Donald Trump has built a bigger, more enduring lead in the polls than nearly anyone expected. He’s also upended the race for the Republican presidential nomination in another way: almost all the other candidates can be defined by their reactions to Trump.
Every Republican running for the White House has had to contend with Trump in some way, but there seem to be three broad strategies the other 16 major candidates are pursuing in a race that has so far defied conventional political logic.
Attack Trump
Jeb Bush was supposed to shape the GOP field by raising $100 million early and preventing lesser known candidates from gaining any steam. Trump’s candidacy has done that instead. Now the former Florida governor is going on the offensive on the campaign trail and in videos to “use Trump and his liberal track record as a foil to discuss Jeb’s conservative record,” as a Bush spokesman described it to the Washington Examiner.
It’s unusual for an establishment candidate to paint an insurgent with Tea Party appeal as insufficiently conservative. The closest precedent is Mitt Romney swatting Rick Perry on immigration in 2011. But it’s also unusual for the Tea Party insurgent to have a long history of more conventionally liberal positions on conservative litmus test issues like taxes, abortion, gun control and government-run health care than those espoused by the establishment candidate.
Although Bush has occasionally criticized Trump’s harsh rhetoric on immigration and other issues, that likely plays into the celebrity real estate developer’s hands. It’s more promising for Bush to call into question Trump’s conservative, even Republican, bona fides.
There’s just one problem: attacking Trump has yet to work for any Republican who has tried it.
After Trump appeared to question John McCain’s military heroism in Vietnam and mock him for being captured, Rick Perry described him as “unfit to be commander-in-chief” and said Trump “should immediately withdraw from the race for president.”
Perry later devoted a large portion of a major speech to calling Trump a “cancer on conservatism” that “must be clearly diagnosed, excised and discarded” rather than “pacified or ignored.” He called Trump a “carnival barker” committed to “Trumpism” — “a toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition” — rather than true conservatism.
While Trump is still riding high in the polls, Perry remains stuck around 1 percent of the national vote. He failed to qualify for the main Fox News debate or distinguish himself at the low-polling candidates’ forum in August. He doesn’t seem likely to make the main stage for the CNN debate at the Reagan Library.
Perry has just one paid staffer in Iowa and is down to zero in New Hampshire. If it weren’t for the post-Citizens United proliferation of super PACs, the long-serving Texas governor would surely have had to drop out by now.
Rand Paul has also tried his hand at confronting Trump. The son of the 1988 Libertarian Party nominee was the first to take the reality TV star on for refusing to rule out a third party run in 2016. Paul said Trump “buys and sells politicians of all stripes.”
Afterward, he continued to go after Trump in speeches, media conference calls and interviews, calling the billionaire a “fake conservative” who just insults people, “an empty suit full of bravado but not anything meaningful for the country.”
“The truth-telling is bluster, the truth-telling is non-sequitur, it’s self-aggrandizement,” Paul told reporters. “Is there really anything substantive coming out of saying people are fat, people are stupid?”
But it hasn’t seemed to get the Kentucky senator anywhere. Paul has collapsed since Trump entered the race, both in the national polls, where he was regularly in the high single digits pre-Trump, as well as Iowa and New Hampshire, where he was usually among the top three candidates. Late August polls showed him at 3 percent in both Iowa and New Hampshire, as low as 1 percent nationally.
Lindsey Graham has called Trump an “idiot” and a “jackass” who knows nothing about the Middle East and whose comments about McCain, a Graham friend an ally, reveal the reality TV star to be lacking in respect for military service. Trump has replied by insulting Graham and giving out his personal cell phone number.
Graham isn’t even included in the RealClearPolitics national polling average because he usually doesn’t register. When a survey was released showing the South Carolina with just 4 percent support for his candidacy, Trump sarcastically congratulated Graham for doing better than his zero percent nationally.
The only candidate who arguably got anything out of taking on Trump is Carly Fiorina. She has been surging since the first debate, where she zinged him for receiving a call from Bill Clinton before getting into the race. “Did any of you get a phone call from Bill Clinton? I didn’t,” she said. “Maybe it’s because I hadn’t given money to the foundation, or donated to his wife’s Senate campaign.”
But Fiorina, like Trump, comes from business and has never held elected office before. Her attacks on Hillary are probably more responsible for her rise than her less frequent criticism of Trump. And she benefited from appearing at the undercard debate, where she was literally the only candidate ready for primetime.
