Three things from this week’s pod with Axios and Jewish Insider’s Josh Kraushaar:
Yeah, Trump is still the frontrunner.
Sigh, DeSantis just can’t seem to replicate his rockin’ Florida campaign nationally.
Manchin, really?
Bonus thing: Win a free WTH mug… see how below.
If you are a fan of the mainstream media, you’ll be pleased to know that the conventional media wisdom about Trump’s popularity is right: He is indeed the man to beat, notwithstanding… everything. If you’re like your trusty podcast hosts, you’re neither a fan of the MSM, nor of the notion that we’ll be repeating 2020 like Groundhog Day. But that’s the way the polls are looking. The main issue here is that while a large majority of Americans don’t want a Biden-Trump replay, large majorities of Americans don’t turn out for primaries. Those are motivated base voters.
Meanwhile, the much-ballyhooed DeSantis juggernaut has been deeply underwhelming (even though some pundits were right that his embarrassing Twitter roll-out would soon be forgotten). DeSantis just seems weirdly incapable of talking about how great his accomplishments in Florida are, how the economy is flourishing and he how eroded traditional Democratic firewalls to have one of the most stunning election successes in 2022. Instead, he seems focused on being the HR bureaucrat of the anti-woke. It’s not that we’re not *all* sick of wokeness, it's that there are other things on everyone’s minds.
New entrant Senator Tim Scott is counting on Americans to be sick of the haters and the negativity. He’s playing 21st century Reagan. The problem is that optimism and vision don’t really seem to be a recipe for frontrunner status either (Scott is running behind Vivek Ramaswamy — or as Dany’s husband put it, “who?”)
At least Chris Christie’s entrance into the race promises that someone will be dumping on Trump soon; but can the NJ native actually beat DJT? Will a dose of his own medicine erode Trump’s standing with the MAGA faithful? It’s unclear that anything will do that.
But there is some good news. Notwithstanding D efforts to paint the GOP as the party of White supremacy, Jim Crow, etc, the reality is that the Republican Party has never been more diverse. Hispanics are trending more and more right, and the party has made major inroads with Black men as well. In fact, the only demographic where the Dems have been scoring consistent leads is among White women college grads. So we’ve got that going for us, which is nice. (And a free WTH mug to the first commenter who IDs that quote in the comments.)
HIGHLIGHTS
Everything is weird about the current GOP presidential campaigns…
JK: There is sort of a disconnect here between the Republicans that are running the campaigns the right way, that are doing the basic blocking and tackling, and still that they're the underdogs. Tim Scott is the underdog. He's pulling in the single digits, he's struggling, even behind in his home state of South Carolina.
And then you have someone like DeSantis who has a lot of things going for him. And Marc, you've written some great columns about his conservative governing record in Florida. He's governed with a great economy. He's fought the culture wars successfully in a way that other governors, Republicans included, haven't been able to say for themselves. And yet he seems to kind of focus on the most trivial or least significant parts of his record. And then you have this launch with Elon Musk middle of this week, this past week, and it just isn't the type of campaign you would expect from a first tier candidate like Governor DeSantis.
Isn’t it early days yet, though?
JK: So look, there's plenty of time. We're in May of 2023, there's many, many months to go before the campaign really does heat up. But there's a lot of warning signs for the leading Trump challenger in DeSantis. And there's a lot of things to be frankly, encouraged about with some of these new candidates like a Senator Scott. We're going to probably hear about Vice President Pence, former Vice President Pence jumping in the race later in the summer. So this is a very volatile field, but I think the elephant in the room still is former President Trump who has only seen his advantage over all these other Republicans grow. And he looks like the pretty solid front-runner at this point in the race.
Is the GOP now Trump’s party?
JK: What does the Republican Party even look like in 2023, 2024, right? I think there's almost a realization that a lot of folks on the campaign side are realizing that you may have to basically beat Trump or if you're not going to beat Trump, you're basically going to have to be someone very similar to Trump with his populism, with his in your face anger and grievance peddling. There may be no room for the Marco Rubio, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley types, Mike Pence,
The reason Pence's numbers went down in the Republican Party wasn't because of his governing record. It was because he didn't defend Donald Trump on January 6th and he didn't break the law on January 6th. So that's the Republican Party electorate when it comes to the base, when it comes to the primary voters these days. And it may just be that no matter how strong of a campaign you have, no matter how effective of a message you have to the broader electorate, it may just be, and we've seen this in some of these Senate in congressional primaries recently, it may just be you have to be the most crazy. You have to pander to the worst elements in the party to be successful
Why is DeSantis fading?
