The Bulwark Podcast - Seth Masket: Trending Trump

Episode Date: June 28, 2023

Grassroots Republican leaders increasingly favor Trump, and he's getting significantly more coverage on CNN than the other candidates. Plus, when Democrats lose, they tend to move to the center. When Republicans do, they tend to move harder right. Seth Masket joins Charlie Sykes today. show notes: https://smotus.substack.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is June 28th, 2023. I cannot believe that it is almost the end of June, which means it's also the end of the Supreme Court session, and they are very, very busy this week. In fact, by the time you hear this podcast, we may have other major decisions, including on affirmative action. really bizarre independent state legislature theory, which feels like five minutes ago was very much a fringe idea, and yet it made its way all the way to the Supreme Court. And by a vote of six to three, the justices nuked it from deep space. Obviously, good news. And also, Donald Trump is rolling out a new defense. It is the bravado defense. We're in the you can't make this stuff up phase of this. Remember, Donald Trump first said the FBI planted all those

documents in Mar-a-Lago. And then he insisted, well, he didn't do anything wrong because he had declassified them all with his mind. And then he said that the papers he was talking about on that bombshell tape were all just newspaper clippings. Well, his new defense is, I'm not kidding, it basically is, I was just bullshitting. I'm not kidding. I would say it was bravado, if you want to know the truth. It was bravado, Trump said in an interview aboard his plane with Somerford and ABC News. I was talking, just holding up papers and talking about them, but I had no documents. I didn't have any documents. It actually gets even better than this because the secret plans, he's asked, well, what are

these plans that you're referring to? He says he's talking about plans for his golf course, not Iran war plans at all. Golf courses. This is on Fox News. He insisted he was referring to building plans and plans for golf courses that were strewn about his desk. Did I use the word plans? He said, what I'm referring to is magazines, newspapers, plans of buildings. They had plans of buildings, you know, building

plans. I had plans of a golf course. I'm sorry. It's like Joe Azuzu has become president of the United States. So joining us to talk about the invisible primary for the GOP nomination and so much else, Seth Maskett, professor of political science, director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver. He writes the Substack newsletter, Tusk, where he's been covering the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Seth, thanks for joining me on the podcast. Oh, thanks so much for having me on. So, can we start off a little bit of a palate cleanser? Because I want to get your take on this. And on one level, this video by Florida Senator Rick Scott is just sort of boiler

plate, you know, performative magadam, right? I mean, it's just sort of a, I hate the people you hate, and I'm going to use all the buzzwords you use. And yet, it's still very, very strange. This is for people who haven't heard this. Rick Scott, you know, went out of his way. He posted this video of himself warning socialists and communists not to travel to Florida. They are not welcome in the sunshine state because freedom or something. Let me just play it. It's about, yeah, it's about 30 seconds. Senator Rick Scott here. Let me give you a travel warning. If you're a socialist, communist, somebody that believes in big government, I would think twice. Think twice if you're thinking about taking a vacation or moving to Florida.

We're the free state of Florida. We actually don't believe in socialism. We actually know people. Some people don't say they lived under it. We know people lived under socialism. It's not good. It's not good for anybody. So if you're thinking about it, if you think about common authority and you're a socialist or communist, think twice. We like freedom, liberty, capitalism, things like that.

Okay, Seth, I'm sorry. My head is hurting. I mean, the stupid it burns here. Because freedom is all about keeping out people with different opinions. Am I right? Or am I misreading what freedom means? Yeah, I love where a free state don't come here. You know, that's an interpretation of freedom. It was reminding me a little bit, if I'm not mistaken, it was Jesse Helms, I think, in the earlier mid 90s, who warned Bill Clinton not to come to his state. He said, you know,

basically, terrible things could happen to you if you come down here. It's kind of evocative of, you know, some really scary stuff back in the pre-civil rights era. On the other hand, it's probably just performative crap, right? You know, he's just trying to sound tough. I don't think he means that there's going to be any sort of enforcement of that or anyone's actually going to get hurt. But that is the kind of language that can lead to that, right? It's at least a sort of tacit way of saying, yeah, political violence is okay against some people.

