Americana

Here’s what the 2024 Republican field is actually running on

THE SCENE

MILWAUKEE – Tomorrow night, for the first time, the Republican presidential candidates who aren’t Donald Trump will get a stage to themselves. No “proud deplorables” drowning out their applause lines. No giddy speculation about what nicknames he’ll hurl their way.

That’ll give Fox News hosts Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum two hours with nine candidates who did accept the invitation, and whose own messaging and policy promises routinely get buried by Trump. Viewers who haven’t heard from these candidates might be surprised by how much they agree with each other — on immigration, on fiscal policy, on social issues, and on Trump’s legacy as president.

Democrats responded to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat by moving left on key issues; each candidate committed to reversing as much of the Trump legacy as possible, expanding the Affordable Care Act, Republicans battling to follow Trump have started where he left off, and stepped to the right.

DAVID’S VIEW

The overwhelming, oxygen-draining focus on Trump’s indictments can obscure just how warmly the GOP field views his presidency. That wasn’t inevitable. New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu flirted with a campaign that would have challenged Trump from the center-right; so did ex-Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who’s hinting that he might run on field with the No Labels flag.

But the consensus from the field we have is that Trump had a phenomenally successful presidency, right on almost every policy, undone only by his own personality and poor decisions.

Immigration. Every candidate onstage supports military action against drug cartels in Mexico, going further than Trump did in office. Every candidate wants to complete a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, an idea that divided the party in 2016 – and again in 2019, when 12 Republican senators voted against the emergency declaration that Trump used to fund wall construction. (Just eight of those senators are still in D.C.)

Two of the Milwaukee Republicans once opposed the wall, but have evolved to support it. Chris Christie derided the way Trump promised to build a “marvelous wall” that Mexico would pay for. Two months ago, he said at a CNN town hall that he’d changed his mind: “We’ve spent this money on building some of it, you might as well finish it now.”

Nikki Haley moved in the same direction. In 2015, when she was urging the party not to nominate Trump, Haley said that it was unrealistic for a Republican to “commit to putting troops along the border” and “say you’re just going to build a wall.” Haley now supports sending special forces after the cartels, and in April, she filmed a video at a section of the border fence that Biden had left undone, declaring that America needed to “finish what we started.”

Firing government employees. Every Republican candidate in Milwaukee has pledged to fire FBI Director Christopher Wray – with one exception. Chris Christie, who recommended Wray when Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey, has said he’d keep him on “if he wanted to stay.”

But that’s about all the disagreement on this topic. All of Trump’s rivals, Christie included, have told activists that they’d restore a last-minute Trump executive order that re-classified tens of thousands of civil servants, allowing a new president to dismantle the left-leaning public sector. Ron DeSantis promises to “use all available Article II authority to restore accountability in the executive branch, move agencies out of DC and slash the bureaucratic state”; Vivek Ramawamy has promised a “headcount reduction” across the government in his first year.

“If somebody works for you, and you cannot fire them, that means they don’t work for you,” Ramaswamy told Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds at their “Fairside Chat” this month. “You can’t fire individual employees who are civil service protected. But those rules do not apply to mass layoffs.” Asa Hutchinson, seen as the most moderate of the onstage candidates, wants to cut the federal workforce by 10%.

“If I had my druthers, I would thoughtfully ask my friend Trey Gowdy to take over the FBI,” Tim Scott said at an Iowa town hall last month. No president has immediately fired the FBI director and appointed a political ally to run the bureau. Scott would hire a former House colleague who chaired the select Benghazi committee.

Health care and taxes. Republican candidates don’t promise to “repeal and replace Obamacare” anymore, starting with Trump. His 2024 promise is the one he made in 2016: He’ll “always protect Medicare, Social Security, and patients with pre-existing conditions.”

The Milwaukee candidates either agree (usually by saying nothing) or want to move toward deeper entitlement reform. Mike Pence endorses an idea that the GOP left for dead in 2017, that “insurance subsidies and low-income healthcare services should be given to the states in the form of flexible block grants.”

Nobody’s come out for an alternative yet. Pence and Christie have both lambasted their party, by which they mean Trump, for not recommitting to entitlement reform; no candidate has disagreed that the 2017 tax cuts need to be extended permanently. That’s not surprising at all – no issue united Republicans more that year – but every candidate is leaning in on a topic Democrats have messaged against for half a decade.

“I think having a chance to provide the American people with the largest tax cut in American history in 2017, as one of the three primary authors of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, really makes me qualified to run our economy,” Scott said at last weekend’s conservative conference in Atlanta, The Gathering.

Foreign policy. There is real disagreement, from both directions, on whether candidates would cut off aid to Ukraine and try to settle the country’s conflict with Russia. It’s also an area where the right/left binary doesn’t apply — the Trump position, that the war is not clearly in America’s interest, is shared by likely Green Party nominee Cornel West.

