The Republican presidential stature gap
Byron York
THE REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL STATURE GAP. There are now five candidates who have either joined the 2024 Republican presidential race or have taken official steps toward doing so: Former President Donald Trump; former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, also the former South Carolina governor; entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy; former Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R-AR); and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC).
Scott became the latest to join the group Wednesday with a video announcing that he has formed an exploratory committee for a presidential run. That is not really necessary — super PACs supporting Scott have already raised tens of millions of dollars. But it elevates Scott’s status in the race without a declaration of candidacy and all the paperwork that entails.
Also on Wednesday, the Republican National Committee announced that Fox News will host the first GOP primary debate, to be held in Milwaukee in August. Which raises the question: What will that debate look like?
Subscribe today to the Washington Examiner magazine that will keep you up to date with what’s going on in Washington. SUBSCRIBE NOW: Just $1.00 an issue!
First, there will surely be more candidates. The biggest likely entrant is Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), followed by former Vice President Mike Pence; former representative, CIA director, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; former Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ); and Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA).
That’s a lot of ‘formers.’ Assume they all enter the race, for a total of 10 candidates. Just three, DeSantis, Scott, and Youngkin, will currently be in office. The rest, even Trump, will be former this and former that.
Trump, of course, has a huge lead over the field. In the latest RealClearPolitics average of polls, Trump has the support of 51.4% of Republicans, while DeSantis has 24.7%. After that, Pence has 4.9%, Haley 3.9%, Pompeo 1.3%, Christie 1.2%, Ramaswamy 0.9%, Scott 0.8%, and Youngkin 0.5%. (Hutchinson, with possibly even lower support, is not in the average.)
Those numbers will, of course, change. Trump is on an upward trajectory at the moment, boosted by many Republicans’ belief that he was politically targeted by an elected Democratic local prosecutor in Manhattan. But that boost could be short-lived, not because the Manhattan case will get any stronger — it won’t — but because other problems remain on the horizon for the former president.
DeSantis, after a strong period following his decisive reelection, has been casting about, looking for the best way to run against Trump. So far, he hasn’t found it, which is no disgrace because no other Republican has found it, either. Still, DeSantis is strong enough that it is accurate to call the GOP contest, at this moment, a two-man race. Everybody else is — again, at this moment — in the lower registers. Many of them will probably stay there.
Now think about the August debate. For the first big GOP debate in 2015, Fox News originally announced that candidates would have to show at least 1% support in the polls to qualify. Fox News later reduced that in the interest of allowing as many candidates as possible to take part. Perhaps something like that will happen again.
But the fact is, there will be a huge stature gap in the debate, no matter who precisely is in it. The gap will be between Trump and…everybody else. Trump dominated the debate fields in 2016 because he simply seemed bigger than the others. His personality was bigger, his positions were more forcefully expressed, his ability to connect with a crowd unchallenged. In a word, Trump was big, and the others were small.
Now, that is likely to be the same, only this time Trump has been president of the United States. Which means that in the GOP field, he was big in 2016, and he is bigger now.
Judging by resumes alone, several Republican candidates are well qualified to run for president. Pence is at the top of that list, having served as vice president, governor, and member of the House. Haley is also highly qualified, having been a governor and ambassador to the U.N. DeSantis has been a governor and member of the House, as has Hutchinson. Pompeo was a member of the House and then CIA director and then secretary of state. That is a lot of experience. But none has been president, and Trump has.
Many non-Republicans reading this might say: What are you talking about? Trump is already under indictment. He might be under more indictments in the next few months. Then there is Jan. 6. Then there is all the 2020 election denial. What does it take to disqualify him as a candidate in the eyes of Republican primary voters?
That is a complicated question. Look at four factors. First, most Republicans are very happy with what Trump accomplished in office — the border, the economy, deregulation, judicial appointments, national security, and more. They would like to see a president do that sort of thing again. Second, most Republicans believe, with good reason, that Trump was unfairly targeted during the Russia investigation, in which a special counsel, Robert Mueller, took years to investigate allegations of conspiracy and coordination between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia and concluded that he could not establish that it even happened. On top of that, there were years of general media hysteria surrounding the Russia matter, again unfairly targeting Trump.
Third, concerning the 2020 presidential election, many polls have shown that lots of Republicans still think there was something fishy about what went on. The problem is there has never been proof of election fraud anywhere near the scale that would be required to change the results of the election. There just wasn’t. And that leaves those Republicans in the position of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who has been famously quoted saying, “We’ve got lots of theories. We just don’t have the evidence.” Yes, it’s obvious that many in the media joined Democrats in trying hard to defeat Trump in 2020. Of course Republicans find that galling. But when it comes to actual electoral fraud, they’ve got the theories without the evidence.
Fourth, on the question of Jan. 6, it appears many Republicans have simply averted their eyes from some of the worst scenes from that day. They don’t focus on the ugly violence that happened in many places at the Capitol. Instead, they look at the examples of Jan. 6 participants who did not take part in any violence and have been charged and sentenced for what is basically a federal trespassing offense. They also look at the government still being coy about the number of federal confidential human sources in the crowd. And as for the larger events that led to Jan. 6, they just haven’t delved deeply into it. Ask them what the Eastman memo says and they will probably not know.
One last thing: Trump supporters do not appear worried by the fact that he will be 78 years old on inauguration day 2025 and 82 at the end of his term — the same age Joe Biden was when many of them said, with good reason, that Biden was too old to be president. Trump is obviously far more vigorous than Biden today, but Republicans would be betting that situation will remain unchanged through 2029. (Were Trump to win in 2024, he could not run again in 2028, having been elected twice to the presidency.)
Put that all together, and you have the current level of support for Trump and the enormous gap in the polls between Trump and the rest of the Republican field. Yes, there are a significant number of Republicans who appreciate what Trump did in office but would like to see the party move on to a new leader. But for many, many Republicans, the stature gap between Trump and the rest of the field, accomplished as those other candidates are, is, at this point in the campaign, insurmountable. Maybe that will change as time passes. But for now, Trump is big, and they, with the exception of DeSantis at this moment, are small.
For a deeper dive into many of the topics covered in the Daily Memo, please listen to my podcast, The Byron York Show — available on the Ricochet Audio Network and everywhere else podcasts can be found. You can use this link to subscribe.