Three things from our pod with Karl Rove this week:
The Stormy Daniels indictment will help Trump.
A large GOP field will also end up helping Trump. If the party doesn’t want him to win, weak candidates are going to have to take themselves out of the running…
A winning candidate who isn’t DJT will have to appeal to the Trump base, but avoid the liabilities that have lost Trump and his allies three straight elections.
Whether you believe that the 2020 election was stolen, that January 6 was a peaceful demonstration, or that Donald Trump was the greatest leader in American history… whatever you believe, there is an important piece of irrefutable data: Three elections — 2018, 2020, 2022 — went south for the GOP. With an historically unpopular president, unprecedented crime, an immigration crisis, staggering inflation, and more, the GOP still couldn’t win the Senate in 2022. Those losses were in large part due to the influence of the former president, and his selection and endorsement of candidates that, for the most part, lost.
Still, losses or no losses, Trump remains popular with the GOP base. He has a solid grip on 20-30 percent of the voting base, and is currently running by double digits ahead of his nearest competitor, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Not only that: Trump is the GOP candidate preferred by the news media, the Democratic Party and the far Left. He is their magic talisman, the man who turns out Democrats, and alienates swing voters, independents and suburban women. There’s a reason the Ds put millions behind MAGA candidates in the midterms.
Trump’s fortunes will rise or fall on the ability of his opponents to offer Trumpism without Trump; populism without the drama; and the prospect of electability for two terms. The latter is no small factor; there’s a lot to fix in the United States, and four years is hardly enough to get it done. So the question will be, do GOP voters want to make a point, and potentially go down in flames? Or do they want to win? We won’t know for a while… keep watching this space.
HIGHLIGHTS
Setting aside the merits of the legal cases threatening Trump, would an indictment help him?
KR: Oh, it will. It will cause a rally around the flag effect. Trump has a... Let's not kid ourselves. He has a strong hold on an element of the Republican Party, basically non-college educated Republican primary voters. But on the other hand, it's based on we like what he did, but we don't like how he did it. And so if somebody can say, "I'm painting a vision of what it is that I want to do that finds favor with you, and I can do it in a way that causes people to say, 'You know what? We can turn the page on that guy and get somebody who can serve the country for two terms in order to advocate the kind of policies we want.'" Because look, one of Trump's weaknesses is that he's focused on the past. He can't help himself. He gets up there and begins to say, "I won. I won big and millions of votes, tens of millions of votes. It was so beautiful."
But people are getting over that. But the other thing is that they really want somebody who can help bring about changes. And one of the weaknesses he's got is that, like it or not, he can only serve one term. And the idea of having a younger, more vital, more energetic person who's going to be able to serve legally two terms and rather than being, if he were to get elected, which I don't think he would get elected. I mean, the same problems that he had in 2020 when he was incumbent are still there today, and if anything, magnified, and that means it's going to be difficult for him to win, even against a damaged creature like Joe Biden, if it is Joe Biden. So yeah, no, it's not going to be easy. And if you are betting today, you'd have to give him a good chance of winning the nomination.
A good chance, but not a slam dunk?
KR: …time is not his friend, and there will be time between now and the time of when people go to vote. And in Iowa, he's had a weakness in the past. New Hampshire, he could have problems with. Nevada, South Carolina will be a place where he'll have some strength, but the bar is going to be set so high in South Carolina. Last time around, he had the benefit of a field that was still 16 or 17 candidates at that time. So nobody hit the 15% trigger that allowed them to get delegates. And he walked out of the state with all 50 some of them. That ain't going to happen this time around, even in a state where he was as strong as he was last time.
One of Trump’s edges was a large field of candidates?
KR: I hear this from party officials, activists, donors, basically saying, "We got to have a more limited field." And you hear from the candidates, they recognize it. People are saying to them explicitly, "I'm willing to write you a $3,300 check and good luck to you, but I'm waiting to see who shows what they've got, that they've got what it takes to win. And then I'm going to open my wider network and my bigger pocket book.
I've talked to several candidates, it's a recognition that they better be able to demonstrate that they've got what it takes, or they should get out of the race.
Do candidates have the self-discipline to do that?
KR: I don't think it's going to be just the self-discipline. I think it's going to be the discipline of a political marketplace where a large number of the players are saying, "You know what? We cannot afford to have him." I mean, think about this. Yesterday or this past week, we had two of the first members of Congress to endorse him, both Pennsylvania's, Barletta and Marino who said, "We're for Ron DeSantis." These are two of the people who stepped forward at the very beginning and were with Trump. And there are more people like that out there because they want to win.
Wasn’t House Speaker Kevin McCarthy looking to help Trump in releasing footage of January 6 to Tucker Carlson?
KR: The thought process behind releasing 40 hours of footage to Tucker Carlson, who then proceeded to take out less than an hour worth of footage of people calmly gathering on the Capitol grounds, [leaving] out a thousand people committing acts of violence that got them arrested and a hundred police officers getting the hell beaten out of them, and people smashing the doors and windows of the United States Capitol in order to gain illegal access to the Capitol and threatening members of Congress and defecating in their offices and attempting to upset and stop a constitutionally mandated session of the United States Congress. All that failed to make an appearance in that program, and that to me was horrendous. But [are] Republicans are going to waltz into 2024 by saying our issue is January 6th? Maybe Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, but I bet you a dime to a dollar, it ain't the Republican presidential front-runners.