Now, I wrote about this in my newsletter this morning. I said, maybe we shouldn't overthink it because it's just the usual performative asshole. I mean, he's just signaling to the base that he hates the right people and he wants to punish them. I mean, that's the erogenous zone of MAGA. But still, still, he's thinking like, I have to raise my profile. I have to troll the liberals or anything. And they look, there are a lot of ways of critiquing socialism, communism, big government. He didn't offer any of them except to say they're not good. So he goes after people, this warning not to come to his state.

Don't come here, spend money. Don't come here and pay taxes. Don't even think about it. As if, by the way, he speaks for the whole state of Florida. I'm guessing the tourism people, folks in Orlando might have a different opinion. I'm also interested in knowing what exactly is Scott's definition of socialism and supporters of big government? I mean, who should not come to Florida? I mean, how do people know you're not welcome? I mean, if you supported the

infrastructure bill, you're not supposed to go to Florida. What would it be? I mean, it's kind of a little, you know, I can't go to Disney World because I support like broadband funding. It's a little vague, right? Yeah. I mean, socialism has become one of those catch-all phrases. It's sort of like woke, you know, it just means it's whoever you don't like, it's whatever you don't want. And, you know, sometimes that can have a racial connotation to it. Sometimes it can just mean liberals. Sometimes it's just, but it's just sort of a catch-all for, you know, those other people who we can all agree we don't like, we don't want them here, we're going to call them socialists. It doesn't really pack much meaning. Well, and he didn't go into any detail about that. I thought the fact that he just threw in support of big government, too.

So basically, if you disagree with me, you are not welcome in my state because it's all about freedom, right? Because that's what free societies do. All right. This is this may sound like low hanging fruit here, but he felt the need to warn socialist, communist, big government supporters not to travel to Florida. Don't even think of coming here. You are not welcome. Where's the video about Nazis, anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, racists, fans of the Unabomber, Medicare fraudsters? I mean, are they still welcome? I just, I mean, what? Yeah, that's the thing. Those are the people who have actually shown up in Florida and actually are a problem.

Maybe I've missed the pro-socialism brigades going on in Miami. There might be some of that, but I haven't seen a ton of it. Not a lot. He doesn't seem concerned about that. Well, this seems like a good segue to Liz Cheney's truth bomb. I think probably a lot of people have heard about this. She was in New York and said one of the main problems this country faces right now is we're electing idiots.

Let's just play the soundbite. What we've done in our politics is create a situation where we're electing idiots. And so I don't look at it through the lens of like, you know, is this what I should do or what I shouldn't do? I look at it through the lens of how do we elect serious people? And I think electing serious people can't be partisan. I do wonder, though, Seth, whether or not our incentive structure, the reward structure in politics actually is conducive to electing serious people. Because the people who rise to superstardom seem to be the least serious people, right? I mean, there's no downside, there's no stigma or price to be paid for being a deeply

unserious person. In fact, that seems to be the way to get your cable gig and lots of clicks and small donor contributions. There's something to that. I mean, I would say, you know, contrary to what she said, there's not really been an idiot-proof era in U.S. politics, right? But there is an issue going on. And I think part of the story is like as a lack of party control over its own nominations. You know, if you think of like George Santos, you know, the Long Island Republican Party that nominated him wasn't paying attention to that nomination and really didn't particularly care. Trump got nominated in 2016, largely because like the party in some ways kind of stood down. It complained about him, but it didn't say here's an alternative. It kind of left things up to the

voters. Part of what's going on is like as sort of party leaders stand down and, you know, play less of a role in guiding things, you see sort of media voices step up. And, you know, the Republican Party has become much more media focused. A lot of it is about, yeah, a lot about just getting on Fox News, doing well on that. The entertainment. And there's actually some interesting research showing that compared to the Democrats, the Republican Party's increasingly nominating outsiders, you know, for Congress and other offices, nominating outsiders with no political experience, which is not necessarily a bad thing, right? Sometimes it might be a good thing. But if there's no actual vetting going on, if there's no attempt to research who these folks are, you know, sometimes some dangerous people can get in. I have one more clip from Liz Cheney. The first clip was

from New York. This is her at the Aspen Ideas Festival, where she's talking about the choice that the Republican Party has to make during this primary season. Let's just play that. I think that it's very clear for the Republican Party, you know, they have to choose. And the choice is whether or not you support the Constitution or you support Donald Trump. But those are mutually exclusive. And the choice is whether or not you support the Constitution or you support Donald Trump. But those are mutually exclusive. And if the Republican Party continues down this path and moves towards, for example, nominating Donald Trump for the presidency, you know, I think that we have seen day after day after day the party go further and further down this path of not being salvageable.