It can be hard sometimes to pin down a specific plan versus a posture: Trump at one point said he could boost aid to Ukraine if Putin didn’t discuss a peace deal, for example, and more recently said aid should be withheld to force Democratic cooperation in investigations into Hunter Biden. DeSantis and Ramaswamy sound the most like Trump in terms of skepticism towards backing Ukraine’s war effort, while the other six support continued aid. Christie and Pence have even traveled to the country and met with President Volodymyr Zelensky. Every Republican has endorsed Trump’s approach to China, and criticized him only for not going as far in challenging the country as he claimed he would; Christie, the field’s full-time Trump critic, joked in June that Trump would mollify Xi Jinping “with salutes and love letters.”

Most of the field wants complete independence from the Chinese economy – from Haley and Pence calling for the end of normal trade relations, to Ramaswamy wanting to prevent U.S. companies from doing business there altogether. The less-specific candidates have found a safe space, promising to roll back Biden-era regulations and environmental rules, on the premise that they’d make China less of a threat.

Abortion and LGBT rights. Trump has the least precise position on abortion of any candidate, refusing to say whether he’d support new federal limits. But he’s led the field on restricting transgender healthcare and inclusion, promising, before anyone else entered the race, to restore his administration’s gender identity rules and legal language — barring transgender people from the military, barring federal dollars from covering gender transitions.

The Milwaukee candidates fit into two camps on abortion. Ramaswamy, Christie, and Doug Burgum don’t support a federal limit; the other five candidates support at least a ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Their conversation has been dominated by questions about when a federal ban must start, largely because anti-abortion groups, led by SBA Pro-Life America, have demanded candidates get behind a 15-week bill.

But even the less-committed candidates go further than Trump. He criticized Florida’s six-week abortion bill as “too harsh.” Both governors onstage – DeSantis and Burgum – have signed one.

“Dobbs says, return that power to the states,” Burgum said at a New Hampshire town hall hosted by WMUR last month. “And that’s where it should be.”

Pence, who helped staff the Trump administration with conservatives, has promised only to appoint “pro-life” cabinet members and healthcare officials. The rest of the field has talked about trans rights and gender identity mostly in the context of who can play on sex-specific sports teams. Pence has more directly defended the Trump record, and said why he’d build on it.

“I think the idea of admitting people who would begin a multi-years process of going through a gender transition – chemical or surgical – people that would not be deployable during that period of time, makes no sense,” Pence told reporters at a stop in Nevada, Iowa last month. “But I also think that having transgender military personnel undermines what the military describes as unit cohesion.”

THE VIEW FROM DEMOCRATS

The DNC is bracketing the Trump-free debate, flying a banner over Milwaukee that mocks the field for its “extreme MAGA” views, and sounding close to giddy that none of Trump’s rivals are trying to pick up voters to his left.

“Every Republican candidate has decided that the best way to beat Donald Trump is to ‘out-Trump’ him and advocate for taking his agenda even further,” said DNC national press secretary Ammar Moussa.

NOTABLE

• The New York Times pressed the entire field, including two candidates left off the Milwaukee stage, on an array of issues. The candidates who haven’t put out detailed plans didn’t jump to attention; when they say they’re using this debate to introduce themselves, they mean it.

Biden for President, “Fought Back.” The president often gets more coverage for what he doesn’t say than for what he does. Multiple statements about the Maui disaster got covered less than his “no comment” to one question about them; presidential visits to factories make less news than Biden walking away from the latest Hunter question. The solution: Paid media. A new $25 million ad buy (in English and Spanish) says what Biden keeps saying on the road: “Manufacturing is coming home. High-speed computer chips are getting made, right here.”

Make America Great Again, “Remember.” This, from the Trump super PAC, is what the Biden campaign is trying to rebut – the perception, shared by most voters, that things were better under the last president, stopping the clock right before COVID. “We were beating China,” a narrator says here. Before any fact-checker can butt in, there’s a less contested claim, one Biden can’t fix: “Prices were low, groceries affordable.”

Never Back Down, “The Bell.” Internal polling for the DeSantis super PAC found slippage in his early-state favorable rating, after months of back-and-forth with Donald Trump. DeSantis’s youth, marriage, and family, clear assets, got lost in the noise. They return here, combining the story of Casey DeSantis beating breast cancer with her own testimony of how helpful her husband was. “He wasn’t even just there for me,” she says in a news interview clipped for the ad. “He was there for my kids.”

The most accurate poll in Iowa has returned – the one that campaigns wake up early for, that catches momentum before anyone else does. And its first heat check of the caucuses finds Trump in command, but not invincible, with a stronger base than any other Republican candidate. Two out of three Trump supporters say their mind is made up; just one in three DeSantis supporters say the same. But 20% of Republicans list DeSantis as their second choice, and just 10% say Trump is.

