In recent months, countless servers have been clogged with ruminations about how much trouble President Joe Biden is in, and how Democrats would be much better off with someone younger and more vibrant as their nominee in 2024. And indeed, the unloved president's big, selfish bet on himself is fast turning into bad money that the party must find a way to recover between now and next November. But Republicans are walking into their own Trump trap—one that might not just cost them the presidency but any ability to be competitive down ballot if they saddle themselves with a future inmate as their nominee.
Consider this scenario—former President Donald Trump has breezed to the GOP nomination, effectively ending the contest on Super Tuesday as his only real rivals, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis bow out after winning precisely zero contests each. Yet throughout what would have been the back half of the primary and caucus calendar, Trump is on trial in Georgia (for election interference) and Florida (in the classified documents case), and is then convicted by a Fulton County jury not long after his official nomination at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in mid-July.
It is not hard to imagine that Trump's conviction, as predicted by all available polling, blows apart his White House run. A Reuters/Ipsos poll this week found that 52 percent of Republicans would not vote for him if he was in prison on Election Day. Let's say that the relentless grind of polarization and partisanship shaves that number down to just 20 percent—this still would represent a landscape-altering disaster for the GOP. According to 2020 exit polls, self-identified Republicans were 36 percent of the more than 158 million Americans who cast a ballot in 2020, or about 57 million voters. 20 percent of that group is 11.4 million, and let's be especially charitable and assume that they just stay home. In 2020, that would have turned Biden's 4.5 point national popular vote win into a 12-point romp with an Electoral Vote total pushing 400.
If an imprisoned Trump, recently convicted of trying to illegally install himself in power as dictator, is down 12 points heading into Election Day, that could exert significant downward pressure on House and Senate candidates, handing Democrats the kind of broad-based repudiation of the GOP that they have dreamed of throughout the Trump era. The looming mystery of what it would mean to elect a president currently serving jail time would thoroughly dominate the election to the exclusion of issues that are currently working to the GOP's benefit—lingering price increases, high interest rates, dissatisfaction with immigration policy and the pervasive sense that Biden is simply no longer up to the task.
And there would be little meaningful room for maneuver for Republican elites as this nightmare scenario unfolds. The Republican Party's Rule 9 allows for candidate replacement for "death, declination or otherwise" but does not specify what "otherwise" actually means. And even if they were to interpret it broadly as including "our candidate is in jail and it really stinks for us," the number of Trump die-hards they might bleed out should they unilaterally stick Haley or DeSantis atop the ticket could very well exceed the number that would refuse to turn out for a potential Convict-in-Chief. That's assuming they beat ballot deadlines to do so anyway, and that those efforts are not challenged by Trump in court.
You don't have to go very far back in history to see how taking this kind of risk has panned out. Hillary Clinton was under FBI investigation throughout the 2016 primary campaign, and Democratic voters made her the nominee anyway. Even just the brief, infamous reopening of that investigation the week before the election by then-FBI Director James Comey seems to have dented her support just enough for Trump to squeak through. And that investigation was a complete nonsense scandal about a private email server that harmed no one, not an effort by a vengeful ogre to undermine the peaceful transfer of power between parties for the first time in American history.
Yet knowing full well that this fiasco is more likely to happen than not, elected Republicans are still mostly sitting around waiting for some deus ex machina to rid them of Trump rather than being proactive about it, or worse—looking only at the toplines in the polling and concluding that Trump is as good a bet as anyone else. He's not. And the reality is that only a whole party effort, from elected officials to donors and party functionaries, has any chance of depriving Trump of the nomination and sparing them another humiliating defeat, this time by backing a twice-impeached convicted felon facing dozens of other charges who will, in a best case scenario, spend the rest of his miserable life fighting to remain a free man.
That fight could be Trump's alone—if only they could convince their own primary voters to come to their senses. Judging from the tepid attacks on Trump by his non-Chris Christie rivals last night, the voters will have to do that without a lot of guidance from the politicians seeking to replace him.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated the location of the classified documents trial against Trump. It is Florida.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