And I think the single most important issue, and I mean that, the single most important issue that faces this nation, and we face a huge array of challenges and threats and they're very complex, but the single most important issue is that Donald Trump never be anywhere near the Oval Office again. And yet every poll would suggest that he has a huge lead over the rest of the field. And you have been tracking the invisible primary for the GOP nomination. I think this is very interesting. You've been surveying Republican county chairs across the country as you track this. And the invisible primary is, of course, all the action that takes place before any votes are actually cast. I mean, it obviously helps to

determine who the eventual winner will be. So you sent surveys to 3,000 Republican chairs for every county in the country. So give me a sense of what you found and where we're going. Yeah. So I've been doing this survey. I did the first wave back in February of this year, and I've been doing them every two months. I did a wave in early April, and I just finished up a wave for early June. And I'm reaching out to all these Republican county chairs. To be quite honest, the response rate has not been enormous. I've got around 170 or so people in the first wave and about 130 in the waves after that. You know, it's people from all over the country. That's a pretty wide range of some of them are very enthusiastic for Trump,

some of them are not. But I'm trying to get a sense of really like how they come around to making a decision, how they're thinking about the candidates. I ask them questions about a bunch of other issues. And, you know, I always start off with, you know, are you committed to a candidate at this point? And over these first three waves, only about half of them say they're committed to a candidate. And that's not too surprising. You know, other people, they're kind of keeping their powder dry. They're waiting to see what happens about things. One of the things we've seen is that in the first wave back in February, among those who said they were committed to a candidate, Trump and DeSantis were basically tied, right around 20% each. And since then, in the April and June waves, Trump has really moved ahead. In this most recent wave,

Trump has, you know, almost 30% of these chairs have said that they're backing Trump and only about 15% are backing DeSantis. But you're also picking up a certain, you know, openness to alternatives. I thought it was interesting. You've been asking the chairs which candidates they would consider for the nomination and what kind of results are you getting there? Yeah, that's a, it's kind of a different question. I say, you know, who are you considering? And they can name as many of the candidates as they want. And I think this is probably helpful for understanding where things are, because a lot of people just aren't wedded to a particular candidate at this point. And interestingly, by that measure, Ron DeSantis has been in the, you know, the number one position all along that there are there are more chairs at least thinking

about him. Now, he was way ahead back in the earliest wave. There were like 75% of the chairs said that they were considering him. That number has dropped. He's at around 60% now. He's still in first place, but the number has dropped. Whereas Trump has been gaining. Only around 40% early on said that they were thinking about Trump, and now it's over 50%. So Trump has actually made some inroads there, people who are more open to him. And interestingly, like the biggest improvement on this measure in the last month was Tim Scott. He was at in the 20s and shot up to the mid 40s, you know, more than four chairs and 10 are now at least open to him. So it seems like he had a

pretty good rollout of his campaign announcement in this last cycle. That is pretty impressive when you consider that Trump is just barely over 50 percent and Tim Scott is at what, 46 percent of chairs are open to considering him. I mean, that's pretty good. What is Scott doing? What are they seeing in him? Why would he have had such a big bump? Unlike some other candidates we can name, he actually had a pretty good campaign announcement. You know, he just gave a, you know, pretty good red meat speech. He has done a pretty effective rollout. He showed up at a lot of the key campaign events in Iowa and New Hampshire. And he's just kind of, in many ways, kind of doing the traditional candidate approach of, you know, just trying to meet as many of just

local influential people as he can and, you know, just sort of convincing them, you know, just trying to meet as many of just local influential people as he can, and, you know, just sort of convincing them, you know, of his approach. And I think, in some ways, it's possible that, you know, being a, you know, black man from the South, who says that, you know, liberals are too focused on race, that has been, you know, something, a message that he's leaned into, and I think has probably helped him, at least initially. That is a message that I think, you know, a number of active Republicans on the right are very eager to hear. You know, it's a message that not every other candidate can really pull. So this is not surprising, but it's still striking that the former Vice President of

