JV Last takes a look at the GOP primaries’ various possibilities in light of the indictment:
Dynamics
The most immediate question is what Trump’s indictment does to the dynamics of the 2024 primary campaign. Generally speaking, there are three possibilities:
No effect: The campaign continues to develop no differently than it would have had Trump not been indicted.
Instability: The race destabilizes and becomes more volatile and less predictable.
Freeze frame: The race becomes frozen where it is.
I’m going to give you the argument for each scenario. And then I’ll tell you which I think is right.
No Effect. The dynamics of the race are as follows: Trump has a serious lead. DeSantis is the only (currently) viable challenger. Trump has been making slow gains. DeSantis has experienced a correction after having 18 months of generally positive momentum.
Mike Pence has made his potential candidacy known and been preemptively rejected. Brian Kemp has tested the waters only gently and gotten no interest. Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, and Chris Christie are margin-of-error candidates.
Why would any of this change?
Trump is the most well-known commodity in the history of presidential politics. He’s been a public figure for 40 years. He’s a creature of tabloid scandal sheets. He’s been embroiled in lawsuits and allegations of corruption, misconduct, and criminality almost literally since before Ron DeSantis was born.
Is it possible that a criminal indictment wasn’t priced into his stock by Republican primary voters before yesterday?
Republican voters know exactly who Donald Trump is. They thought he could win in 2016 and 2020 and they thought he could win as of 48 hours ago. How does a witch-hunt indictment by a Soros-funded prosecutor change any of that?
An indictment doesn’t change anything in this race. The only thing that will flip the dynamics is DeSantis catching fire with voters.
Instability. We’ve never had a major party presidential candidate under indictment and in this view, Republican voters freak out.
It’s not that they don’t support Trump—they’re with him. They think he’s innocent; it’s a witch hunt; etc. But they start worrying that he can’t beat Biden.
In this scenario, Republican primary voters turn off the Id Theory of Politics and become cold-eyed realists, scouring the polling on independent voters and adjusting their preferences accordingly.
With some portion of Trump’s voters suddenly in play there are a couple different things that could happen. They could all flow to DeSantis, increasing his strength. Or they could consolidate around someone else, creating a three-candidate dynamic.
It’s also possible that some Republican candidates themselves will attack Trump over the indictment—either on the merits or because it makes him weaker against Biden. The indictment provides an opportunity for them to create contrast with Trump without abandoning any MAGA policies.
Or the indictment could lure some other, off-the-radar candidate into the race. Like a cable news host or a business figure. Someone untraditional whose implicit proposition would be, “Let’s just start this whole populist revolution over.”
Don’t forget: There will be a stream of developments on this case over the coming months. We’ll get the charging docs. We’ll get motions and testimony. Maybe there’s an incident of political violence. There may be more indictments.
There are a lot of events about to unfold and Trump has only a limited ability to control them. In this chaos, there will be opportunity.
Freeze Frame. But the truth is, I don’t buy either of those arguments. The most likely outcome is that this indictment freezes the race where it is and makes it very hard to change its trajectory. Here’s why:
Trump’s indictment is now the top story for the 2024 presidential campaign. It will suck up all of the coverage. It’ll force Fox to kill their shadow ban on him. And here’s the key point: Every single member of the Republican party and Conservatism Inc. will have to stipulate that Trump is innocent, the prosecution is a witch hunt, and the entire case is dangerous to America.
That will be the baseline for the Republican discourse.
How is any other candidate supposed to break through? By coming up with a plan for entitlement reform?
No. The only way to get attention will be to talk about Trump and the only thing Republican voters will tolerate hearing about Trump is that he’s innocent and Alvin Bragg / the Democrats are evil and Republicans must fight for Trump.
And once you have a single dominant story with a single party line, then there are very few opportunities for anyone to provide contrast and make cases for themselves.
Just put yourself in the mind of a Republican candidate. What do you say about the indictment when you go on Fox?
This is a travishamockery. If the radical Democrats can do this to President Trump, they can do it to any of us. We must fight back against this witch hunt and send the communists a signal that we will triumph. So you should vote for . . . me?
Yeah, no. Makes no sense.
Another part of the dynamic that gets frozen is DeSantis. As it stands right now, just about everyone assumes he’s running. It would destabilize the race if DeSantis didn’t run.
And Trump’s indictment almost certainly keeps DeSantis in, even if his polling continues to decline. We know this because yesterday evening—by total coincidence—Florida Republicans introduced their bill to change the law so that DeSantis could run for president as the sitting governor.
This makes sense because it underscores the extent to which DeSantis is less a competitor to Trump than his understudy. He’ll keep making demonstrations and preparing his run because someone has to be ready in case Trump blows up.
In short: I can see how the indictment might introduce uncertainty into the Republican primary. But right now I’m convinced that it will function as an artificial stabilizing element which actually makes it harder for the campaign to develop and change according to its own logic.
Agreed. It’s frozen. And DeSantis is freezing to death.