The upshot, as Americana told you from the state fair last week, is that DeSantis still has a pulse in Iowa, and the highest favorable rating of any candidate. Just 29% of likely caucus-goers say it’s more important to pick a candidate who can defeat Joe Biden than a candidate who can win, but they don’t think agreeing with their views is necessarily risky – hence Trump’s lead, despite the warm feelings they have for the alternatives.

Republican voters wanted Donald Trump to join the debate tomorrow – three-quarters of them, according to another section of this poll. They won’t get that, but they want to hear a debate more about the issues Trump focuses on than the ones DeSantis and Ramaswamy have run on to outflank him. Two-thirds aren’t interested in an abortion discussion, the one that rival candidates have struggled to drag him into.

No one has ever used the phrase “listless vessel” like Ron DeSantis does, probably because each word has multiple, unrelated meanings. On land, a listless person lacks drive and enthusiasm, and a vessel is an empty container. On sea, a vessel is a boat, and when it’s listless, it’s sitting still in the water.

In context, from the multiple times he’s used the phrase this year, DeSantis says “listless vessel” to refer to a vacant, directionless person, typically made that way by progressive education.” In March, DeSantis said at an announcement of a Florida civics program that “when you don’t have people that have that foundation at all, we’re just listless vessels of citizenry at that point.” In April, DeSantis told an Akron, Ohio crowd that a student who learned American civics might not become “some listless vessel that has no idea why people fought and died for our country.”

A month later, launching his presidential campaign on Twitter Spaces and Fox News, DeSantis said he was challenging “a president who is a listless vessel, not energetic, and not dealing with the key challenges that are facing our country.” Casey DeSantis got in on it, putting her name on a June fundraising email that warned how candidates “turn into listless vessels bending in the wind and beholden to polls and politics.”

Still, the phrase went almost unnoticed (except in Americana) until this weekend, when DeSantis talked with The Florida Standard, an outlet he’s given access to in order to starve out the state’s “legacy media.” “If all we are is listless vessels that are just supposed to follow, you know, whatever happens to come down the pipeline through Truth Social every morning, that’s not going to be a durable movement,” DeSantis said. The Trump campaign condemned him for applying his homebrewed phrase to the MAGA movement, and an odd term suddenly became a grave insult.

White House. Three Republican presidential candidates who didn’t qualify for tomorrow’s debate are protesting their exclusion, calling it “rigged” (Perry Johnson), threatening to sue (Johnson and Larry Elder), or explaining why they fell short (Francis Suarez).

So what happened? All three candidates got flummoxed by the RNC’s debate criteria – specifically, the criteria for polls that could get them onstage. On June 2, the RNC required candidates to collect 40,000 unique donations and get 1% support, or more, in three polls that “survey at least 800 registered likely Republican voters through a mix of live calls, integrated voice response, online panels, and/or text message,” and meet a few other standards to avoid sloppy data or bias.

In the final days before the qualifying deadline — 9 p.m. eastern time, Aug. 21 — Johnson, Elder, and Suarez all claimed to have met the standard. On Aug. 17, the RNC told Suarez that he could reach the polling threshold before the deadline. Suarez began claiming that he had already, providing the Associated Press with a partial screenshot of the committee offering him 135 debate tickets. Left out of the screenshot: Those tickets were conditional on making the debate, and he hadn’t done it yet, because he counted an American Wire News poll that failed the RNC’s likely voter screening rule.

Johnson and Elder took another approach. Elder didn’t claim to make the debate until Monday evening, when his campaign informed the RNC of three polls that put him at 1% — a national Rasmussen poll, a national Trafalgar poll, and a Trafalgar poll of Iowa, as well as an Insider Advantage poll with only 750 respondents. Johnson’s three polls included one, from Victory Insights, that excluded 12 states from its “national” sample.

Senate. After some nudging from Florida Democrats, ex-Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell launched a challenge to Sen. Rick Scott, a first-term Republican who won the seat by just over 10,000 votes. Republicans have made massive gains in Florida since then – starting with Mucarsel-Powell’s south Florida district, which they flipped in 2020 as Donald Trump made huge gains in Miami-Dade County.

“This race will be one of the most competitive Senate races in 2024,” Mucarsel-Powell said in a fundraising email. Republicans scoffed: Last year, Rep. Val Demings spent nearly $80 million to lose to Sen. Marco Rubio in a landslide. After her announcement on Tuesday morning, the National Republican Senatorial Committee hinted that it would attack the Democrat over her husband’s work with a Ukrainian oligarch.

But without her, Democrats faced the prospect of nominating a fringe candidate for a seat they held for 18 years; the best-known candidate in the race had been ex-Rep. Alan Grayson, who lost a U.S. Senate primary in 2016 and has filed for some other office every cycle since then.

• one day until the first GOP presidential primary debate
• 14 days until special congressional primaries in Rhode Island and Utah
• 53 days until elections in Louisiana
• 77 days until elections in Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, Mississippi, and Virginia
• 146 days until the Iowa caucuses
• 441 days until the 2024 presidential election

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