The Sweep: Do Retail Politics Matter in 2024?

Appetizer

I’ve often complained about bad polling here. But there’s also a problem of polling being used badly. Our constitutional republic doesn’t leave everything to the majority, after all. Most Americans can believe that Donald Trump and Joe Biden are guilty of the crime of retaining classified information. And that poll would be an interesting window into their prospects for winning a general election in 2024, but it would not be a very good way to determine whether either will wind up in jail. 

Thus enters this headline: “Majority of New Yorkers want Santos to resign, new poll shows.” There are a few problems here right off the bat. First, of course, God himself could want George Santos to resign and it probably wouldn’t make much of a difference. But that’s not what’s galling. George Santos represents New York’s 3rd Congressional District. But this Siena Poll surveyed 800 registered voters across New York state. I’m sure a majority of California’s 39 million residents would like Kevin McCarthy to resign, but that population isn’t very representative of the 761,000 or so people who live in California’s 20th Congressional District and obviously disagree. 

In many ways, Santos has been a blessing—a low stakes way for us to learn some valuable lessons about the repercussions of building a celebrity candidate where flash is rewarded over substance because Congress is too broken as an institution for anyone to have any substance. As I’ve said before, there isn’t much difference between a candidate who pursued a popular, bipartisan solution and failed to pass any legislation because it didn’t have majority support from his own party and one who didn’t try at all and spent his time raising millions of dollars by saying outrageous and outraging things on social media. Actually, there is. The second guy has a few million dollars to spend. 

Thankfully, Santos doesn’t really matter. Congress is broken. But even in an institution in the peak of health, a freshman congressman wasn’t going to have a lot of say over anything besides what he wants for lunch. And even then, Chick-fil-A still isn’t open on Sundays. And his increasingly flimsy lies to cover up for previous lies provide some levity during this winter. And he’s not going to resign because the one thing he has right now is a budget for staff and a salary as his legal woes pile up. And he has the Speech or Debate Clause, which provides him at least a limited amount of protection from being arrested at work and from having his office searched. 

And so let this be another way the gift of George Santos keeps giving. Voters’ feelings don’t always matter. And not all voters’ feelings matter when it comes to the House of Representatives. 

Main Dish

It’s been a week of skirmishes in the 2024 GOP trenches. Donald Trump is headed to South Carolina and New Hampshire. Ron DeSantis isn’t winning any popularity contests. Nikki Haley popped up on Fox News. Mike Pompeo is out with his new book. In some ways, it all feels so familiar, but other things have certainly changed. 

After the Supreme Court’s investigation into the leak of the Dobbs draft opinion came up empty handed, Donald Trump “truthed” that they should “go to the reporter & ask him/her who it was. If not given the answer, put whoever in jail until the answer is given. You might add the editor and publisher to the list.” Back in 2015, every newspaper in the country would have been led with screaming headlines about Trump’s disregard for the First Amendment and the threat to a free press. Fast forward to 2023, he is once again the leading candidate for the Republican nomination … and nobody cared. Perhaps they learned something after all. 

Relatedly, Trump heads to New Hampshire and South Carolina for his first big events this weekend since announcing his campaign two and a half months ago. It will be a test of Trump, yes, but also of the media in this brave new cycle. What will he try to do to try to get the attention he craves and that once came so easily? How do reporters walk the line between covering the frontrunner and not feeding oxygen to the fire? More on this next week, I fear. 

Then there are all the other people who are interested in taking a shot at the crown.

A Ron DeSantis profile that made the rounds last week said out loud what everyone in D.C. has been whispering about for months. How will DeSantis deal with, umm, “complaints about his interpersonal skills,” as Jonathan Martin over at Politico put it? The polls certainly make him look like the best hope for wresting the nomination away from Donald Trump, but anyone who has worked with DeSantis can tell you that he isn’t a retail politician. He doesn’t seem to have a lot of friends—not fellow governors, not former colleagues in the House. Donors grumble about a lack of hand holding. To put it bluntly, he’s known as kind of a cold, prickly a**hole. But the only real question is whether voters will care. Do retail politics matter anymore? 

