In a climactic scene of All the President’s Men, the 1976 Watergate movie, Robert Redford playing reporter Bob Woodward talks to Deep Throat in a dark corner of a parking lot.
Frustrated by the reporter’s slowness, Deep Throat snaps, “You’re missing the overall.”
Woodward: “What overall?”
Deep Throat: “The people behind all this were frightened of Muskie and that’s what got him destroyed. They wanted to run against McGovern. Look who they’re running against…”
This comes to mind today not because of precise parallels but imprecise ones. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) frightened Democrats after his landslide 2022 reelection, so they absurdly denounced him as “worse than Trump.” Sadly, he helped them by running a hapless campaign and is now out.
The opponent the Democrats have long wanted is former President Donald Trump, and that’s who it looks like they’ll get. Their partisan political prosecutions boosted his popularity, and the only candidate now standing between the runaway favorite and the GOP nomination is former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. President Joe Biden would be frightened if Haley looked at all like nabbing the nomination. She still could, but it is a very long shot.
It’s not that Trump has no chance of beating Biden — he does because Biden is that bad a president! — but the incumbent suspects, as we all do, that if voters are presented with the same choice they had in 2020, they’ll make the same decision. Trump is ahead in most polls, especially in battleground states, but for any voter, especially conservatives, who want to avoid another four years of Biden’s mismanagement, warning signals are flashing.
In the latest Quinnipiac survey, in which Biden beats Trump 50%-44%, the incumbent has a 12-point advantage among independents. Those are voters likely to vacillate up to the last moment and then, in the privacy of the polling booth, realize that even though they dismiss the end-of-democracy doomsayers, they just couldn’t abide a return to Trump and the triumphal vulgarities and chaos of 2017-21.
Among those same voters, Haley does 28 points better than Trump, beating Biden by 16 points. As Marc Thiessen of the American Enterprise Institute asked GOP voters on X: “Republicans, are you absolutely sure you want to do this?” By “this,” he means nominating Trump, the proven loser, rather than Haley.
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Tiresome as identity politics are, a significant minority of voters pay attention to such superficial matters as appearance rather than substance. Haley is from a minority and is a woman, which would make many voters feel good about casting their ballots for her. One of the merits of democracy is that you can vote for whomever you want and for whatever reason. If modern obsession with race and gender helps tip the balance toward better government, who should complain?
It would be foolish to suggest anything other than that Trump is likely to walk away with the GOP nomination. But if that’s the primary choice Republicans make and the result is America getting Biden again, we’ll end up saying “Thanks, MAGA voters,” with the same sad irony with which now, surveying the damage done by the 44th president, we still say “Thanks, Obama.”