What’s the winning formula then?
KR: Somebody's going to have to lay out their own agenda and be authentic about it. And part of that agenda has to grab people... Remember what they're interested in: they want their taxes kept low. They want America to be strong on the stage. They want energy independence. They want somebody who's going to take on the nuttiness of the progressive left when it comes to things like transgender and education and so forth. But they want to know who you are. And if you're authentic about it, they're going to be more likely to say, "You're the alternative I want." But at some point, they're going to have to take on Trump. They're going to have to find ways to say, "You know what, with a due respect to the former president, he failed to take on China on the number one economic issue we face, which is, they're stealing our intellectual property. They're stealing the way that we make things and the things that we make. And he cut deals with them that they've never lived up to and haven't been penalized for." Even while he was president, they promised to buy all this grain and American Farm Brutus and simply didn't.
How will the issue of Ukraine play?
KR: [T]he victory of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine would not be the end. It would be the beginning. So this would be a problem, a huge problem if he were to win. But in the meantime, it is also a problem of authenticity for Ron DeSantis. Go back to his appearance at Embry Riddle University in his district five years ago or six years ago, in which he basically says, "We need to arm the Ukrainians because Putin is a threat." And if he's being too cute by half by now, sort of saying, "Well, no blank check," and sounding like he's against aid to Ukraine. One of his great strengths is people look at him and say what he is, he believes. And if suddenly you have this, I used to say this, but now I say that and he can't have a plausible explanation of why he no longer sees Putin as a threat, then this will go to one of his great strengths, which is credibility.
Why shouldn’t people trust Trump?
KR: We lost the Senate, and we lost House races we should otherwise have won because he endorsed candidates like the nut in Ohio who turned out to be a liar about his so-called combat record. He wasn't a combat veteran. He was a loader on the flight line in Qatar for four months. And that guy got the Republican nomination for one reason only, which was Donald Trump endorses him. Same thing happened in New Hampshire. Same thing happened in a district in Washington state. Same thing happened in a dozen races around the country, which meant we would've won the House by 20 seats, not by five.
Also, somebody might be gutsy enough to say, with all due respect, you were the guy who presided over a $3 trillion COVID relief bill in which hundreds of millions of dollars were stolen in unemployment benefits by people in prison and by crooks because you didn't put in place the regime to make sure that that crooks couldn't steal money. And you're the guy who then piled on. As you were leaving office, you wanted to give one last burst of spending. And of those three point something or other trillion dollars, 500 billion of it is still not spent. And you're the guy who presided over that. Now, maybe we needed to spend money there, but they were counting on you to make certain it wasn't stolen, and hundreds of millions of dollars was stolen on your watch.
Should the other candidates out there criticize Trump?
KR: So I don't have a problem with Nikki Haley going out there and saying, here's what I did as Governor and here's what I want to do as President, or DeSantis saying, you know what? I'm really focused on my legislature where I'm trying to do X, Y, and Z at length. They're laying the predicate by expanding the amount of information that people have about him. And again, back to my point. He's going to come after them, and the counterpunch is more important than the punch.
Take Trump and Biden out of the equation. Who has a better bench?
KR: Well, the problem is they have a bench. And think about it. These are the people who want to run but are being held up. Newsome of California. Granted he's got good hair, but he's weird. Polis of Colorado. Amy Klobuchar, Senator from Minnesota wants to run. Whitmer of Michigan wants to run. Pritzker with his gigantic family fortune wants to run. We have Cooper of North Carolina, Murphy of New Jersey. Corey Booker wants to run. Elizabeth Warren may run. The Clintonites are lining up behind Mitch Landrieu. Pete Buttigieg wanted to run, but I'm not certain his train is going to be leaving the station.
Full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
Republican Presidential Primary Survey (The Bulwark, January 16-21 2023)
This is the dynamic that could decide the 2024 GOP race (CNN, March 7 2023)
The Missing GOP Agenda (Free Beacon, February 10 2023)
The Cold Calculus Behind the Shrinking GOP Presidential Field (Politico, February 2 2023)
Only the Voters Can Crush Donald Trump (Wall Street Journal, December 8 2022)
The GOP’s 2024 Senate Opportunities (WSJ, March 8 2023)
Fox contributor Karl Rove: Trump's CPAC speech was “a good one, but not a great one” (Media Matters, March 6 2023)
I Got 2022 Mostly Right. Now on to 2023! (WSJ, January 4 2023)
Unity Won’t Come Easy for Either Party (WSJ, April 27, 2016)
Donald Trump benefits as Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz split remaining votes (USA TODAY, February 24 2016)
Turnout was high in the 2016 primary season, but just short of 2008 record (Pew Research, June 10 2016)
Contrasting Partisan Perspectives on Campaign 2016 (Pew Research, October 2 2015)
How Republicans see the GOP on the eve of the 2016 election (Pew Research, November 2, 2016)