent Republicans had condemned Trump’s “rigged election” lie early and often?

There was a compromise available to McConnell and the rest of the institutional GOP after the insurrection. As a way to “balance” their dereliction of duty in acquitting Trump at his impeachment trial, they might have spoken up to vouch for the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory at the polls.

It’s the very least they could have done to mitigate the fallout from Trump’s “Stop the Steal” insanity. Letting him propagandize against the integrity of the electoral system without rebuttal was destined to poison the right’s trust in democracy long-term and damage its commitment to classical liberalism. A movement convinced that it can’t get a fair shake from voting will naturally consider authoritarian solutions.

But the GOP establishment condemning the so-called Big Lie would have had an important short-term effect, too. I quote yesterday’s newsletter: “Normally, a man who lost the national popular vote twice and who dropped the last presidential election to the same Democrat who’s running this year would be the last candidate his party would nominate. As it is, Trump’s ‘rigged election’ nonsense in 2020 may have failed as a bid to retain power but succeeded wildly in shielding him from the usual political repercussions of defeat.”

Republican voters in this year’s primary felt no compunction about renominating a loser because they’d never been forced to accept that he lost. No one with a modicum of influence within the GOP has devoted any real effort in the past three years to persuading the party’s base that Trump fell short in 2020 because most swing voters dislike him, not because of chicanery involving voting machines. Even his most formidable opponents in the primary, Haley and Ron DeSantis, shied away from the claim for fear of aligning themselves with Biden and the Democrats on the subject of who won the last election.

It’s awfully hard to make an effective electability argument against a candidate who’s been allowed, unhindered, to preach that he won the presidency both times he tried. Had McConnell and Haley and DeSantis and a handful of other big-name Republicans said loudly and often that Trump didn’t win in 2020, enough doubt might have been seeded in the minds of primary voters to make today’s Super Tuesday polling look different.

But now the pessimism creeps in. What evidence is there that the GOP’s voters would have heeded those Republicans and lent credence to their account of how the election had played out?

The X factor in every conversation about shaping right-wing opinion is the influence of populists in partisan media. We’ve been over it many times in this column: The more competitive the infotainment industry becomes, the greater the pressure on each outlet to race to the bottom by promoting propaganda. Fox News took up the Big Lie after the last election not because its anchors had been brainwashed by Trump but because its viewers had been brainwashed by Newsmax and had begun to defect.

There’s no reason to believe that dynamic would have changed had more establishment Republicans vouched for Biden’s victory three years ago. Populist news sites incentivized financially to tell their consumers what they want to hear would have lambasted those Republicans as “traitors” until they piped down and backed off. Containing the Big Lie would have required GOP officials to devote an enormous amount of time and effort to pushing a message guaranteed to anger and alienate their own voters, a position to which politicians are naturally allergic.

It also would have required a respectable right-wing press to carry the message in the effort. And apart from a few sites like the one you’re reading right now, that respectable press doesn’t exist anymore.

It can’t be said enough: There is no “Trump problem” on the right. There’s a populism problem. And that problem wouldn’t have been solved in the primary by having Washington Republicans defend the integrity of the last election.

What if Ron DeSantis, not Nikki Haley, had been the last Trump challenger standing?

For reasons having to do with basic math, Haley was always an imperfect vessel for Republicans who wish to move on from Trump. She appeals mostly to college-educated and dogmatic conservatives and there aren’t enough of those left in the GOP to make a majority. To dethrone the king, you need to peel away some of his working-class populist bloc.

Haley couldn’t do that. Ron DeSantis could. Theoretically.

DeSantis’ strategy as a candidate was to out-populist Trump, believing that by doing so he’d kill two birds with one stone. First, he’d lure away some MAGA voters by offering them a younger, smarter, less controversial, more policy-minded version of their hero. Then, as the governor’s polls began to rise and Trump’s began to fall, traditional conservatives who are leery of DeSantis’ agenda but leerier of Trump 3.0 would reluctantly climb aboard his campaign, propelling him to a majority and ultimately to victory.

Many shrewd observers, including our own Steve Hayes, believe DeSantis had it backward. Instead of foolishly trying to win over Trump cultists before wooing conservatives, he should have tried to consolidate conservatives before wooing Trump cultists. Maybe, if he had locked in 30 percent of traditional Republicans off the top, “soft” populists who were leaning toward Trump would have judged DeSantis more viable than they expected and begun to consider him seriously.

