Trump keeps winning but stioll might lose.
A point I did not notice in the columnists and cablecasters, who said Nikki Haley was soundly defeated in the New Hampshire Primary by Trump, who won by eleven points or so, was that Halley had doubled her percentage of participants by winning over 40% of the vote in New Hampshire white getting less than 20% of the caucus participants in Iowa. That meant that most of the Desantis supporters, who dropped out of the presidential race just a few days before the New Hampshire primary, had switched to Haley rather than Trump. It seems that the maximum support for Trump in the Republican party is around fifty percent and that the rest of the Republicans are not happy about Trump and likely in a general election not to vote or maybe support Biden. That does not mean Haley can keep climbing and defeat Trump in the primaries, but it might mean that in the general election, Biden might win by a landslide despite the prevailing view that 2024 might be a very close election. But predictions based on primaries are reading tea leaves, given how much can change between now and then, and it would be better to think about the significance of the primary system itself.
The primary system, which replaced the proverbial “smoke filled rooms” where political bosses decided who would be the party nominee, lasted until 1960 when, to the surprise of Lyndon Johnson, Jack Kennedy wrested the nomination with a combination of primaries and bosses, such as Mayor Daley of Chicago. Pivotal was a Kennedy win in West Virginia, an overwhelmingly Protestant state, which showed a Catholic could win. Joe Kennedy, Jack’s father, had spent plenty of money in West Virginia to make that happen. Primaries ever since are not only the garnering of delegate votes but a testing ground for how well a candidate will play, and so commentators say Trump has won in primaries from a number of American regions.
It is difficult to judge if the primary system has led to better general election candidates. Clinton and Obamas were prepared by character and intellect to govern, though they had missteps in the first years in office and Reagen depended on his strong cabinet from the start. But then again, Wilson and Hughes, their competitors in 1916, were able people even if Wilson was an unreconstructed Southerner and claimed to be free of the bosses, and FDR who was nominated for his name later on tried unsuccessfully to conquer the bosses.
The real question is how the primary system alters the discourse of politics and it seems to be detrimental for democratic rules and spirit, especially in the early primaries. It is often observed that Iowa and New Hampshire are rural states with few electoral votes and overwhelmingly white and so favor conservative candidates. Iowa has special economic interests and so for years all candidates had to pledge to be in favor of federal ethanol subsidies because ethanol is produced from corn, a major Iowa product. But the quality of electioneering is affected by these small states. People take pride in having visited homes and bars where they can meet the candidates on multiple occasions before deciding which one of them to support and candidates blige by pressing the flesh and cooing over babies, asif this provided a real read of the candidates. The voters think they are entitled to be up close and personal with the candidates and the candidates oblige so as to garner these few valuable voters. But that is to rearrange priorities. Certainly the voter is king, but that does not mean demanding obedience rather than candidates doing more important things like refining their programs and policies lest an election is nothing more than a beauty contest, the only question how charming the candidate may be and, anyway, people who like Donald Trump are taken less with his charm than his authoritative nature. Give candidates some dignity. Moreover, the later and large population primaries like New York and California do not depend on personal schmoozing as the basis for evaluating character. The airways are filled with ads of the candidate’s own production which place them in their most favorable light and that is a sufficient basis on which to judge character, and his followers are just to glorify their disdain, not to whether in their canned slogans or in their personal presentation. JFK had aristocratic hauteur and Joe Biden is a straight shooter and Trump is a demeaning bully and voters can decide which personality they prefer. And that means, somewhat accurately, as opposed to the case in the New Hampshire coffee klatch, that citizens vote on people remote to them who will remain remote and who will usually be not very different in office than what they appeared to be. Biden is a bit more Liberal in office than as a candidate. Trump just coats an accusation with sarcasm whether it makes sense or not, LBJ was a wheeler dealer from the start, and Nixon always had a fatal flaw that might undermine what was a credible Presidency. Believe what you see and don’t excuse yourself for candidates not being what they seemed.
The chasm between the Trumpists and everyone else has gotten deeper since the New Hampshkire primary. Trump has said that Nikki Haley’s husband has not been in military service on the Horn of Africa, not that it matters to present a spouse at campaign events, when her husband has been deployed in military service at the Horn of Africa. Trump is not even making a comparative accusation, given that Melania, his own spouse, is not present at such events. All Trump does is cloth an accusation with sarcasm rather than sense. The purpose for himself and his followers is just to trumpet disdain, not distinguish points of view.
Then special counsel of the Justice Department found it could not press charges against Biden for having had classified documents in his garage but added the gratuitous remark that Biden had memory lapses, which is fodder for the idea that Biden is in serious decline, a talking point for Trump supporters. Why does Trump's lifelong mean spirited ignorance and inability to make an argument rather than a set of assertions not be worse than Biden occasionally mixing up proper names? A friend of mine says the answer is that m,ost people don’t notice the differences.
Meanwhile Republican House members are all out Trumpists, turning down a border deal because Trump wanted them to and impeaching the Secretary of Homeland Security on policy differences. And a special election in New York reduced the Republican House majority down to two. Aren’t there enough traditional Republicans and not standing for re-election to vote against Trumpism and make Jeffries the new Democratic Speaker of the House? Dire times would require that.
The division between Trump and Haley got even more deep in the week before the South Carolina primary. Trump says Putin should attack NATO countries if they don’t pay their debts, even if NATO countries do not have debts but goals and Trump constantly failed to pay his own creditors. Novaltny was killed and Trump used that to show he himself was abused by the courts, required to pay a judgment of 4oo million dollars because of his business shenanigans. Haley can exercise her foreign policy cred and denounce abandoning Israel and Ukraine. Will foreign policy turn the corner on South Carolina voters? Or maybe Trump being in too many courtrooms? Halley is the only one standing to pick up the pieces if the long awaited turn against Trump ever happens.
The actual results two days ago in the South Carolina primary were not at all surprising. Trump won by twenty points but Haley got forty percent, which meant that there are a lot of anti-Trump voters in the Republican Party and they might not support Trfump in the General Election. A third of Republican voters said they wouldn’t and Haley had sixty percent of the South Carolinians who were independents who voted in the primary. So Haley loses the nomination and Trump loses the Presidency but it gives a Constitutionalist palpitations that a potential dictator is just one day away from getting put into office. Remember that Trump is not an ideologue. He does not have a set of intersecting principles that inform what will be his policies if he were to be elected. He has run all around the issue of abortion, proud of the reversal of Roe v. Wade but not in favor of the Alabama judicial finding that the cells used in in vitro fertilization were already human beings whose disposal would constitute murder. What he would do in the White House, however, is pretty clear in that it would bring havoc to the Constitutional system because he says it will because as he says he is motivated by revenge.
An interviewer asked a South Carolina voter why he liked Trump. Such interviews are dubious because tv interviews show clips of uneducated people as if they were better measures of public opinion than more articulate voters. This person sounded uncomfortable, as if never asked why he might support Trump. The answer offered was that he was strong on foreign policy while Biden had given in to foreign adversaries. Put aside whether that was true or not. What the voter had done, I surmise, was to fill into Trump whatever words had passed through his own mind just so that he could offer a reason when in fact no reason is needed. Trump is an end to himself and that is why commentators now talk about there being a soon to be “rapture” when Trumpists will se4r the light and dispense with Trump, maybe after some criminal conviction, but I don’t think so because Trump has gotten under the skin of so many people that they won’t break with him. That this population is still a minority is what gives constitutionalists like me our hope.