As the 2020 election season enters its early stages with President Trump’s approval ratings taking a further beating from the protracted partial government shutdown, we’re starting to see more articles about the potential for a primary challenge to Trump.
I am generally supportive of the idea of primary challenges against incumbents and cheered when many liberal Republicans were taken down in primaries during the Tea Party era. I also think even losing primary challenges can be useful in furthering a specific idea or putting pressure on an incumbent. A good example of this is Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who became much more reliably conservative in the run-up to his 2012 re-election race, out of fear that he was at risk of losing the Republican nomination without bolstering his right flank.
Challenges to an incumbent president are less common, but by no means unprecedented. Former California Governor Ronald Reagan challenged President Gerald Ford in 1976; Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., challenged President Jimmy Carter in 1980; and political columnist Pat Buchanan challenged President George H.W. Bush in 1992.
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Looking at those challenges, however, each of them came from either the Right or Left, with opponents tapping into a sense of disillusionment among the base. Reagan was rallying Goldwater conservatives who opposed the liberal Republican Ford. As Jon Ward recounts in an excerpt from his new book on the 1980 Democratic primary, Kennedy was a proponent of national healthcare challenging Carter on behalf of liberals who saw him as overly fiscally conservative. In 1992, Buchanan ran a populist campaign that also exploited conservative anger over Bush’s breaking of his “no new taxes” pledge.
Had Trump done what many conservatives had feared (and what rivals had warned about during the 2016 primary) and cut deals with Democrats and adopted liberal positions he once held on gun control, abortion, socialized healthcare, taxes, and so on, it would be much easier to see how somebody like Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, would have emerged to say, “See, I warned you, now it’s time to replace Trump with a real conservative.” But as things stand, it’s difficult to see how it would be easy to challenge Trump from the Right.
Sure, in my fantasy world, somebody would be calling out Trump for his refusal to tackle entitlements or the debt and for his assault on free trade, among other things. But such arguments trying to portray him as an interloper failed during the 2016 primary, so it’s hard to imagine them resonating with the broader Republican electorate today. He’s cut taxes, pursued deregulation, been pro-life, largely resisted gun control, and appointed lots of conservative judges. That’s enough of a record to stave off any serious challenge from the Right. Indeed, the recent Gallup poll showing Trump with an abysmal 37 percent approval rating overall, found that his approval rating among self-identified conservative Republicans was 88 percent. (If there’s to be a challenge to Trump from the Right, it may be more likely to come from the populist Right, if he’s seen as caving on immigration, which is likely why he’s been so reluctant to give in on border wall funding.)
[Read more: GOP operatives in key states warn Trump 2020 is slow out of the gate]
Given the difficulty of challenging Trump from the Right, that leaves two basic alternatives. One alternative is to challenge Trump from the Left. It would be difficult to see who that would appeal to, as such a candidate would be a harder sell to the Trump critics who remain ideologically conservative. The other alternative is to run a campaign about character and civility — challenging Trump for his Twitter tantrums, bombastic rhetoric, casual dishonesty, violation of norms, erratic management style, and so on. The problem is that it will be difficult to make that the focus of any Republican primary challenge, because those are many of the same arguments that are going to be employed against him by Democrats. It seems like that would play right into the hands of Trump, by allowing him to lump in the challenger with the “fake news” media and liberal Democrats.
Now, if something substantial comes out of the Robert Mueller report that seriously implicates Trump in a Russian influence campaign in the 2016 elections, his approval rating tanks into the 20s, and it looks like he’s a certain loser in 2020, that starts to change the dynamic. At that point, you can imagine a primary challenger making the case that Trump is going to lose badly and the only way to prevent Democrats from taking power with a massive majority with which to implement their socialist agenda is to pick a less tainted nominee. It still may prove a difficult case to make, especially given the loyalty that Trump engenders among the base and their suspicion of polls (which was vindicated in 2016).
Sure, those arguing that Trump should be challenged aren’t necessarily suggesting that he’d lose a primary. The argument is that it would be about making a moral stand against Trumpism and advancing a more stable version of conservatism.
But I think this underestimates the downside risk. If somebody runs a primary challenge on a traditional free market platform and gets slaughtered by Trump, it only bolsters the strength of the populist movement within the party and makes the traditional conservatives look even more irrelevant. A stronger challenge that weakens Trump for the general election virtually ensures that many Republican voters will blame the primary challenge for any defeat. That, too, could muddy the post-2020 argument to Republican voters that the party needs to move beyond Trumpism as well as increase the bitterness that rank-and-file voters feel toward so-called party elites.
On the other hand, if Trump gets nominated without a challenger, and goes on to lose the general election, it will be much easier for 2024 Republican candidates to make the case against the Trumpist vision of the party and for a return to a more traditional conservatism.
In short, I’m not convinced a primary challenge would serve the purpose its proponents believe it will, and it very well could be counterproductive in the long run.
