Sure, why not?
I’ve been saying this for awhile and I think it becomes truer every day. Despite the fact that he is an ex-president Trump’s path to the nomination is the same one he had in 2016: the anti-establishment outsider, especially in light of the party elites pushing Ron DeSantis.
JV Last at the Bulwark takes a look at the lay of the land:
I have some Deep Thoughts on Ron DeSantis for later this week, but I want to start by asking you to consider a parallel: Is he Scott Walker or George W. Bush?
I don’t mean on the merits or as an ideological figure. I’m talking exclusively about DeSantis’s political position at this moment in the primary. Is he a rocket about to take off? Or is he the stalking horse for the entire spectrum of the Republican party / Conservatism Inc.—from the think tanks to the donors to the grifter class?
The reason this question is interesting is because there’s evidence to support both views.
Nate Cohn has done a deep dive on the data and concluded that DeSantis is definitely not Walker; but may not quite be W.
Here’s Cohn:
[A]t least at the beginning of the race, Mr. DeSantis is no Scott Walker. He would start the campaign in a very different and far stronger position, even if there is still no way to know whether he “has what it takes” to succeed against former President Donald J. Trump.
What sets Mr. DeSantis apart from Mr. Walker? To be blunt: how many people already say they want him to be president.
In this narrow but important respect, Mr. DeSantis has a lot more in common with Barack Obama or Ronald Reagan than Mr. Walker or the other promising first-time candidates who did not live up to high hopes in recent years, like Kamala Harris, Rick Perry or the retired general Wesley Clark.
Here’s a graph Cohn put together that prompts all sorts of questions:
I have thoughts.
When you look at this list you can divvy up the candidates into two classes: Political rock stars and party war horses.
The Rock Stars: Candidates with immense political talent who were pushed upward by support from voters, who projected their hopes and aspirations onto them. Kennedy, Reagan, and Obama.
The Party War Horses: These were candidates whose primary asset was a unified party structure that pulled them upward—often against the tide of popular preference. That’s Bush, Clinton, and Giuliani.
Here’s where it gets interesting: Of the three Rock Stars, only Obama captured the nomination.²
Of the Party War Horses, only Giuliani failed to win the nomination.
Clearly, if you have a choice between grassroots support and a hammerlock on the party infrastructure, it’s better to have the unified apparatus.
Or at least it was better to have the unified apparatus.
One of the clear trends of the last several years is that “The Party Decides” is no longer a maxim that’s universally true. It wasn’t true in the Republican primary of 2016 or the Democratic primary of 2020.³ It hasn’t been true in most of the Republican senatorial and gubernatorial races of the last six years.
Past performance is not indication of future gains, obviously. Maybe the pendulum has swung back and the unified Republican/conservative elites will be able to pull DeSantis across the line.
But that’s the central question for the Republican primary. And by coincidence, it gives Trump an obvious line of attack: Even though he’s the former president
the Swampthe party elites are still arrayed against him and trying to impose their will on Republican voters.You can see the argument, yes? Donald Trump is fighting for YOU. Meatball Ron is Mitch McConnell’s stalking horse.
Or at least, that’s what I’d be arguing if I were running Trump’s campaign.
You can’t be new twice, but you can be anti-establishment forever.
Yep.And that’s where he’s going. I don’t think it can win him the general election but it almost certainly is at least a veto point in the primary.