I’m skeptical, as I think the governor pivoting toward conservatism early in the campaign would have alienated the many post-Trump populists who had joined his cause and supplied the ideological energy for his candidacy. That faction would have returned to Trump in protest, leaving DeSantis to bump up against a ceiling below 50 percent. But I’ll grant that it’s possible—not likely, but possible—that his ceiling would have been higher than Haley’s on Super Tuesday if he, not she, had ended up as the last Trump challenger left in the race.

Had Haley quit following her third-place finish in Iowa, her faction of anti-Trump Reaganites might have succumbed to the “lesser evil” logic I described above and switched to DeSantis. He would have bounced up in the polls by 10 points, perhaps more, and that might have given Trump’s less committed populist supporters something to think about before New Hampshire and South Carolina. So long as the governor remained a very distant second place, they had no reason to ditch Trump. But what if the distance suddenly shrank?

Nikki Haley will be routed in the South today, where populism rules. DeSantis would have been more acceptable to those voters. Perhaps a lot more acceptable, creating some honest-to-goodness suspense.

But … there are reasons to doubt.

Start with the fact that he was polling pitifully in New Hampshire and South Carolina before he left the race and had been for months. Since September, DeSantis was stuck at around 10 percent in the latter state and routinely scored in the single digits in the former. To make him viable against Trump, a lot of Nikki Haley voters in both places would have had to shift rapidly toward the governor after she dropped out. Had they chosen to stay home instead, DeSantis might well have underperformed Haley in those states and ended up weaker on Super Tuesday than she’s proven to be—assuming he even chose to remain in the race this long.

Which brings us to another problem. To believe that DeSantis could have consolidated Haley’s bloc, you need to imagine him as … not Ron DeSantis. The reason many voters in New Hampshire and South Carolina switched to Haley in the first place is that they’d taken a hard look at him, the great anti-Trump hope, and decided “no thanks.” That was the story of his entire campaign, slowly bleeding support over the last eight months of 2023 while Haley, the superior retail politician, inched higher week by week.

It’s not just a matter of him having lacked charisma or likability, although those were both problems on the trail. It’s a matter of DeSantis’ agenda being neither fish nor fowl. His attempt to somehow be more populist and more conservative than Trump, more classically liberal in some respects and less in others, made him a less comfortable option for both dogmatic Reaganites and dogmatic populists than other candidates in the race were. And it made him a really poor vehicle for a protest vote among the many Democrats and independents who’ve been crossing over to support Haley this past month. When you vote for a candidate who’s neither fish nor fowl, what is it, precisely, that you’re protesting?

Why would diehard anti-Trump voters show up for a guy running as “more Trump than Trump”?

Haley’s candidacy, doomed as it is, was ideal for a protest vote. She’s smart, pleasant, and classically liberal; when you vote for her, you’re voting for a better Republican Party in all respects, which is why enthusiasm for her has kept up even as her chances of victory have evaporated. The same isn’t true with DeSantis. In theory, due to the nature of his right-wing coalition, he might have done better than Haley on Super Tuesday. In practice, I expect he wouldn’t have made it this far.

What if Trump hadn’t been indicted—or at least had been indicted in a different order?

This, not the impeachment trial of 2021, is probably the great what-if of the campaign, one touted by DeSantis himself. If not for Trump being waylaid by the “deep state” in the form of four criminal indictments, what does this primary look like?

The polling doesn’t lie. After DeSantis easily won reelection in Florida in November 2022, he shot up to the high 20s in surveys and remained there for months, hovering within 15 points or so of Trump for most of that time. Then, on March 30 of last year, Trump was indicted in Manhattan in the Stormy Daniels matter. Within a week, his lead over DeSantis exceeded 25 points. Within a month, it exceeded 30.

The “rally ‘round the probable felon” effect effectively ended the Republican primary. How would the race have shaken out without it?

Or, if it’s too improbable to imagine Trump dodging four separate indictments, what if the more serious charges against him had at least been filed first? The Manhattan indictment is famously the weakest of the four, brought by a stridently partisan Democratic prosecutor in a staunchly liberal city based on a novel legal theory and a fact set that’s nearly a decade old. It stank of politics even to his critics.

The odor of it may have overwhelmed Republican voters and colored their perceptions of the three subsequent indictments, each of which is based on sturdier stuff.

