Waiting for a man in a red fleece vest
Ed Kilgore on the yearning for Youngkin:
One of the best signs that Ron DeSantis’s 2024 presidential candidacy is circling the drain is the renewed enthusiasm some Republicans have for a late entry in the 2024 race who can save them from the Donald Trump and his unsatisfying rivals. This recent valentine to Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin from the New York Post’s Miranda Devine is a good example of the longing for Mr. Right on the right:
The genial former private equity chief executive is living proof that “conservative common sense policies work,” in a state that he sees as a microcosm of America. …
A 6-foot-7 gentle giant with a perpetual smile, he already looks presidential, but says he is bemused by growing pressure to enter the presidential race, as Ron DeSantis falters and Trump is ensnared in Machiavellian Democratic lawfare. …
While not explicitly ruling out a late presidential entry, he says he is “laser-focused” on Virginia’s pivotal legislative election in November.
You get the sense that Devine still imagines that once Youngkin has saved his state for good this fall, he can turn his magnificent visage and towering figure toward the needs of his nation. It’s probably not coincidental that Devine’s boss is News Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch, who in July was reported to have been shifting his affections to Youngkin from the disappointing DeSantis. Indeed, as Media Matters noted at about the same time, Fox News had taken up the banner of promoting Youngkin as a dark horse candidate for president:
Youngkin has been featured in at least 6 live interviews on Fox in the past month — one each on Fox & Friends, Fox & Friends Weekend, America’s Newsroom, and Fox News Tonight, and twice on Hannity.
Fox & Friends co-hosts Kayleigh McEnany and Steve Doocy pushed Youngkin to run in 2024, with Doocy noting that “powerful Republican donors … are encouraging you to jump into the race …”
The narrative seems to be emerging on Fox News that if Youngkin can flip control of the Virginia Senate to his party in November, he could roll right into a late presidential bid on the wings of this fresh demonstration of his blue state viability.
But how feasible is that sort of timetable? Not very.
Sure, in the years before the universal adoption of primaries and state party caucuses to choose presidential nominees in the early 1970s, late entries able to command support from favorite-son candidates and local party leaders could and sometimes did win. As late as 1968, Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic nomination without entering a single primary, and the same year Ronald Reagan announced a credible (if not successful) presidential bid on the very eve of the GOP convention. In 1952 Democrats drafted Adlai Stevenson (who had never announced his candidacy) at their convention, and eight years later nearly did it again (John F. Kennedy held off a Stevenson effort that only emerged at the convention).
But in recent decades, successful candidacies have never been last-minute affairs, and they were invariably launched in time to compete in the early primaries and caucuses, as NPR reported in October of 2015 when Joe Biden was considering (and ultimately rejected) a late entry:
[F]rom 1996 onward the announcements came earlier. Almost all eventual nominees for both parties made official starts in the spring and early summer, between 500 and 650 days before that first Tuesday in November.
He goes on to note some recent attempts such as the late calls to draft Jeb! in 2012 and the Bloomberg entry in 2016 and asks:
Could electability-minded Republicans panic enough about Trump’s 2024 viability to need a sudden savior like Youngkin right before voters start voting early next year?
Anything’s possible, but the entire reason Murdoch and Devine and others are yearning for Youngkin is that Trump is crushing the current Republican field. Yes, he’s in ever-increasing legal peril, and sure, Trump could say or do anything at any moment. But at this point, the odds are much higher that Trump will have effectively nailed down the GOP nomination by late this fall than that an aggrieved Republican majority will be searching for an alternative having rejected DeSantis, Scott, Pence, Haley, Ramaswamy, Christie, Hutchinson, Suarez, and Hurd. Politicians tend to look for late-entry saviors precisely because they’ve already lost. If you hear more and more cries for Glenn Youngkin as the weeks go by, you can probably bet they are being voiced by losers as well.
The idea that a stiff like Youngkin is the ultimate Trump-slayer makes me laugh. And it shows just how futile these efforts to end the Trump nightmare really are. The GOP doesn’t have a great bench and they are shooting their entire wad on this quixotic attempt to dethrone the man they’ve all been protecting and enabling for the past 6 years. Unless he drops dead on Trump Force One sometime in the next year it’s done.