(Bloomberg Opinion) -- If I were a political adviser to a conservative Republican senator or governor with presidential ambitions, I’d be giving one message right now: Challenge Donald Trump for the nomination.
Not because Trump is particularly vulnerable. He appears to be close to a lock for renomination right now, and that would most likely be true even if he slumped badly in the next six months.
Still, it’s the smart move.
After all, look at the last two Republicans to take on incumbent presidents from the party.
In 1991-92, Pat Buchanan ran against sitting Republican President George H.W. Bush. Buchanan was originally mounting an ideological protest against Bush, whom hard-line conservatives never trusted and who had violated some aspects of conservative orthodoxy during his presidency. Still, the candidacy of the long-time pundit and occasional White House staffer wasn’t expected to go anywhere until the 1991 recession hit and Bush’s popularity cratered. Buchanan wound up running as much of a populist economic campaign as the social conservative one that he had intended, and while he never came close to the nomination – peaking with 37% of the vote in New Hampshire and failing to win a single contest – he certainly did create quite a stir.
The outcome for Buchanan? Rather than being punished by the party for weakening a president who lost to Bill Clinton, Buchanan wound up gaining a fair amount of stature and ran a somewhat serious campaign for the 1996 nomination, winning three states including New Hampshire and winding up second in votes and delegates. It’s hard to imagine Buchanan having done as well in 1996 had he passed on 1992.
Before that, in 1976, Ronald Reagan challenged sitting Republican President Gerald Ford. It was an unusual situation; Ford had ascended to be vice president after Spiro Agnew resigned, and then was elevated to the presidency when Richard Nixon resigned. Ford had never been nominated for anything beyond a House district. Reagan, who had already run for president in 1968 but had fallen short, almost defeated Ford.
Reagan, of course, won the Republican nomination and the presidency in 1980. There’s no way to know whether he would have won without the 1976 effort, but it seems likely that it helped him. After all, without it he would have been an aging, stale possibility, one who had by 1980 been out of office for six years with little to show since then.
There’s one more perhaps relevant data point. John McCain spent a few years during George W. Bush’s first term as a major source of dissent, voting with the Democrats enough times that John Kerry reportedly considered McCain as a running mate in 2004. McCain, instead, chose to return to Republican orthodoxy, and wound up the 2008 nominee. Speaking out against the president isn’t the same as a nomination challenge, but it shows that Republicans were pretty forgiving of McCain.
So what about 2020? A challenge would be meaningless, and perhaps even harmful to the challenger, if it wins little or no support at all. Two obscure House Republicans took on Nixon in the 1972 primaries, but Nixon was at the peak of his popularity. They remained obscure.
Right now, Trump polls well among Republicans. But it’s not a bad gamble that a serious conservative challenger could pick off some votes.
The most likely possibility is that a recession would open up many Republican voters to a challenger, just as Bush (and Ford) suffered from economic bad times. Because that seems to be a real possibility at this point, it’s not a bad bet for some potential heavyweight candidate to hope to take advantage of it. (Yes, that’s cynical and self-interested behavior. That’s what presidential politics is.)
A second possibility is that Trump’s various scandals and odd behaviors could make him more vulnerable than the polling numbers suggest. Trump is almost certainly remaining afloat in part because of negative partisanship – the idea that voters aren’t so much enamored of their own party but really hate the other party. An internal party conflict might just trigger a form of negative partisanship, with the insurgent blamed for actually helping the Democrats. It’s plausible, however, that without any actual Democrats involved, some Republicans might feel free to indulge the doubts about Trump that some of them surely have. The extreme version of this would be that something is unearthed that severely damages Trump; at this point, no one should count on something ugly turning up that shakes his Republican support, but I wouldn’t rule it out, either.
The thing is that there’s a very good chance that Trump’s reputation among Republicans will be a lot worse by the time the 2024 election cycle gets going in earnest. If Trump loses the 2020 election, it’s likely that Republicans will hold him personally responsible and blame it on his failure to be sufficiently conservative, just as George W. Bush was blamed for being insufficiently conservative late in his presidency. Even if Trump wins, there’s a solid chance that he’ll be an unpopular second-term president, with the party taking significant losses in the 2022 midterms – because, after all, many presidents are unpopular in their second terms, and the odds are that if there isn’t a recession by 2020 that there will be one at some point in a potential Trump second term.
All of which means that the odds are that a solid nomination insurgency by a solidly conservative Republican would have a pretty good chance of setting up that candidate as the 2024 front-runner.
Right now, former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld is running against Trump, but he’s a moderate who has no realistic chance of winning in 2024 even if he generates a bunch of protest votes next year. And Mark Sanford, former South Carolina governor and former member of the House, is doing candidate-like things as well. But Sanford’s once-solid conservative credentials were questioned when he was in the House, and having lost his governorship over a sex scandal and then lost renomination for his House seat, he’s not exactly a potential star. There are several current or recent statewide office-holders who presumably could marginalize Weld and Sanford.
Of course, they would take plenty of heat from Trump and from Trump-friendly Republican-aligned media. But anyone afraid of such things should never be a presidential candidate in the first place. Jumping in is always risky. But right now, it sure seems to me that the potential rewards outweigh the risks.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Philip Gray at philipgray@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.
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