Source: CNN

The Republican presidential field is growing almost by the day, but no candidate has yet offered an effective answer to GOP primary voters on the race’s most compelling question – why they should ditch Donald Trump.

Former Vice President Mike Pence became the latest candidate to signal a campaign on Monday by filing papers ahead of an official announcement and a CNN town hall on Wednesday. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is expected to jump in on Tuesday. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently wrapped up his first Iowa swing, and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott has embarked on his own bid. Ex-South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has been on the trail for weeks, appearing in a CNN town hall on Sunday in Iowa. And even North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, despite low national recognition, seems on the cusp of a run, declaring in a campaign-style video ahead of a “big announcement” on Wednesday that “anger, yelling, infighting” are not cutting it anymore, in a clear shot at Trump.

There are multiple reasons why the twice impeached-ex-president, who lost in 2020 but is attempting one of the most epic comebacks in political history, could be vulnerable in a general election. But none of his Republican rivals appear to have yet broken through among primary voters with a rationale as to why they would be the best choice to carry the GOP into the 2024 showdown.

Not only is Trump highly popular with conservative grassroots. Polls among that group of voters show strong satisfaction with his presidency and support for his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Surveys also prove that he has convinced his fans that the flurry of criminal investigations and other probes into his personal and business conduct are all part of a massive “witch hunt” to stop him. Such sentiments were shared by multiple voters interviewed ahead of a CNN town hall last month in the first-in-the-nation Republican primary state of New Hampshire – even by those open to considering other candidates.

This means that some of Trump’s greatest general election vulnerabilities – including the chaos of his administration, the possibility that he could be convicted of a crime and his attempt to overthrow a democratic election – may be hard for his GOP opponents to sell to primary voters. And Trump’s bond with voters has always been personal and emotional: the tumult, vulgarity and attacks on the fabric of law and democracy have long been part of his appeal to a cross section of Americans soured on the political system and what they see as liberal elites. This may explain why the electability argument – implicitly being made by several GOP candidates – has not yet gathered much traction during fiery early primary campaign exchanges.

Sununu’s decision is a commentary on the state of the GOP

Heading into the 2024 race, and especially after Trump’s lackluster campaign launch last year, some establishment Republicans began to argue that the former president’s obsession with his personal grievances, including the 2020 election, meant that more party activists might be ready to move on. Yet halfway through the critical pre-election year, Trump sits strongly atop polls of the GOP race and rivals have struggled to slow him.

In a fresh sign that the GOP base isn’t ready to look forward, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu – seen by many Washington Republicans as a bright voice for the future – exclusively told CNN’s Dana Bash Monday that he wouldn’t run. The entire rationale for a potential Sununu campaign was his belief that Trump couldn’t win a general election and the party was ready to move on.

He insisted as much on CNN’s “Inside Politics” on Monday, adding that Trump isn’t even a conservative.

“Former President Trump and his message, his style, his brand, have cost us dearly, and he doesn’t represent the Republican Party. He doesn’t represent that limited government, local control, individual liberty stuff that we all talk about. He’s about himself and I just want Republicans to be about the Republican values that made us successful,” Sununu said.

Yet at the same time, his decision to pass said a lot about the state of his party.

The volume of candidates jumping into the race shows it is still early. No Republican voters will weigh in for at least six months in early state contests. The impact, for instance, of multiple potential indictments against Trump amid intensifying Justice Department and other investigations remains unclear – at least amid more pragmatic GOP voters. And a CNN/SSRS poll published last month found that while Trump had a majority support in the primary electorate, more than 8 in 10 either supported or said they were open to considering the ex-president and DeSantis, and small majorities said the same of other candidates. The magic of the US primary process – spread out among multiple states, regions and months – also offers the chance for a candidate to catch the Zeitgeist and to emerge.

But absent some collective decision to clear the bloated field and coalesce around the strongest anti-Trump candidate before voting starts in largely winner-take-all primary races, Trump appears in a formidable position. Even in that eventuality, it’s far from clear that an alternative – long presumed to be DeSantis – would be able to beat the ex-president. Trump’s transformation of his party in his own image is so strong that it seems, at least at this early stage, that the 2024 field will have just as difficult a time in halting Trump as did Republicans who ran against him in 2016, who got picked off one by one.

