The Republican primary is no great mystery waiting to be solved. Although it will be easy to cast doubt and judgment on the campaigns that failed to be competitive, I don’t think any of the specifics mattered. Nothing has substantially revised the conclusion Philip Klein came to months ago: It’s the indictments, stupid.
The simple reason why Trump has been so formidable is that he keeps getting indicted. It’s the most obvious point, but it’s hard to escape the reality that the one factor put the race out of reach for anybody else was the fact that Republican voters have rallied around Trump during his legal fights, and they are not ready to abandon him. This seems pretty clear from the data.
Trump was indicted for the first time by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on March 30th, with news of the impending indictment having circled in the week before. On March 28, DeSantis was 15.1 points behind Trump in the RealClearPolitics average. That polling suggested Trump remained popular within his own party, but that there was an opening for somebody else. Within three weeks, Trump’s lead had more than doubled, to 31.6 on April 18. In the months that followed, DeSantis underwhelmed — while Trump’s support steadily grew as he racked up indictments. He now leads DeSantis in the national average 61.3 to 13.8 — or by nearly 50 points.
The polls started moving with the indictments and then just kept consolidating, without any punctuated movement that could be traced to this or that issue. Ron DeSantis’s numbers fell after the indictments and then kept falling as he gathered a reputation for falling numbers. Once the race started to look like a foregone conclusion, anti-Trump voters consolidated behind Nikki Haley, who offered a more full-spectrum, anti-Trumpist, anti-populist platform.
DeSantis had to run this year; there was no way he could wait until 2028. His post-Covid, postelection stock was far too high. If he hadn’t challenged Trump, he would have been considered too chicken for the future. I don’t think his political career is necessarily over after his term in Florida.
Tim Scott and Haley, like Marco Rubio and Rand Paul before them, took a flier. You can’t begrudge them either.
Democrats decided to make Trump the center of American politics, and Republicans said, “That’s fine with us too.”