Wrap your head around this one. What I’m about to describe is a long shot, although not as extreme as you might think. Donald Trump leads with either 56% or 34%, (Fox News said 34% and Trump went wild, much to Kayleigh McEnany’s chagrin) DeSantis is at 25% and everybody else is under 5%. Therefore, if the primary were held today, Trump would conclusively win.
But will that be the case in even a few short months from now? Trump is in some serious legal jeopardy. Jonathan Last has gamed out a scenario for what could happen if Trump’s legal problems take him out of the picture, which is becoming an increasingly realistic possibility.
But a federal indictment is coming for Trump. This won’t be a New York City politics production. And it isn’t about sexual assault. It’s a real-deal crime against the state. Complete with a tape of Trump holding a smoking gun and explaining to listeners what it is and whom he just shot with it.
Jail time—real, orange jumpsuit stuff—suddenly becomes possible.
And maybe Republican voters panic.
It doesn’t have to be all of them. It just has to be enough to register decline in the polls. Enough to get Trump under 50 percent. Because once he starts bleeding support, that becomes its own story. It could plausibly spook other marginal Trump supporters who are worried about electability. Before you know it, the combination of news about the criminal trial and news about Trump’s backwards momentum becomes a flywheel. Maybe—maybe—the panic becomes sufficient to push Trump all the way down to the 35 percent mark that Ron DeSantis’s highly paid advisers believe is Trump’s absolute floor.
Now let’s assume that Ron DeSantis continues to be Ron DeSantis. Actual human beings continue to observe him in the wild. And the effect isn’t good. DeSantis, too, continues to lose some ground. Maybe enough to get him under the 20 percent mark.
Suddenly what you have is room for an alternative.
Last goes on to name Tim Scott or Glenn Youngkin, should he decide to be drafted. He also says he could make a case for Mike Pence. I wish he would. I would love to hear a scenario where Mike Pence could get the GOP nomination. That would be next level weird. It’s beyond my imaginative capacity, I’ll say that much.
He continues.
What’s important is that if the Trump/DeSantis share falls to ~50 percent, then someone else is—and maybe even two someones are—going to become viable. Suddenly the race is scrambled and all of our assumptions about what the Republican electorate wants get reexamined.
In this scenario I wouldn’t expect Republican voters to repudiate Trumpism, but maybe they’d move on from it. Without ever admitting what they’d done, of course. Or resolving the internal problems of their caucus. But maybe they’d just leave this era behind, pave over it, and build the next era on top of it.
Because this is how, in general, societies deal with big, internal problems. A new generation comes along and instead of fixing the mess their ancestors left them, they build over it and create their own problems.
Last says that the above scenario is maybe 1 in 10 or 1 in 20. Those are not high odds. But bear in mind that Trump is in the scenario. Trump had 1 in 5 odds or worse of winning the election in 2016 and that came to pass. Maybe this will, too.
I’d put those odds substantially higher today, as CNN is breaking news that the document describing a plan to attack Iran, which he said in an interview in 2021 he had taken, is missing. It was not found in the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago last August, and they are reportedly demanding its immediate return. This is an extremely sensitive document and if the mad mango has hidden it somewhere or destroyed it, he’s not going to be running for office for ever.
Of course, the longer the republicans are weak and divided by internecine fighting over moronic policies, the better it is for our side and for sane, competent governance, which is what the country needs.