the United States, Mike Pence, has fewer than a quarter of these Republican county chairs who said they are considering him. I mean, when you think about, I mean, Mike Pence was the ultimate loyalist vice president. He's checked every conceivable box for conservative Republicans. You know, he's paid his dues and yet he defied Donald Trump on January 6th. And so you only have fewer than one out of four county chairmen who even say they would consider him. This is really an indication of the underlying dynamic of this primary, isn't it? It's pretty fascinating. Back in April, I went, I want to get the name right, I think it was the Faith and Freedom Coalition event in Iowa. And Pence was there. He was one of the candidates who showed up to speak. And he was actually working the room a little bit before the program started. And it's a very evangelical

crowd who shows up at this thing. A lot of people were running to say hi to him, to take their pictures with him. People were very friendly to him. And I was sort of there just listening in. And a lot of people would go up and say hi, do a selfie, and then walk away just shaking their head, yeah, too bad about him. They liked him personally. They thought he agreed with them. You know, he cared about the issues they cared about, but also he didn't stand up at the moment that they thought was absolutely necessary, which was January 6th. And he was just ineligible as a result of that. And then you asked the chairman who they do not want to see as nominee, pretty decisive numbers there too.

Yeah, I thought that was probably useful. I did this same sort of thing among the Democrats in the 2020 race. And this was always useful for capturing sentiments toward Bernie Sanders. No matter how enthusiastic they are, there's a big chunk of the party who doesn't like them. And Trump's numbers have always been fairly high in this category. Around between 30 and 40 percent of Republican chairs say they do not want Trump to be their nominee. But Mike Pence is higher there. He's in between 40 and 50 percent. And reliably in the number one position is this has been Chris Christie. There's been this pretty remarkable everyone hates Chris trend showing up in this where there's not that many people are considering him and a lot of people are rejecting him. One of the things I think interesting in this, though, is that DeSantis has been very low in this measure. That is,

even if he's not in first place, there are very few people who are rejecting him out of hand. So at least so far, people are open to him. Hey, folks, this is Charlie Sykes, host of The Bulwark podcast. We created the Bulwark to provide a platform for pro-democracy voices on the center right and the center left for people who are tired of tribalism and who value truth and vigorous yet civil debate about politics and a lot more. And every day we remind you, folks, you are not the crazy ones. So why not head over to thebulwwork.com and take a look around? Every day, we produce newsletters and podcasts that will help you make sense of our politics and keep your sanity intact.

To get a daily dose of sanity in your inbox, why not try a Bullwork Plus membership free for the next 30 days? To claim this offer, go to thebullwork.com slash charlie. That's thebullwork.com forward slash charlie. We're going to get through this together. I promise. I understand that you're also like trying to get some sense of how, you know, issue beliefs break down between Trump supporters and Trump opponents? Is there any pattern, any bright line that you're seeing between them within the Republican Party? Yeah, it's interesting. You know, in some ways, there's not a huge sense of ideological divisions between Trump supporters and Trump opponents. I mean, except like belief about Trump. Yeah. You know, one area is support

for Ukraine. It's war with Russia. Chairs who support Trump are not big fans of Ukraine, and they tend to lead more toward Russia in that conflict, whereas the rest of the party leans very strongly toward protecting Ukraine. people's sort of opinions about politics and, you know, opinions about race and gender and all sorts of other things. And one place where there is a big distinction is that Trump fans tend to have a somewhat more conspiratorial view toward politics, you know, that basically elites are controlling things and we don't get a fair shake. You wrote yesterday on your subsect newsletter about Trump's media coverage. I mean, not a surprise that he's getting a lot more media coverage than the other candidates, but it is interesting that he's getting a lot of additional coverage from CNN. And you wrote, one of the things we know that is associated with candidates' success in primaries, the amount of media coverage they receive. So not a surprise that he's dominant, but how dominant is he? I mean, how skewed is the media coverage of Donald Trump vis-a-vis the other Republican

candidates? It's pretty highly skewed. I mean, he's just he just completely dominates those figures. So this was a an index that's done by it's called the G-Delt online news summary. Basically, they take, you know, the percentage of stories that a news network runs on any given day and just say, OK, well, what percentage of those news stories contains the words Donald Trump or contains the words Ron DeSantis? And just looking at national news, you know, just generally on any given day, you know, roughly like 5% of news stories are about Trump and maybe like 1% are about DeSantis. And you can drill down a little bit. You know, I was looking looking at CNN and looking at Fox coverage.