Be like The Donald
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Other Republicans have decided to copy or co-opt Trump, embracing him personally and echoing his policy proposals.
Scott Walker has been caught in an immigration enforcement arms race with Trump that has left him seeming to endorse an end to birthright citizenship for children born to illegal immigrants and a wall on the Canadian border too. The Wisconsin governor has clarified or walked back both stances, saying he was misunderstood.
After Trump released his tough immigration plan, Walker said he had endorsed some of its ideas first. That’s partly true: Walker was the first to talk about a populist approach to immigration that put American workers first, consulting with “pro-worker” restrictionist Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., before Trump.
Perhaps sensing donor discomfort, Walker seemed tentative about his evolution on immigration and there were persistent reports — all categorically denied by his campaign, it should be noted — that he was still signaling support for a pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens in private. The perception, fair or not, is that Walker has tried to “me too” Trump at the expense of his own straight-talking reputation.
Walker has lost his once-steady lead in Iowa. He has fallen out of double digits in New Hampshire, with one Boston Herald poll showing winning as little as 4 percent. He’s dropped to sixth place nationally.
Ted Cruz has hugged Trump the tightest. He has repeatedly refused to criticize Trump directly, even during the flap with McCain. He is appearing with Trump at a rally against the Iran nuclear deal. He has declined to emphasize his differences with Trump on legal immigration.
“I like Donald Trump,” Cruz has said. “He’s a friend of mine. I’m grateful he’s in the race.” Cruz and Trump met personally early in the latter’s meteoric rise.
Cruz’s polling has held constant or improved slightly. He stands to benefit if Trump falters, as he hasn’t done anything to offend either the billionaire’s supporters or Trump himself. It’s easy to imagine Cruz winning a Trump endorsement if the Texas senator outlasts the reality star.
The risk for Cruz is if Trump doesn’t just gradually lose support as voters become more engaged but implodes for some other, more dramatic reason. What if there is a scandal? What if Trump finally says or does something that goes too far for the primary electorate? Cruz is in a good position now, but he’s opening himself up to blowback.
Ben Carson has been gaining in the polls despite a generally conciliatory tone toward Trump. The soft-spoken retired neurosurgeon shares Trump’s nonpolitical background but has a much different style. His rise could at some point threaten Trump, so it will be interesting to see if their cordial relations can last.
Ignore Trump
Another option is to refuse to engage Trump, despite his massive media presence. “My job is to connect to the voters, not to disconnect them from Donald Trump,” Mike Huckabee told ABC. “He’s going to give his message, I’m going to give mine.”
Huckabee went on to deliver a closing statement at the first debate that appeared to be an attack on Trump. The punchline was that his target was Hillary. But that revealed the downside of ignoring Trump. The former Arkansas governor, Fox News personality and 2008 Iowa caucus winner is polling in the middle of the pack, but the Clinton-Trump joke was one of the few times he’s broke through during this campaign, aside from occasional bits of Trumpian red meat.
John Kasich also doesn’t want to talk about Trump. Aside from occasionally speculating voters will tire of Trump’s negativity, the Ohio governor refrains from criticizing the front-runner even when asked. At the first debate he gave Trump credit for “hitting a nerve” and he’s defended the businessman from media scrutiny of his personal life.
Kasich is emerging as a top tier candidate in New Hampshire and is exceeding expectations nationally. The conventional wisdom was that he wouldn’t qualify for the primetime debates, due to low early polling numbers and a late start. So far, that’s wrong.
Marco Rubio has also tried to avoid making his campaign about Trump. The closest to a Rubio-initiated spat with the billionaire was a benign controversy over the extent of America’s greatness. Trump hasn’t returned the favor, calling Rubio “Jeb’s plebe.”
With sky-high favorable ratings among GOP voters, Rubio might be well positioned: Bush donors might give him a second look and he could be a bridge between the party establishment and conservatives who an alternative to Trump. But he’s vulnerable on Gang of Eight and might suffer from the Tim Pawlenty problem of being too many people’s second choice.
Not every candidate has followed these exact templates. Chris Christie has alternately criticized Trump, described him as a friend and refused to answer questions about him. Bobby Jindal was nearly as scathing as Perry when Trump went after McCain, but he’s also incorporated random mentions of Trump in his stump speeches, a facetious pitch for additional media coverage, and sounded more like Trump than his usual wonky self rhetorically.
But it all goes to show how much Trump is dictating everything in a once-impressive field.
Right now, it’s Trump’s world and the other Republican candidates are living in it.