JK: The thing with DeSantis, I kind of am stunned that DeSantis, who has been so successful as a governor gets stuck in the weeds when he's talking about abbreviations like ESG or even DEI, which I understand and a lot of us understand, but even a lot of Republicans don't speak in the technical details of the Conservative online world when they're criticizing some of the excesses with woke progressivism. Trump for all his challenges, he actually speaks very bluntly about a boy's a boy, a girl's a girl. This is crazy stuff, what's going out in the schools. That is the rhetoric, the simple, straightforward rhetoric that is successful and effective in Republican politics.
It wasn't just the glitches from the Twitter event this past week. It was the fact that DeSantis seems to be talking to an audience of maybe a few hundred people that are very online that don't necessarily speak the language of, what is it, like cultural Marxism and some of these phrases that, again, I understand what he's talking about and a lot of people very immersed in this stuff do. But it's not going to reach your average Iowa caucus voter. It's not going to reach your average town hall questioner in New Hampshire. And I'm kind of stunned that with all the preparation that DeSantis had, he's not hitting his marker when it just comes to talking about his successes as Governor of Florida.
I do think the culture war stuff, especially what he did, like the run-up to the reelection, I thought that was actually good stuff. I mean, that was stuff that was sellable because he wasn't talking about punishing vaccine makers. He wasn't talking about the six-week abortion bans. I've always said that DeSantis has trouble taking the W, taking the win
At a certain point, some people thought the field needed to be small to beat Trump?
JK: So I think it's actually useful to have more candidates 'cause I think we're still trying to figure out what Republican voters are looking for. And look, I could see Scott breaking through, it's early, it is early. He could air ads in Iowa. By the way, the only states that matter right now, it's not the national numbers, it's Iowa, it's New Hampshire. All these candidates trying to make an upset play to dethrone Trump in the first two caucuses and primaries. And if that happens, throw out these national polls because they can change really fast.
The problem I think is that the Iowa numbers are also looking very, very strong for Trump. There was a Emerson poll, I think it was a little favorable to Trump. They tend to be pretty hot for Trump these days. But it showed Trump with I think about a 60 point advantage over DeSantis, maybe 40 to 50 point advantage head to head against DeSantis. Even the more optimistic anti-Trump folks that are doing polling in the state find Trump 15 points up over DeSantis.
But I think it's actually a smart move in the primary to win Iowa, to win some of these conservative states. But if Trump wins Iowa and if then he follows that up with a New Hampshire victory, the race is over, everything is going to come down to this first two early states
Can Christie’s entrance change things?
JK: I think Chris Christie actually, I think in his heart of hearts he's not going to be the nominee, but I do think he may enter the race as someone who's going to be on the debate stage and actually will prosecute the case against Trump and maybe get some eyeballs and maybe get some points that way. At least points against Trump that way. So that's one thing to watch. But boy, if no one's going after Trump by the time that debate rolls around or if Trump doesn't show up at that debate and it doesn't affect his numbers, he's going to be a heavy favorite if things don't turn pretty quickly.
Is the GOP really the party its enemies suggest it is: White supremacists?
JK: There was actually new data from the liberal sort of data mining group Catalyst that came out a couple of weeks ago and found that when they actually examined the precinct by precinct data that it was African American voters that, even though they still voted solidly Democratic, they made among the most moves towards the Republican Party, especially African-American men. So it only confirms some of this anecdotal, the growth of African-American Republican lawmakers we're seeing in Congress. And look, I think the thing with that makes it so politically important is if that trend even continues on a very small scale, that could change the dynamic in states like Michigan or in states like Georgia. The map could look a little bit different if Republicans could get 20% of the African American vote versus 10% to 15%.