Imagine, then, that no indictments had been filed—or that the Manhattan charges weren’t the first ones filed but the last. Imagine that the first indictment brought was by special counsel Jack Smith for Trump’s conduct before January 6, or for hiding classified material from the feds. Would the primary have been different?

The margins might have been. I don’t think the outcome would have.

Go back to the polling. Viewed one way, the fact that DeSantis came within 15 points of Trump before the indictments were filed is hopeful. That’s striking distance; with a break or two, he might have won! Zoom out, though, and it seems insane that Trump still enjoyed a double-digit lead in the primary at a moment when he was at his nadir politically and DeSantis was at his zenith.

Consider: In the winter of 2023, Trump had two impeachments, a coup plot, and a riot at the Capitol to his record. His party had just managed to blow what should have been a wave midterm election by nominating a bunch of Trump-backed populist miscreants whom swing voters refused to support. DeSantis, meanwhile, had become the right’s hero of the pandemic by resisting heavy-handed COVID restrictions. And he had just waltzed to victory by nearly 20 points in what had been, in very recent memory, a top battleground.

Everything was working against Trump, everything was working for DeSantis. Trump had yet to begin attacking his rival in earnest and DeSantis had yet to show off his disappointing retail presence to primary voters nationally. Plus, no indictments yet. And even so: Trump by 15.

Insane. In context, to believe that DeSantis might have eventually overcome Trump is to vouch for the basic sanity of Republican voters, which I can’t do. A party that treats felony charges as a reason to support a candidate, not to oppose him, is one that doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt on good judgment.

Besides, certain realities that developed over the campaign pointed to a Trump victory even if he hadn’t been criminally charged. DeSantis did eventually show off his disappointing retail presence on the trail and oversaw a famously dysfunctional political operation. The indictments weren’t to blame for that. His core argument against Trump, electability, also evaporated over time as the governor often performed worse in head-to-head polling with Joe Biden than the man with 91 criminal charges pending against him did.

If the indictments had never been brought, Trump might well be polling even better against the president, further undermining DeSantis’ electability pitch.

As for what might have been different if Jack Smith’s charges had been filed before the Manhattan charges: Not much, I think. The core complaint of MAGA voters against Trump’s prosecutions would have remained fully intact. This is “lawfare” orchestrated by the president, abusing the justice system to put a thumb on the electoral scale by incriminating his opponent. The order of the indictments ultimately matters less than the fact that so many were brought in such short order, a pile-on that occurred only after Trump had begun running for president again.

And while the Manhattan indictment truly does stink, my strong suspicion is that those who cite its stinkiness as a reason to ignore the other indictments are already in the tank for Trump and searching for ways to rationalize voting for him again. The entire country understands the gravity of his coup plot in 2020 and why law enforcement would ultimately take an interest in it. A voter who delegitimizes those charges because of entirely unrelated charges in the Stormy Daniels matter is a voter who’s desperate to justify shielding their man from accountability by hook or by crook.

Ultimately we have a chicken-and-egg problem with the indictments: Did Trump gain in the polls because of the criminal charges brought against him or were criminal charges brought against him because he gained in the polls?

All along I’ve suspected that prosecutors, or at least the Justice Department, would have opted not to put the country through an ordeal as bitter as indicting a former president if it had reason to believe that former president was no threat to reoffend. If Trump had left politics in 2021, willingly or because Republican voters had tired of him, the DOJ could have rested assured that he’d never again be able to organize a coup or to hoard state secrets at Mar-a-Lago. Accountability of some kind on the right would have given law enforcement an excuse not to demand its own version.

But when Republicans sent Trump soaring to a 15-point lead over Ron DeSantis in early polling, it became clear that they wouldn’t hold him accountable in any way. The only thing standing between Trump and total impunity for trying to overthrow the government was the justice system.

And so I leave you with a fourth what-if: What if Merrick Garland and his deputies had chosen to indict Trump in the spring of 2021, long before they knew whether Republicans would or wouldn’t punish him politically for January 6?

Perhaps he would have been convicted and already cooling his heels in prison. But my guess is that this itself would have become an outrage and political casus belli cited disingenuously by the right to justify nominating Trump again. We were ready to hold Trump accountable by moving on and nominating DeSantis. But because the DOJ didn’t trust us to do so, we have no choice but to nominate Trump again.

There is no Trump problem, only a populism problem. Until the latter problem eases, what passes for a “Trump problem” will remain.