A chat with Elon Musk riddled with technical glitches, live on Twitter, is an unconventional way to launch a presidential campaign. Anyway, with the announcement of Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, the race for the Republican nomination is already underway. The first states will not vote until January. Primaries are difficult to predict, because it is expensive to conduct a sufficient number of high-quality polls of primary voters in key battleground states. However, once this caveat is made, there is a candidate who has an immense, perhaps insurmountable advantage: Donald Trump. Trump has a real chance to become the next president of the United States. According to the betting markets, the odds of him returning to the White House are one in three.
If someone, to preserve their sanity, decided to pay less attention to Trump after his defeat in 2020, you may now be wondering how that is possible. The parties do not usually keep the losers. Trump led the Republicans to defeat in the 2018 midterm elections and the 2020 presidential elections. After encouraging his supporters to “stop the robbery”, some of them stormed Congress, leading to the death by stroke of a police officer and the suicide of four others. Subsequently, Trump has also been found responsible for a sexual assault. Does the Republican Party really plan to reappoint him?
Yes, it probably will. In 2016 and in 2020, it made some sense to think of Trump's move as a hostile takeover of the party. In 2023, this is no longer the case. Trump is the favorite because a large portion of Republicans like him. His supporters have now controlled the Republican National Committee for six years. More than half of the Republicans in the House of Representatives were elected for the first time after 2016 and, therefore, under the banner of Trump. Nearly all the House and Senate Republicans who refused to make peace with him have resigned or retired. Of the ten House members who voted to remove him in January 2021, only two remain. They are outnumbered within their own group at a ratio of more than 100 to 1.
In addition, the current Trump campaign is better organized than those of 2016 or 2020. Our analysis of the primaries shows how difficult it will be to defeat him. He has one impressive lead: YouGov polls for The Economist show that Republican primary voters prefer Trump to DeSantis by 33 percentage points. Trump also has a huge advantage in the support of elected Republicans, which is usually a good indicator of what is to come. In 2016, the last time Trump ran in a primary, he won it with much less support than he has now.
There are still Republican voters who would like an alternative: His 58% in the polls means that about half of primary voters are open to choosing another candidate. However, difficulties in coordinating the
opposition to Trump are enormous. Privately, some people close to the Trump campaign say that the fact that many candidates run in the primaries favors them because it divides the field. There are big donors who are giving money to other candidates on the condition that they drop out after the South Carolina primary, one of the first to be held, if they are asked to do so. The idea is to forge unity around a single candidate other than Trump, just as the establishment Democrats did when they rallied around Joe Biden in 2020 to stop leftist Bernie Sanders. However, behind-the-scenes maneuvering by party barons is unlikely to work against Trump for the simple reason that he is the Republican establishment.
The way the primary schedule and pending court cases against Trump overlap is nightmarish. The trial in New York for the falsification of business records will begin shortly after Super Tuesday, the date on which more than a dozen states vote. Neither that trial nor any of the other investigations he faces are likely to have been resolved before the conclusion of the primary. Therefore, it is possible that the candidate of one of the two major parties is subject to criminal charges with his name printed on the ballot paper. America has had badly behaved presidents before. Never one charged in a criminal proceeding.
It may be thought that, given that situation, voters will abandon Trump en masse. Could be. Yet when a jury ruled in early May that he had sexually abused a woman 30 years ago, the verdict had no visible effect on the polls. Trump is an expert at convincing Republican voters that he is the real victim. Democrats and many US allies think Trump is a threat to democracy (as does The Economist). His campaign is already turning that charge against the accuser: “The 2024 election,” a recent Trump campaign email announced, “will determine whether we succeed in maintaining our Republic or whether America succumbs to the dark forces of tyranny.” Those who accept that this is the current situation are likely to overlook Trump's myriad and glaring flaws.
So imagine that it is November 2024 and Trump and Biden meet again in a payback attempt, the first since Dwight Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s. Could Trump win?
There is no doubt that the general elections will be close. The electoral college gives a slight advantage to the Republicans. The last landslide victory was 40 years ago. Since then, America has been politically divided and calcified because voters rarely change sides. Biden has some underappreciated strengths, but no one considers him formidable. If the country entered a recession, Trump's chances would increase. Some of the tactics proposed to stop it after
Primaries, like running a third-party candidate, have an air of desperation: they could backfire and increase your chances.
All this means that the possibility that the next president of the United States will be someone who divides the West and delights Vladimir Putin must be taken seriously; that he accepts the results of the elections only if he wins them; that he calls the thugs who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 martyrs and wants to pardon them; that he has proposed defaulting on the national debt to annoy Biden; and that he is the subject of multiple investigations for violating criminal law, in addition to having a record of sexual assault in a civil law case. Anyone who cares about America, democracy, conservatism, or decency should hope that DeSantis or any of the other non-Trump Republican candidates can defy the odds and defeat him.
© 2023 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. Translation: Juan Gabriel López Guix.
