Barring some major unexpected change, President Biden will not face any major opposition for the nomination next year. At the present time, his opposition is composed of fringe candiates who reject most of the Democratic platforms of the past thirty-five years.
On the Republican side, there is supposedly a nomination contest. But in many ways, we are seeing a repeat of the 2016 campaign with Donald Trump starting from a stronger position than he did in 2015. Back then, Trump was an unknown quantity as a politician and Republican voters were simply playing with the possibility of supporting Trump. Now, he is a known and the “maybe” 25% is something like a 40% certain and a 30% maybe. But the constant is that most of the top contenders are unwilling to attack Trump.
Part of the reason why Trump has emerged with only a handful willing to attack him is a general perception about negative campaigning. The problem with negative campaigning is that it has a cost. Negative campaigning is aimed at “persuadable” voters. At best, it persuades the voter leaning to the opponent to vote for you (a gain of one vote for you and a loss of one vote for your opponent or a swing of two), but it is acceptable if it merely results in the voter deciding to sit the race out (a loss of one vote for your opponent). People do not like negative campaigns and such campaigns drive up the negatives of both the candidate doing the attack and the candidate being attacked. If successful, the negative campaign drives up the negatives of the candidate being attacked more than it does the candidate doing the attacking. In the general, negative campaigning works because you tend to have two candidates with enough “certain” voters that even if all persuadable voters flipped to a third candidate that third candidate would still finish third.
But primaries tend to be different, especially in the “prefiling” period. In a primary, you tend to have fewer certain voters. Even if running a negative campaign sours hard-core Republicans on their nominee, they are still going to vote for that person in the general. And they tend to not be turned off by attacks on a Democrat. (The same is generally true in reverse.) But in a primary, you are not attacking “them.” You are attacking “us.” Equally important, at least in the early stages, voters are considering multiple candidates and there are more than two options. In other words, your attack on candidate A is unlikely to make the voter stay home or vote for you. It might lead the voter to support candidate B.
Generally speaking, if you are going to go negative in a primary, you are essentially committing to a “whack-a-mole” strategy in which you attack any candidate who seems to be viable (or who becomes viable). Such an approach is very difficult to pull off. In Trump was able to do this, but he also took a very unusual approach to negative campaigning. Trump’s approach was a very “bully”-like tactic. Most negative campaigning is airing your opponent’s dirty laundry. While Trump did some of this, his primary tactic was something that easily fed into social media memes — name-calling. Name-calling does not require any proof or anything scandalous. It just requires coming up with a label that sticks. Which is how the world’s most dishonest campaign succeeds by labelling his opponent as “Lying Ted.” Not that Ted Cruz wins any medals for being honest, but he is not anywhere near the same league as Donald Trump in terms of dishonesty.
From a strategic standpoint, as much as knocking Trump out of the picture is essential to any candidate’s hopes of becoming the Republican nominee in 2024, no candidate wants to prevail at knocking Trump down five or six rungs only for another candidate to become the new frontrunner.
The other reason why candidates have been reluctant to attack Trump are the numbers that I mentioned above. There is a certain share of anti-Trump votes in the Republican Party. And some candidates who are not really in the race to win have been willing to attack Trump in the hope of getting the 20% or so of Republican voters who appreciate the threat that Trump is to their party and their party’s values. But the rest of the candidates realize that for the majority of Republican primary voters, Trump is part of the “us” and anybody who attacks Trump is part of “them.” What these candidates need to do is persuade the Trump worshipers who have taken over the Republican Party is that Trump for whatever reason is now longer the best person to advance the Trump agenda (whatever that is beyond the idolization of Donald Trump). Given that the Trump agenda and Donald Trump are essentially the same thing, this strategy is very tricky. It should not be surprising that the chasing pack is hoping that prosecutors will force Trump out of the race (or at least make it clear to Trump supporters that Trump is no longer a viable general election candidate) without getting their own hands dirty.
There is one other thing about going negative in the primary. Because you are attacking “us” rather than “them,” you create the potential of sufficiently strong negative feelings that a voter who would normally be “certain” for you in the general election will decide not to vote in the general election. This risk tends to be overstated to a certain degree. While pundits regularly talk about negative primaries harming a nominee’s general election chances, the reality is that, in most cases, those wounds quickly heal because the hatred of “them” outweighs any lingering dislike of the candidate that got the nomination. But, in a very close race, it only takes a small number of partisans who balk at supporting the nominee. There is some fear that some Trump partisans are more Trumpers than Republicans. To the extent that this is true, if there is a perception that the Republican nominee was disrespectful to their god, those voters would be somewhat likely to sit out the presidential race. And, as we have seen, the Republican-Trump coalition is barely competitive in the swing states. Unless dumping Trump gets some swing voters back from the Democrats (which would require dumping Trumpism as well as Trump), offending the Trump supporters would be fatal to any chance in the general election.
Which leads us back to where we started. Especially with Trump displaying his well-known cowardice by skipping this week’s Republican debate, the leading candidates on the stage are more likely to attack the bipartisan prosecutors who have brought charges against Trump rather than point out the many ways in which Trump was a bad, bordering on failed, president. There will be one or two on the stage who may attack Trump, but those folks will be condemned by the other candidates. And nothing that happens on Wednesday will make it less likely that Trump will be the Republican nominee again.