And it's doable. I mean I think you can look at some of the targeted races and there's some evidence that Republicans have made small but significant inroads and I think it's not a coincidence you have Tim Scott leading the charge on the presidential race. You also have Larry Elder, who's not going to be much of a factor, but he's also running in that field. You have Byron Donalds, the congressman from Florida who I see on almost every cable news show these days and makes the Conservative case pretty effectively much much of the time. And he's becoming a more familiar face to kind of the news junkie crowd. And you also have, like you mentioned, Kentucky, I mean that's going to be the big race in 2023. It's going to be a competitive race. Governor Bashear is quite popular for a Democrat in the state of Kentucky.
But all the polling suggests this is going to come down to two or three points and it's going to be a hotly fought race with the eyes of the country on it as a possible precursor for 2024. And he's someone who's a Mitch McConnell protégé, I've interviewed him a number of times. He would be a national star if he gets elected governor in the Republican Party. So there are a lot of these data points that are growing and emerging. And a lot of people, there were a lot of predictions, if you remember back in the Romney era when Republicans had been losing ground with non-white voters, and it was sort of inevitability that Democrats were going to win the day in the future. And it's hard to kind of predict things because the opposite of a lot of those expectations has actually happened, where Democrats have done better with these affluent and white suburbanites.
The GOP is actually gaining with minorities…
JK: They've actually made surprising inroads in the last decade. And Republicans are making inroads with Hispanic, African American and Asian American to a point that a lot of people didn't see coming. So look, in a way Democrats still hold the advantage because there may be a lot more, the suburban voters are in some pretty crucial states and districts and that's a pretty valuable voting block by itself. But the racial polarization that seemed to dominate our country for so long is actually going the other direction. And I think it's a good sign. It's an encouraging sign for both the Republican Party and also for democracy.
The Democratic Party right now is sort of the party of the really rich, the really elite and then the very poor. It's a sort of incoherent coalition that identity politics plays a big role kind of fusing that together. But that is fraying, that is changing and I see that trend continuing at a small scale level in the coming years. And it'll be interesting to see what happens in 2024 and how Tim Scott does in the primary and whether any Republican can continue to make some of the gains that have been happening since 2016.
We’re in for some seismic changes in the coming years…?
JK: Yeah, we are at a tipping point. This could be the last, if you have an 82-year-old and a 78-year-old, if that's what we have, I mean it's not a great sign about where we are as a country, if that's not what most voters want yet the parties are kind of so drawn to these elder statesmen. I was talking to a Republican strategist who says, unless Ron DeSantis wins, Trump couldn't run for more than one other term, and Biden obviously would be termed out in '86. And you could have J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley, you could have this very, as you guys know, this NatCon wing, they want to make their statement in Republican politics and there could be a changing of the guard. Whether it's along racial lines or it's along ideological lines.
But there there's going to be a lot of changes in both parties in the next election and there's going to be fights within the parties that are going to get really, really messy and really could define where our politics go in the next couple of decades.
What about the wild card, Manchin?
JK: Well, I do think Manchin is seriously considering it because he doesn't have a great pathway to reelection in West Virginia and he's already gotten a lot of attention as the pivot vote in the Senate. He could certainly get more attention as the third party candidate. He does like that, the media oxygen. I don't think that even someone who's the most compelling third party candidate, even with Biden and Trump, the partisanship is still so strong in this country. Even with the growth of independents or people defining themselves as independents, it's just really, really hard to run up the middle and get 35% of the vote.
Just look at Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona, which by the way is one of the states that has the most independents, most swing voters in the country. And she may run, and we may get to see this kind of independent test in action in that state, in the Senate race. But all the polls show her still in third place as the incumbent senator, kind of at 15,% 20% making a big% statement, but you know, have to get 35, 40% to really... Ross Perot was at that level back in '92. That was the high water mark in my time.
Whole transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
Rise of the Black Republican (Axios, May 21 2023)
The GOP’s shrinking Senate map (Axios, May 14 2023)
The GOP’s quiet winning streak (Axios, April 30 2023)
Five things to know about Tim Scott’s record in Congress (Roll Call, May 22 2023)
Tim Scott is in a better position than you might think (Washington Post, May 15 2023)
The 2024 Republican Primary Is Heating Up. Time For Another FiveThirtyEight Primary Draft! (FiveThirtyEight, May 24 2023)
Ron DeSantis’ 2024 Campaign Launch Fail Could Predict What Happens Next (The Daily Beast, May 25 2023)
Trump’s 2025 vision, revealed (Axios, May 21, 2023)
Bill Murray, Caddyshack.