If the GOP were truly Trumpified, they would have nominated Ramaswamy
A grand lunatic theory of presidential nominations
A couple of weeks ago at the annual Midwest Political Science Association conference, I was on a couple of roundtables that tried to make sense of the Nomination Contest That Wasn’t in 2024. The obvious answer is that it’s hard to challenge a sitting president for the nomination (which I addressed earlier on this very blog). On the Republican side, the obvious answer is similar: Trump, as the former president, enjoys many of the same advantages. And that Republicans just love Trump, and the party has been fully Trumpified. But looking a bit closer at what that means and why Trump has been so successful at taking over the Republican Party also tells us some things about how nominations work.
First things first. I am a known critic of our presidential nomination system, from its obsession with unrepresentative states and lack of real choice for people outside of a handful of places. My grand theory of contemporary nominations reflects this: efforts to make the process more open and competitive have mostly done the opposite.
My grand theory of presidential nominations rests on the scale of what it takes to do national coordination in our current environment, and suggests that we look at the intersection of 2 factors: name recognition, and ambiguity.
Let’s start with name recognition. Jonathan disagrees with me about this so you may get a different view in a future column, but it seems to me that name recognition has grown in importance as the primary fields become larger and more unwieldy. The 2020 Democratic contest is a good example of this: look at the percentage of Democrats who had an opinion of Bernie Sanders (the second-place finisher in the last contest) and Joe Biden (the former vice president) versus the rest of the field, including several Senators. But as the contest becomes more nationalized, and presidential fields become more crowded, I predict that candidates who have significant national profiles will be at an advantage.
Candidates without a national reputation have to work to build one over the long nomination contest. This isn’t impossible – Obama in 2008 is a good example of it. But Obama’s overall political persona is also revealing in this regard: in order to build up the kind of coalition needed to win a major, you need to be able to be bit of everything to everyone. This sounds a little imprecise, but is drawn from the logic of The Party Decides school of thought. In the post-reform era, as formal structures to enforce compromise and concession in nominations fell away, candidates have increasingly had to try to be appealing to most key groups – but in many cases, not of those groups. This kind of situation was built for Obama, who personal and political story of hybridity lent itself to many different kinds of narratives.
In 2016, Trump also had a situation to maximize name recognition and ambiguity that few could hope to replicate: nearly everyone in the country knew who he was, but he had no real political record. This allowed 2016 Trump to position himself in an ambiguous way: his rhetorical tone and comments on immigration appealed to the staunchest conservatives, while his statements about Social Security and economic policy – along with his general reputation as a businessman – drove support from others within the party coalition.
Biden’s ambiguity came in the opposite form – a long record that positioned him as a Clinton-style moderate, a civil colleague to 20th century segregationists, a steady and stalwart Democrat, and vice president to the first African American commander-in-chief.
In 2024, the ambiguity takes on a different character. Trump has the advantage that he’s not terribly bound by the truth – the 2020 RNC featured an immigration naturalization ceremony, after years of stoking anti-immigration sentiment. But his political ambiguity also comes from the fact that establishment Republicans did pretty well during his presidency, achieving important goals like deregulation, tax cut legislation, and three conservative Supreme Court justices (which arguably has done more to enhance conservative power than much of anything Trump did as president). Trump talks a populist game, but has proven to be someone that the existing conservative power structure can work with (this, again, is aided somewhat by his flexible relationship with the truth). Candidates like Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy are less proven in this regard. So in a weird way, in a party where the major divide is Trumpism/MAGA vs. everyone else, Trump is able to position himself as the acceptable candidate for both factions. Those running as Trump alternatives, on the other hand, had to burnish their Trumpist credentials.
There are three implications of this grand theory of nominations that I think warrant further consideration:
1. It makes it harder to run against well-known candidates (which in turn speaks to my incumbents argument from a few weeks back). Building up national name recognition, in particular, might work against remaining politically ambiguous in this political environment. Once a candidate is associated with a particular faction or political movement, it’s potentially that much difficult to appeal to the broader party coalition. Governors are probably at a relative advantage to members of Congress in this regard, but building a national name is tough.
2. The need for ambiguity creates a disadvantage for women presidential candidates, who have to balance this imperative with authenticity challenges. Hillary Clinton managed to overcome this, I think, for two reasons: name recognition, and the fact that she was associated with her husband’s moderate faction of the party but also tried to position herself as a more progressive candidate on social welfare issues – which may be easier to do as a woman. We don’t have a lot of examples of women who have sought a major party nomination – but those who have made recent bids have been questioned about their political commitments, their backgrounds, and whether they come off as genuine and sincere. (Sometimes male candidates face these critiques, and sometimes women candidates bring the problems on themselves – as with Elizabeth Warren – but there’s a real pattern here IMO).
3. This theory helps to explain why Trump has taken over the GOP in important and meaningful ways, but also how Trumpism has limits. The most recent example of these limits is the passage of this week’s foreign-aid and related bills. House Speaker Mike Johnson defied Trump by putting forward the Ukraine aid bill – as did a significant minority of the Republican caucus who voted for it. How is this compatible with the fact that Trump sailed to the nomination and has generally reshaped the party organization to suit his personal needs? One explanation is that Republicans with different preferences will support him because he’s useful – but that doesn’t mean they do everything that he wants.
Why am I still writing about nomination politics in April – after a pretty uneventful nomination season from a horse race perspective? One reason is that scrutinizing the process from all angles (especially ones where Jonathan disagrees with me) helps us to trace how power flows within political parties, analyzing what matters when the stakes are highest.