The conundrum for every GOP candidate

Trump’s popularity – not to mention his skill so far in lining up endorsements among key local officials and office holders in important states – offers his rivals an existential challenge. In order to define why they would be a better president, they have to distance themselves from the party’s most popular figure while trying not to alienate a chunk of his supporters and even those Republicans open to someone else but who still like Trump.

So far, none of the alternatives – including a more efficient, organized form of Trumpism (DeSantis), a more internationalist version (Haley), a more compassionate and aspirational kind of conservatism (Scott) or a return to traditional GOP values (Arkansas former Gov. Asa Hutchinson) – has yet caught fire. Pence, who will bet big on building a launch pad among social conservatives in Iowa, is meanwhile saddled with the false accusation by Trump that he had the constitutional power in the 2020 election certification process to keep the then-president in office.

DeSantis’ struggles to frame an alternative path to Trump have shown the difficulty of taking on the ex-president. The Florida governor has leveraged his robust record of implementing hardline cultural conservative policies in his home state and his sharp understanding of his power to argue that he’d be a far more effective president than Trump, whose administration is remembered by many Americans for chaos, Twitter storms and scandal.

DeSantis has also warned that Trump would be an immediate lame duck if he won the presidency in 2024. The governor argues he could offer Republican voters the luxury of four or even eight years over two terms to change the character of America. Trump, however, has hit back, playing on nostalgia for his presidency among his fans, which only appears to be growing as his first term settles into history.

“You don’t need four, and you don’t need eight. You need six months,” Trump claimed in a town hall event with Sean Hannity on Fox last week that followed weeks of withering personal attacks on DeSantis, including over his showdown with the Walt Disney Company – which Trump said shows DeSantis can’t even fend off Mickey Mouse.

Haley has also been increasingly clear in trying to distinguish herself from Trump. At the CNN town hall on Sunday, for instance, she categorically rejected the ex-president’s disdain for Ukraine’s fight for its independence and democratic freedoms. (Trump had said he’d end the war within 24 hours – likely in a manner that would please his friend, Russian President Vladimir Putin.)

“This is bigger than Ukraine,” said Haley, who served in Trump’s Cabinet as the US ambassador to the United Nations. “This is a war about freedom and it’s one we have to win,” she added, warning that any capitulation by the West could prompt Putin to move against NATO members in the Baltic. Her comments were also a slap at DeSantis, who earlier this year referred to the war as a “territorial” dispute, before later trying to walk that back. But in the transactional, “America First” GOP of Trump, there’s little evidence that primary voters want a return to the moral and global leadership of the Republican Cold War hero Ronald Reagan.

There’s even less evidence that GOP voters believe that Trump’s legal problems disqualify him from serving as their nominee. His indictment in a business records case related to a hush money scheme, in which he pleaded not guilty, seemed to solidify his support in the GOP, even if it appeared to compound worries that he might be as toxic to swing state voters in 2024 as he was in 2020 and in the 2022 midterm elections. And after a jury in a civil case found he sexually abused E. Jean Carroll, he mocked her in in a CNN town hall – to the applause of much of the audience.

Meanwhile, the special counsel’s investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents and possible obstruction appears to be nearing its final stages. Lawyers for Trump met with Justice Department officials on Monday, following a public request for a meeting about what they characterize as prosecutorial misconduct, according to sources familiar with the matter.

CNN reported exclusively last week that prosecutors have an audio recording of Trump acknowledging he held onto a classified document. And on Monday, CNN reported exclusively that at least one witness has been asked by prosecutors about a flooded Mar-a-Lago computer server room, where surveillance video logs were kept, as part of the federal investigation. An employee had drained the swimming pool that ended up flooding the room, sources familiar with the matter told CNN, although it’s unclear if the room was intentionally flooded or if it happened by mistake.

Trump has denied all wrongdoing. And GOP voters seem to have already bought into his narrative about the probes into him, which also include his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election. In an NBC News poll in April, 68% of Republican voters believed that investigations into Trump were politically motivated attempts to stop him. Those results showed the effectiveness of Trump’s campaign of misinformation supported by his allies in conservative media. And they also suggest that GOP rivals may only hurt themselves by attacking the ex-president over his legal quagmire.

Eight years after Trump took over the GOP, his opponents in 2024 are yet to show they have any idea for how to nudge him into history.

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