On CNN, there's considerably more coverage of Trump. And it was ranging between 5% and 10% on any given day. But on the days when he's received an indictment, either from Manhattan or from Jack Smith, it would shoot up to like 20 to 25 percent of news stories were about Donald Trump that day. That's pretty stunning. And interestingly, it was actually he was getting more attention on CNN than he was on Fox. That is interesting. In fact, I also found it was interesting that you pointed out that DeSantis is getting almost identical coverage from both CNN and Fox, a statistically insignificant difference there. So he's getting a fair break from CNN and Fox. Or he's equally getting not a fair break, right?

Right, exactly, exactly. Let's switch to the Democrats just a little bit. You wrote, you don't fix parties by platforming cranks. You posted about how some Democrats are arguing for, you know, debates between Joe Biden and RFK Jr., who is a notorious anti-vax conspiracy theorist, former HUD secretary and presidential candidate Julian Castro has been making the argument in the New York Times. Actually, he was on the Run-Up podcast with one of our recent guests, Usted Herndon, and argues that despite Biden's you know, his age, the tepid enthusiasm for him, and because some semi-famous people are running against him, the Democrats should allow Biden-Kennedy debates. And he thinks that would benefit the party and Biden. You disagree. Yeah. He seemed to be making this argument that, you know, he was pretty confident that, you know, Biden would still emerge victorious, but that, you know, those more conspiratorial minded people who are

in the Democratic Party who are backing Kennedy, that they would be mollified by that, that they would think, well, you know, my candidate lost, but at least it was a fair system. It was a fair fight. And my candidate got to express their views. And I just don't think that's a realistic description of these folks at all. I think that pretty much no matter what happened in that, they would still claim that the outcome was rigged. They would claim that the debates were rigged. They would claim that, you know, well, look how well my candidate did. And they're still not letting him in this primary or they're still not letting him do this next thing. It feels like a little bit of PTSD going back to 2016 when, you know, Bernie's crowd insisted that the DNC had rigged the nomination fight against them, right?

I mean, isn't that sort of the cloud over all of this is you don't want to have a Bernie 2016 bitch fest all over again. Well, exactly. And this was something that Castro said in that interview. He was talking about how there's, I think what he called like a lingering bitterness from the 2016 race. That lingering bitterness was not because that contest was rigged. It was because the Sanders people kept claiming it was rigged. You know, there was not really that much, so much after 2020,

basically the party still took sides. People still endorsed Joe Biden in 2020, the same way they endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016. But there was no real rigging in any sort of illegal Mayor Daley in Chicago sense of the concept, where votes were suppressed or anything like that. And Sanders just chose not to make an issue out of it in 2020. And as a result, neither did his supporters. You don't really mollify that by platforming people who are conspiratorial minded. And I think, you know, if there was a problem with that with Sanders, it would be, you know, 20 times that with Robert Kennedy Jr., who's, that's really his whole platform is conspiracies.

And, you know, stepping back from the horse race issue here, there is a clear downside to platforming somebody who is as reckless as RFK Jr. I mean, RFK Jr. is not a normal political figure, despite his name. I mean, he is putting out things that are demonstrably false. And I think what we've seen is that when we platform crazy ideas with the naive belief that maybe they'll be exposed and discredited. In fact, what it does is it elevates them. It puts them into the mainstream. And so having a debate where the president of the United States stands on a stage in front of tens of millions of people, and then RFK Jr. uses that forum to basically pump bullshit and disinformation into the body

politic is just not a good thing. I mean, however it plays out in the polls or internal democratic politics, I mean, have we learned absolutely nothing over the last seven or eight years? I think that's exactly right. I'm not a big fan of the, you know, I guess what they call the debate me culture, you know, the idea that, well, you know, you shouldn't be afraid of just having the debate, even if the person making these arguments is manifestly irresponsible or if their ideas are crazy. There's sort of this magical thinking about the power of debate that only the correct answers will win in the end. You know, it's sort of like trial by combat, you know, in Game of Thrones or

something like that. Well, obviously the person who's saying falsehoods can't win in combat. And that's really all debate is in these things. It's whoever can, you know, yell the loudest or the most persuasively or something like that, you know, they've got to be on the right side. And there's just nothing to back that up. And in fact, what we've seen is that it ends up promoting bad, dangerous and false ideas. And that's exactly what RFK is trying to do is get, you know, conspiratorial and false ideas into the mainstream. Well, I mean, Castro also said that Cornel West, who's running for the Green Party nomination, should be given a bigger platform as well, because the general

