With spring turning to summer, the field is abloom with challengers to Donald Trump: Tim Scott, Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy and others. All will doubtless try to make convincing cases for their candidacies, but expect them also to argue in one way or another that the current runaway leader of the pack is simply unable to win a general election.
Mr. DeSantis put it most directly last week. According to the New York Times, in a phone call with donors to a super PAC supporting him, he said: “You have basically three people at this point that are credible in this whole thing … Biden, Trump and me. And I think of those three, two have a chance to get elected president — Biden and me.”
Given recent electoral history this pragmatic case against Mr. Trump has a superficial plausibility, but I’m sceptical about the wisdom of the strategy.
First, persuading people to vote for you on the grounds that you’re more acceptable to a wider electorate is a tricky proposition. It asks voters to suspend their own judgment about who is best to lead the country in favour of some parallel assessment of the judgment of their fellow Americans, whose views and intentions are unknowable. It invites them to say, “I think the country needs X, but I also know that my views are so far outside the mainstream that I’d better vote for Y.” Who thinks like that?
Historically the approach has had mixed results, to say the least. It might have worked for Democrats last time, when primary voters chose Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders. But it often doesn’t fly.
Was Ronald Reagan less electable than George H.W. Bush in 1980? Many at the time thought so — including much of the media and the Democratic leadership who jumped for joy when the former California governor won the nomination that year. They looked less happy and much less smart when he won the presidency. Mr. Trump himself was deemed by almost everyone less electable than Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush in 2016. Voters in the general election had other ideas.
William F. Buckley’s famous standard — to pick the “rightwardmost viable” candidate — might once have made sense. But it doesn’t fit the ideological tenor (or lack of it) of the Trump age. Mr. Trump’s intellectual plasticity muddies the picture. As we are starting to see on issues such as abortion, Mr. Trump may be carving out a more centrist position than his main rivals.
His appeal is both sui generis and ad hominem. There’s no easy way to transfer it to another candidate. It may be better simply to let voters go with their druthers rather than get them to participate in some kind of prisoner’s-dilemma exercise that requires them to anticipate the putative choices of others.
Another problem with the argument is that it isn’t at all obvious in any case that Mr. Trump is less electable than Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Scott, Mr. Pence or anyone else.
True, he lost in 2020. He also failed to win a plurality of the popular vote in 2016 and arguably cost the Republicans dearly in both the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections.
But most of these were very close elections. In 2020 a few tens of thousands of votes in three states would have made him two-for-two in presidential contests. It takes more than a little chutzpah for someone who hasn’t registered a single vote in a presidential primary contest to dismiss someone who has already been elected as “unelectable.”
The current polling doesn’t even support the contention that Mr. Trump is unelectable. The latest RealClearPolitics average puts him narrowly ahead of Mr. Biden in nationwide polls, while it has Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Biden in a tie.
A Harvard-Harris poll last week gave Mr. Trump a 7-point lead over Mr. Biden, with Mr. DeSantis again tied with the president.
Yet the biggest problem with the electability argument is that it’s a dissembling euphemism that betrays the weakness and pusillanimity of the candidates arrayed against Mr. Trump.
By calling him “unelectable,” Mr. DeSantis and others are drawing attention to Mr. Trump’s core weakness without actually calling it out.
What they really mean is Mr. Trump is “unelectable” in the way that Lizzie Borden and Al Capone would have been unelectable — morally unfit, characterologically so flawed that his election would represent a threat to the stability of the republic.
If that’s what you mean, say it: Mr. Trump may or may not be electable. He has proved himself unfit.
The Wall Street Journal
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As the Republican primary contest gets going in earnest we are going to hear a lot about “electability.”