Thoughts on the invisible primary and links to the goings on of the moment as 2024 approaches...
Henry Gomez and Matt Dixon over at NBC had a nice look at the emerging delegate strategy of the budding DeSantis campaign. A few reactions...
- Before I even clicked on the link, my first thought was, "Yeah, Jeff Roe was brought onto the staff at the super PAC and Ken Cuccinelli is running the show over there. This will be a delegate strategy story." It was. Both were involved in the Cruz delegate operation in 2016. Put a pin in that.
- Folks linking to this piece keep interpreting it as a "skipping" story. As in, this DeSantis strategy entails skipping Iowa, New Hampshire and the other early states. I did not read it that way. This strikes me as a strategy not unlike that of the former president's. It is a strategy built on the notion that the 2024 Republican presidential nomination race could go on for a while next year. Donald Trump is well-positioned to go the distance. And Ron DeSantis is demonstrating that he at least potentially has the resources, financial and otherwise, to do the same. This behavior is less about skipping those early states than thinking about the full primary calendar. Look, a lot of the 2016 Republican candidates traveled widely in 2015, and not just to the earliest states. There was this whole discussion about whether the SEC primary was working. Working, that is, in the sense that the collective movement of southern states to Super Tuesday would draw candidate attention to the region. Visits occurred to the South and elsewhere, but none of them skipped Iowa, New Hampshire or any of the other early states. Well, some of the candidates did. They skipped the later early states after withdrawing. DeSantis may pepper other states with visits, but keep an eye on him and others as Iowa and New Hampshire approach. They will not be skipping either.
- The most interesting part of the article was this peek into the thinking from inside Team DeSantis. “One thing that we have looked at is that Trump can be beat on the delegate portion of all this. He has never been good at that.” That is straight out of the Cruz playbook from 2016. And it made sense in 2016. In 2023-24? Eh, maybe. Maybe not. This can be filed into that category of "Where is Trump this cycle? Closer to 2015 or 2019?" Trump will have for 2024 some institutional advantages within the party at the state level that he did not have in 2015. He definitely had that in 2019 and worked that to his advantage in the 2020 delegate game. Those connections still exist. But are they as strong? That is the question. And that matters for who fills the delegate slots that are allocated to candidates based on the results of primaries and caucuses across the country. Will those folks selected to fill those allocated slots be as firmly in Trump's corner or can other campaigns potentially exploit the divorce between the allocation and selection processes in the Republican nomination in the way that Cruz did in 2016? RNC rules may make that more difficult for challengers to Trump in 2024. This is the story. Focus on that.
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Anything you can do, I can do better. DeSantis scored a congressional endorsement this week and the Trump campaign then conveniently rolled out an endorsement from a member of Congress from right in DeSantis' backyard. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) threw his support behind Donald Trump.
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Yeah, those head-to-head Republican primary poll results keep popping up. This time it was a one-on-one between Trump and DeSantis in Iowa (with parallel numbers for a wider race as well). On the one hand, these head-to-heads are make believe. They capture a race that does not exist and very likely will not exist when voting commences in 2024. There will be more candidates in the race, at least initially, than merely Trump and DeSantis. But the supposed value added is to demonstrate that Trump is more vulnerable in a one-on-one race. That is another hypothesis that finds its roots in 2016 and may or may not have been true then anymore than it is now.
The assumption nestled in all of this, of course, is that DeSantis has the best shot to take down Trump (but can only do so if the others get out of the way). But that is only a partial test. It only gets part of the way toward an answer because it only consistently tests one alternative against Trump. How do the other candidates do head-to-head with Trump? Better or worse than in a multi-candidate race? Clearly, the retort here is likely to be that other candidates are not tested against Trump because they are in single digits in the multi-candidate polls. Fair, but why trust the multi-candidate polls in that case and not for measuring how DeSantis is doing against Trump?
The head-to-heads only offer spin opportunities for the campaigns. They certainly do not tell us much about how voters and the field will react once votes are actually cast in a multi-candidate race in the early states next year and voters in subsequent states begin to process that information. That picture will develop and change.
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Over at FHQ Plus...
- Thursday was a busy day for presidential primary bill movement across the country. There were a variety of changes in Idaho, Maryland and Missouri.
If you haven't checked out FHQ Plus yet, then what are you waiting for? Subscribe below.
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On this date...
...in 1984, former Vice President Walter Mondale won the Wisconsin Democratic caucuses, days after Gary Hart claimed victory in the beauty contest primary. [The caucuses were used to allocate delegates.]
...in 1988, Senator Paul Simon (D-IL) withdrew from the Democratic nomination race, just a few weeks after his lone win in his home state primary.
...in 1992, Bill Clinton took the Wisconsin primary, and President George H.W. Bush swept primaries in Kansas, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
[As a fun aside, a representative from the Kansas secretary of state's office recently testifying before a committee about the presidential primary bill in the Sunflower state noted that the state held a rare presidential primary in 1992. That was a function of a request, he said, from Bob Dole to ensure that delegates went to the president and not potentially Pat Buchanan in a caucus.]
...in 2015, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) entered the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.
...in 2020, former Vice President Joe Biden won the delayed and then not delayed Wisconsin primary.
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