Trumpism without Trump

It is inevitable that people will claim that the losing candidate in an important election was a bad candidate who ran a bad campaign, even if there’s no particular evidence for it. To follow up on Erik’s post from yesterday, in 2016 and 2024 critiques of the Democratic are inevitably combined with claims that Donald Trump is such an unusually bad candidate that it would take a particularly inept campaign and/or bad candidate to lose to him. But this is not true. As Bill James once said about the San Francisco Giants of the late 60s and 70s, Trump isn’t a typical bad candidate, but one who yokes extraordinary strengths and extraordinary weaknesses. Trump is indeed a bad, undisciplined candidate in many ways. But he has two major strengths — an ability to mobilize sporadic and first-time voters, and the ability to lie about rejecting unpopular core positions of the party (in this election, pretending to be moderate on abortion and healthcare) without alienating the party’s base. And these strengths are evident when you compare Trump to other MAGA figures downballot. Erik mentioned Jacky Rosen winning Nevada with fewer votes than Harris. We can see this in other states:

• In Michigan, Harris lost with ~2,724, 000 votes, while Elissa Slotkin won with ~2,708,000, another election with a critical number of Trump-only ballots.
• In Wisconsin, Harris got ~1, 667, 000 votes, and Baldwin got ~1,672,000. Given that Baldwin is a very strong candidate with carefully cultivated ties to local interests, that still looks pretty good for Trump.
• The one key battleground where the Democratic Senate candidate decisively outperformed was Arizona, but this proves the point in a different way. Part of it is that Gallego is a really strong candidate, IMHO a much more interesting potential presidential candidate than Kelly. But part of it is Kari Lake demonstrating once again that hardcore Trumpism without Trump tends to be a losing proposition in competitive elections, even if you can find a candidate who was a fairly well-liked local celebrity before entering politics. (Mark Robinson is obviously the most extreme example of MAGA without Trump from this cycle; the teflon isn’t transferrable.)

What this means for the post-Trump Republican Party is of course uncertain. But when I read that someone like DeSantis would have won a true landslide — I think that’s actually a highly questionable proposition. I can easily see a scenario where a candidate with less scandal baggage but more right-wing positions and less ability to mobilize low-information voters loses to this Harris campaign, and I don’t think it’s going to be easy for Republicans to find a good candidate in 2028 (especially if Trump is still around to effectively hand-pick his successor.)