Can Any GOP Challenger Beat Trump To The Nomination

A few months ago, I thought there was an opening for one of Trump's Republican challengers to defeat him for the party's Presidential nomination.  Even in June and July, I acknowledged that it was a long shot, requiring Trump to have a particularly vulnerable episode at the same time as a single Republican candidate had a surge of momentum, clearing the field of all other challengers and consolidating non-Trump support.  

With each passing week, that seems less possible, but I still won't discount the possibility with as frenzied of affairs as nomination fights have become in the last generation.  At this point in 2003, it seemed there was almost no chance that John Kerry would prevail for the 2004 Democratic nomination.  In September 2007, neither Barack Obama nor John McCain seemed poised to be nominated less than a year later.  And Joe Biden's fortunes rose and fell with breathtaking swings in late 2019 and early 2020.  By contrast, Donald Trump's fortunes held steady in his previous Presidential runs.  As soon as Trump laid waste to erstwhile frontrunner Jeb Bush in the summer of 2015, he never looked back and held his lead easily until the nominating in the spring of 2016.  

It's looking increasingly likely that the latter scenario will unfold instead of the former heading into the 2024 nomination fight.  After all, at least Trump's 2016 challengers put up a fight.  This year's challengers have made it clear that they won't.  Maybe as it gets closer to the time when voters head to the polls, if Trump's challengers can smell a whiff of his blood in the water, they'll test drive an effective attack against him, but I'm skeptical.  To be fair, it's hard to know what line of attack would work, especially since Trump's head-to-head polling numbers against Biden are no worse than the other Republicans in the field, giving MAGA voters little reason to trade up and giving the other candidates limited leverage to aggressively take him on.

If Trump's foes are able to draw blood, it would most likely involve litigating the Trump campaign's badly weakened financial standing.  Trump will burn through tens of millions of dollars as he faces due process for his felony indictments, and that will at some point lead to a campaign finance spiral.  It's already happening to a limited degree, but as the court cases ramp up, they will chew up an increasing proportion of his campaign's finances.  This should be a lay-up for rival campaigns to exploit, arguing that he won't be able to run an effective campaign in person because of all the time he'll be spending in courtrooms and on the ground because the big-money donors, sick of bankrolling his legal defense, will at some point refrain from donating.  In a normal campaign, this would be an easy sell, but these aren't normal times and the fever swamp of contemporary GOP politics is definitely no normal coalition.  Still, Republicans are hungry to win and if they can be convinced another candidate is more likely to win than Trump, it's not unthinkable that they could cobble together enough dissenters to keep Trump below 50% support.

But who among them has any chance to do that?  Prior to last month's Fox News debate, my money was on South Carolina Senator Tim Scott as the strongest candidate in the field.  That may still be true, but damn did Scott lay an egg in that debate.  It was another South Carolinian who genuinely impressed in the debate, and that was former Governor Nikki Haley, who skillfully positioned herself as an eloquent emissary of the center-right with the potential to clean up in the general election.  If Trump stumbles, she'd be in the catbird seat for consolidating the non-MAGA vote, but she's got a big logistical problem that I already touched upon.  Both she and Tim Scott are from South Carolina, and since it's one of the earliest states in deciding the nomination, it's not particularly likely that either will drop out before South Carolina votes.  This would position them to cannibalize each other's support and undermine their individual potential.

This is a highly inconvenient overlap for Republicans who want to win next year, as either Haley or Scott strike me as formidable foes for Biden.  The Democrats at this point require full consolidation of both African Americans and college-educated white voters to eke out the narrowest of wins, and Scott and Haley would be well-positioned to chip away at Democratic margins among both groups, with limited downside potential of losing support on the right.

How about Mike Pence?  Ron DeSantis?  Chris Christie?  Larry Elder?  Ryan Binkley?  My first instinct is that the Republicans could nominate a ham sandwich and get a bare minimum of 47% of the vote and every one of the states Trump won in 2020, positioning any of the GOP candidates to eke out 270 electoral votes.  And that's likely to happen but there's always some variables in the mix, including third-party candidates from either the center or the right who could poach some votes, and of course, in any scenario where Donald Trump is denied the nomination, he would insist the primaries were "rigged" and would send his replacement nominee's campaign over the cliff in the general election, denying them a potentially large faction of the MAGA army.

Any of these scenarios at this point seems like a long shot though.  As badly as DeSantis's star has fallen in the past few months, it wouldn't surprise me if he dropped out before the first primary as Scott Walker did when his campaign started to sag eight years ago, attempting to cut the losses to his reputation before a humiliating defeat and perhaps salvage a political future.  It's long been assumed that DeSantis would be the last challenger standing against Trump, but even if DeSantis stays in the race, it's less than obvious at this point that he would fill the role.  If not DeSantis, then who survives as Trump's final head-to-head rival?  Right now, that strikes me as the most interesting lingering mystery of the nomination fight, and whoever it is, what their strategy will be to take him on.

Ever since 1992, elections where incumbent Presidents run for re-election tend to match up very closely to the previous Presidential cycle.  Only in open-seat contests are we likely to see any kind of realignment.  Given that the last election was decided by fewer than 50,000 combined votes in three states, I'd bet against anybody getting a mandate in the general election.  Barring unpredictable third-party noise, that bodes well for Trump in having some semblance of even-money chances next year.  But it bodes equally well for any of his challengers for the nomination whose odds would be no worse and potentially much better than Trump's.  A coin-flip chance for the Presidency awaits whoever gets the Republican nomination, but unless your last name is Trump, your odds get longer by the day for getting the nomination that positions you to flip that coin.