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Jonathan Bernstein
The Democratic presidential nomination cycle is somewhat unusual for a party with a first-term incumbent president. The Republican 2024 cycle? There has never been anything remotely like it.
Of course this is all about former President Donald Trump, whose unannounced campaign has been going strong since the day he left the White House. Trump is doing all the things that presidential candidates do at this point in the election cycle; in fact, he is doing far more of those things than most past candidates have done. And he is, in several ways, quite a bit different than any other nomination frontrunner.
To begin with, no party has had a former president run for their nomination since Teddy Roosevelt did it in 1912. And even that isn’t an ideal comparison because Roosevelt was running as a third-party challenger against a sitting Republican president, William Howard Taft.
The last time a former president tried to capture the nomination of an out-of-power party was when Grover Cleveland did it — winning the nomination and the presidency — in 1892. But Trump shouldn’t take too much solace from that. Not only did Cleveland accomplish that feat before the modern nomination system began in 1972; he did it 20 years before presidential primaries were invented. So it’s hard to consider that a useful precedent. It’s also the case that Cleveland had won the popular vote twice at that point, so he looked a lot more like a winner with a flukish loss than Trump does after losing the popular vote twice.
Then there is the unprecedented fact that Trump is the first-ever frontrunner to be in deep legal trouble. It’s true that in 2016 Hillary Clinton was under investigation (as was, it turned out, Trump himself, multiple times). But it simply doesn’t compare. The 19-item list of criminal and civil trouble Trump faces right now is simply far more serious and extensive than … well, it’s probably more legal trouble for a presidential candidate than all other candidates combined over the last 50 years. Perhaps throughout US history.
That’s not all! Trump remains a rare and perhaps unique case of a nomination frontrunner who can’t be counted on to be loyal to the party regardless of what happens. He has recently shown that his implicit threat to turn against party nominees who aren’t sufficiently pro-Trump isn’t just an idle boast; he recently attacked the Republican Senate candidate in Colorado and essentially told his supporters not to vote for him.
Added to that is the at least marginally real possibility that Trump would run as a third-party candidate if he failed to capture the nomination and the virtual certainty that he would declare primary losses fraudulent, and it adds up to something new in nomination politics. 2 Especially since in 2024, unlike 2016, it’s likely that a fair number of party actors, including elected officials, would stick with Trump if he turned against the party’s presidential nominee.
There is simply no way to know how this plays out. We might compare Trump the candidate with presidential aspirants who were sitting or former vice presidents, and note that those attempts have had a wide range of outcomes during the modern (1972 to present) era of nominations. Sitting vice president Al Gore drew only one challenger in 2000, whom he beat easily. Sitting Vice President George H.W. Bush and former VPs Walter Mondale and Joe Biden drew full fields and won nominations only after overcoming quite a bit of resistance. Former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who won a nomination under the old system in 1968, was narrowly defeated in 1972. Former Vice President Dan Quayle failed to gain traction and dropped out before the Iowa caucuses. Presumably a defeated president would enter the contest in a much stronger position than either sitting or former vice presidents, all things being equal. 3
But all things are rarely equal. We have no way of knowing how Trump’s legal difficulties will play out, either in the courtroom or on the campaign trail. Neither does the Republican Party, including potential presidential candidates. Nor does anyone (including primary voters themselves) really have any way of knowing whether his strong polling numbers in horse-race surveys about the nomination reflect name recognition — in which case his lead could fade as other candidates emerge — or firm commitments from voters.
What little hard evidence we have so far indicates that candidates aren’t particularly intimidated by Trump. As we would otherwise expect with an unpopular Democrat in the White House, there is no shortage of Republican candidates running for 2024. That means they are doing things like traveling to key presidential primary states, currying favor with Republican politicians, beginning to put together candidate campaign organizations and giving campaign-like policy speeches. There appear to be at least a dozen candidates doing the things that candidates normally do at this stage.
Perhaps none of these candidates will still be running by spring 2023, let alone in 2024. But at least so far, Trump isn’t coming close to clearing the field.
—Bloomberg