Amid a spate of new reports painting President Trump in a highly unflattering light, the question keeps gnawing at some of us: If Trump withdrew from his reelection race, how would another Republican running in his place be polling?
My sense, based on more than four decades of close attention to presidential politics, is that Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, or Kristi Noem would be running neck and neck with Joe Biden rather than an average of about 8 points behind.
There’s no way to prove it, of course. Even the attempt to convince people, by extrapolating from existing polls and other evidence, would rely on such subjective interpretations as to be not worth the hassle. The effort would reinforce the opinions of those who already believe as much, but the arguments would be just as quickly dismissed by those who think Trump is uniquely a winner.
What cannot be denied is that there’s a hard core of people who might otherwise be open to voting for a Republican but who will never, ever vote for Trump. They find him too divisive, too destructive to support. There are plenty of others unenthused about Biden and who might thus just stay home from voting but whose antipathy to Trump may push them to the ballot box for the Democrat after all. Polls do consistently show that an inordinate number, even a majority of likely Biden voters say their expected vote is more against Trump than for Biden.
On the other hand, even if possibly to a lesser extent, Trump does inspire enthusiasm among segments of the population that don’t always vote, so another candidate in his place might lose some voter turnout from that faction.
I don’t think it’s a “wash,” though. I think a generic Republican would do better in November than Trump will.
All of this “what if” speculation arises again because of the double whammy of a caustic book about Trump by his former lawyer Michael Cohen and of the multiple reports late last week that Trump in numerous ways had denigrated U.S. soldiers who had been killed or captured. Trump, of course, denies all the stories (and there’s no need to belabor the details here), but there is no denying he has said and done enough things similar to the ones in these new reports that most of them are at least broadly plausible.
While the decision-making process of voters, especially “swing voters,” involves a somewhat mysterious psychological alchemy, reports such as these certainly reinforce doubts about Trump. The simple reality many analysts and committed voters forget is that there is always a small but significant percentage of voters whose preferences — between candidates or between voting and not voting at all — remain quite fluid right up until Election Day. Committed voters might dismiss reports such as the ones that emerged against Trump last week, but the opinions of swing voters really do get buffeted around stories such as these.
All of which explains why some of us who are conservative still dream of a different Republican at the top of the ticket. We wonder if winning would be easier without all of Trump’s self-inflicted wounds or whether those wounds are more than counterbalanced by the way he motivates some nontraditionally Republican voters.
We’ll never know. What we do know, though, is that the stories of Trump’s alleged narcissism, racism, and cruelty come so repeatedly and so vividly that they wear on the nerves. If Trump would just get out of the way, maybe we would have a campaign dominated not by Trump’s outlandish personality but by ideas for America’s future.
