The former president, who is skipping the Fox News debate, inspires fierce loyalty among about three in 10 Republican voters and consistently leads his closest opponents by 40 points or more in polls.
But he also causes dread and deep antipathy in other wings of the party and will enter the primaries facing 91 criminal charges in four separate indictments brought by three prosecutors.
His eight rivals face a singular task: How to capitalize on Trump’s problems without alienating his supporters.
(Associated Press)
Some analysts see that assignment as hopeless. They point to Trump’s iron grip on his core supporters and the difficulty of uniting the party’s factions behind a single rival.
Others see an opening. They note that a large majority of Republicans say they are at least considering rival candidates.
“I think he’s beatable,” said Republican strategist Alex Conant, whose D.C.-based firm recently surveyed Republican voters. About a quarter of Republicans will vote for Trump no matter what, another quarter oppose him, and “you’ve got 50% in the middle that like Trump but are open to an alternative,” he said.
A rival would have to “consolidate the quarter that is not going to vote for Trump and chip into his margins among the half who are open to someone else,” he said. For that to happen, one candidate will have to emerge early as the plausible Trump alternative.
A breakout performance at the debate could be a critical first step.
The choice facing the eight rivals boils down to actively trying to beat the 77-year-old Trump or aiming to cultivate his voters in hopes of becoming his stand-in if something, such as his age or the criminal charges — renders him unavailable.
The challengers, only one of whom has run for president before, include the former vice president, three former and two current governors, a sitting senator and a businessman. They’ve offered very different answers to that central strategic question.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, a 37-year-old entrepreneur and political outsider, have pitched themselves to the pro-Trump wing of the party as fellow admirers of the former president.
Ramaswamy has been especially devoted to Trump, defending him at each twist of his legal path and demanding that all candidates promise to pardon the former president if they win.
DeSantis has sometimes obliquely criticized Trump and has tried to outflank him to the right on policy, but has largely not responded to Trump’s repeated attacks even as the governor’s standing has dropped in polls.
With Ramaswamy rising as DeSantis declines, the likely collision between the two has been a major sub-theme leading up to the debate. Earlier this month, a memo became public from the super-PAC that supports DeSantis advising him to “hammer Vivek Ramaswamy.”
At the other extreme, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson, the former Arkansas governor, have chosen to run squarely at Trump. They don’t have much to show for it. Their presence has largely served to demonstrate how much the Republican electorate resists direct criticism of the former president.
The other four candidates have arrayed between those polls, with former Vice President Mike Pence alternating praise for Trump’s presidency with denunciations of his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, and the two South Carolinians in the race, Sen. Tim Scott and former Gov. Nikki Haley, doing their best to avoid talking about Trump unless forced.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, almost unknown outside his home state, has mostly focused on introducing himself to voters. The 67-year-old governor will participate in the debate while on crutches after tearing his Achilles tendon in a pickup basketball game Tuesday.
For each of the debaters, the session will provide an opportunity for attention that has scanted them during months dominated by news about Trump and his parade of indictments.
But the opportunity comes with risk, said Republican strategist Alice Stewart.
“No campaign is won on a debate stage, but you can lose one,” she said. Candidates have to find a way to quickly make “a personal appeal to voters as someone who is likable and connects to voters.”
The session could also highlight fissures in the party on issues. That’s true even though televised faceoffs aren’t often forums for deep thoughts on governance. Debate coaches urge candidates to aim for viral moments, not policy discussions.
The two most prominent divides involve support for Ukraine and opposition to abortion.
Trump’s friendliness toward Russian President Vladimir Putin has pulled a large share of the party into opposition to Ukraine. DeSantis and Ramaswamy both have expressed skepticism about additional U.S. aid to Kyiv. By contrast, Pence and Christie, who both have traveled to Ukraine in recent months, and Haley, who served as Trump’s U.N. ambassador, have stayed with the party’s pre-Trump hawkish internationalism.
On abortion, the GOP has struggled ever since last year’s Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe vs. Wade and ended the national guarantee of abortion rights. The decision suddenly transformed Republican opposition to abortion from rhetoric to policy, a shock to many voters, who have responded angrily in a series of state elections, most recently in Ohio, where the antiabortion position lost badly in a referendum this month.
That’s left the party caught between its large and influential bloc of antiabortion voters and its desire to appeal to swing voters. Antiabortion groups have demanded the candidates support a nationwide ban, an idea embraced by Pence and Scott. Other candidates, including Trump, DeSantis and Haley, have tried to avoid being pinned down to a policy, while giving rhetorical support to the antiabortion cause.
Despite those and other policy pitfalls, the attention from the GOP-heavy Fox audience could be valuable, especially for the two who have recently gained support in polls — Ramaswamy, who has shown appeal nationally to younger voters and those with college degrees, and Scott, who has bet heavily on his ability to mobilize evangelical voters and other social conservatives in Iowa, which is scheduled to hold the campaign’s first balloting on Jan. 15.
Both possess charisma and life stories that many Republican voters find inspiring — Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and child of immigrants whose business bets made him more than $200 million by the time he turned 35, and Scott, a Black man who grew up in poverty, embraced conservatism and devout Christianity, and rose to the Senate.
The exposure likely matters less for Pence, who is already almost universally known from his four years as Trump’s vice president and, especially, for his refusal to go along with Trump’s request to block the count of electoral votes in Congress on Jan. 6. That act has won him widespread praise, but more from Democrats than his own side. Many Republicans view him as a betrayer.
Among likely participants in Iowa’s Republican caucuses, for example, just 42% viewed the former vice president favorably compared to 53% who viewed him unfavorably and 5% who weren’t sure, according to a poll released Monday by veteran Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer. The share of Republican voters who see Pence unfavorably was surpassed only by Christie, who was seen negatively by 60%, the poll found.
Trump, by contrast, remains highly popular in the GOP, both in Iowa and nationally.
Nationwide, about three in 10 Republican voters consistently say in polls that they will support Trump and no one else. That gives him a solid base from which to build, as well as a powerful threat to wield against any party leader who challenges him.
Trump combines that solid base with a large share of voters who are less enamored of him, but still find him acceptable. He has the backing of just over half the voters in nationwide polls of Republicans, according to the average maintained by the FiveThirtyEight website. No one else is close.
Another 25%-30% of the party’s voters oppose Trump, either because they see him as a lawbreaker or because they think he would lose to President Biden and cost other Republicans their seats.
The task for rival candidates is to find a way to unite those anti-Trump Republicans with enough soft Trump supporters to put together a majority. From the day Trump erupted onto the political scene, no Republican has managed that feat. The debate will provide early clues to whether the latest group of hopefuls has come up with a better way.
Mehta reported from Milwaukee and Lauter from Washington.