For sure, Donald Trump was no Bill Clinton, either. He wasn’t working the rope line in Iowa and grabbing babies to kiss. He sent his chopper to the state fair to do the work for him. Neither was Barack Obama, by the way, who was known as a wonk who had difficulty connecting in small groups. But both Trump and Obama were preternatural on a stage. DeSantis, on the other hand, has a different—and potentially valuable—-skill set of his own: an ability to maximize negative attention on issues that he thinks will galvanize his supporters. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had been busing migrants to other U.S. cities for weeks, but it was DeSantis who got the bulk of the headlines when he chartered a plane to Martha’s Vineyard. And Florida isn’t even a border state! Add in the fact that a lot of GOP bigwigs are going to be happy to support a moldy loaf of bread if it means retiring Donald Trump, and DeSantis is very much still in business. 

Speaking of skill sets, Nikki Haley is back. And I am confused. In April 2021, she said, “I would not run if President Trump ran, and I would talk to him about it.” Then a few months later, she said, “I would talk to him and see what his plans are. I would tell him about my plans. We would work on it together.” I don’t even know what that means. But this week, she went on Sean Hannity’s show and all but announced she’s running for president. “It’s time for a new generation. It’s time for new leadership. And it’s time to take our country back.”

First of all, “it’s time to take our country back” was literally our tagline from Carly Fiorina’s 2016 campaign. I still have the posters in my basement. Here’s an ad from YouTube. But imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that. I’m somewhere between nostalgia and PTSD. 

Second, her jump back into the scene was marred by an unusual headline, “Operative jumps from Haley team to Pence.” Tim Chapman, a well known conservative strategist, was the executive director of Haley’s nonprofit and is now jumping ship to join Pence’s nonprofit as a senior adviser. It’s unusual to see operatives switch horses this late in the game and especially at such a high level. 

Third, Haley is very good at what she does. Nobody in the Trump administration played his or her hand better. This is a woman who has been underestimated at every turn in her long political career, and she keeps coming out on top. But inside the Beltway, the first thing anyone will say when you mention her name is, “Oh man, remember that Alberta piece?” in reference to a Politico profile that Tim Alberta did in 2021 that included six hours of on-the-record conversations with Haley. If you haven’t read the whole thing, I highly recommend it as an interesting piece about Haley but also a great piece of journalism all on its own. Here’s one brief excerpt: 

A person with no pedigree, no connections, no fancy resumé, doesn’t travel from family accountant to United Nations ambassador in the span of 12 years without prodigious talents. Haley has them. She is unusually bright. She has an acute sense of timing that has allowed her to often (if not always) make her own luck. She is a natural storyteller—someone for whom the best answer is always a riveting anecdote—and has a gift for reading every room, always knowing what people want to hear. She has a warmth and common touch that camouflage her ruthless competitive streak.

But she also has liabilities. What I’ve heard again and again is that Haley’s raw skills obscure an absence of core beliefs and a lack of tactical thinking. I’ve also heard—and witnessed—how her laid-back southern persona conceals a pugnacious impulsive streak. Her unplanned outbursts and bridge-burning decisions are legend in South Carolina where she built a reputation for demanding loyalty but rarely giving it, leaving the road behind her littered with enemies as well as allies.

And some of her rivals aren’t pulling their punches. Mike Pompeo’s new book claims that “Haley worked with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump to become former President Donald Trump’s vice president” while she was U.N. ambassador. (Haley has dismissed the story as “lies and gossip.”)

Pompeo is hoping this book can be splashy enough to vault him into the conversation. And 10 years ago, I think it would have. As the Washington Post reviewer wrote, it’s “not like most books by nakedly ambitious people preparing to run for president. It’s more interesting and more vicious.” But in our modern climate of reality television and a post-2016 political world, even the juiciest details can seem par for the course and fade into the background of special counsels and drag queen congressmen. 

That same review concludes:

It’s like being locked in a room and forced to listen to 20 hours of Tucker Carlson reruns at top volume. But it’s certainly more entertaining and substantial than most campaign books. On the evidence of “Never Give an Inch,” Pompeo is a good husband, a good father, a good Christian and a great patriot. But no reader can fail to appreciate — as Trump did — that he really is a mean son of a bitch. 

Dessert

A reminder not to take the simple pleasures in life for granted.