election is going to come down to a few closed states and the people who feel left out of the system may stay home. I am really having a hard time getting into his head on all of this because Cornel West, you know, the more prominent he becomes, the more likely he is to repeat the Jill Stein phenomenon of 2016 and draw votes away and, you know, perhaps open the door to Donald Trump. Again, there seems to be kind of this this incredible ahistorical naivete about what happens when you elevate and amplify fringe candidates and fringe ideas. Yeah, I don't see the value of doing that. You know, I tend to be an advocate for, as I mentioned before, for parties taking more of a role in steering nominations. We've seen this in the past. In 2020, there were four or five state Republican parties that just canceled their primaries and just said, look, we're going to back Trump. He's going to be the nominee.

We're not going to do this. It's a waste of everyone's time and money. And that was actually not that unusual. Several state Democratic parties did that in 2012 with Obama. Parties are allowed to take sides. We could argue that maybe they defer to their incumbents too much. That's different from saying, well, we should, you know, promote a bunch of fringe candidates and the best candidate will win.

I think that's a real recipe for disaster. So since we're talking about political parties, it makes me think if I can ask this without it being too abstract, but does the Republican Party as an institution actually exist anymore? I don't mean literally, but in terms of its ability to control what in fact happens. Donald Trump is clearly not a creature of the Republican Party. Is there any Republican establishment that can actually do anything effectively in 2024? I mean, this is really a key question. I think it exists, but it has a lot of challenges. And I mean, it's just making sort of collective decisions. This is

not something the Republican Party has excelled at recently. If you think to like Kevin McCarthy becoming speaker back in January, it's not unusual for a presumptive speaker to face some challenges, right? Nancy Pelosi had that last time she became speaker. That tends to go on behind the scenes. It tends to be something that gets worked out ahead of time. And the actual vote ends up being pretty pro forma. No one gets embarrassed in the end. That's not what happened back in January.

They strung that out for a week. They embarrassed McCarthy repeatedly. There was just very little ability to actually do any deal making with a lot of folks where it wasn't really sure what they wanted out of him. We saw the same thing a few years earlier with the selection of Paul Ryan as speaker. It's a very hard job to be involved in just sort of collective decision making in that party. And I really think we saw that a ton in 2016. This was a

concern I was really focused on that year throughout that nomination contest, where you saw a fair chunk of the party expressing a lot of concerns about Donald Trump. Like I think it was National Review put out there against Trump issue in January of 2016. You saw, you know, Mitt Romney comes out and gives this big speech about here's why Trump is a problem. I was listening to your interview last week with Chris Christie, you know, where he said he backed Trump in, I guess it was February of 2016, because he thought it was inevitable. I would actually disagree with him there. Yeah, I did too. But what we did see is, you know, no one ever came out and said, okay, Trump is this problem. And here's why we need to back Jeb Bush, or we need to recruit Mitt Romney, or we need to, you

know, rally behind one person. That just never happened. Everyone sort of had their favorite pet candidate. And candidates sort of rose up against Trump one at a time. There was a moment for Chris Christie, there was a moment for Rubio. Later, there was a moment for Ted Cruz. But no one ever sort of closed ranks behind that candidate. And so they all sort of made a run at him and then failed. And then that was it. You saw the opposite go on with Democrats in 2020, I guess, like shortly after the New Hampshire primary, when everyone was sort of freaking out that Bernie Sanders was going to win, he was going to cost the party a victory in the fall. And the party needed to rally behind Joe Biden. And they did that.

It was rather shocking and fast, but they actually did that. And the contrast between what Republicans did not do in 2016 and what the Democrats did do in 2020 is pretty remarkable. Thinking back to 2016, that was perhaps the last year in which people could indulge the fantasy that there was this secret establishment out there, there was this party that would, you know, at some point in the end cause sanity to prevail, you know, would block him. And I remember back at the time, and this, I'm not telling tales out of school because I've discussed this before, but my fellow Wisconsinite, Reince Priebus, was chairman of the Republican National Committee. In our conversations, he constantly assured me, don't worry, it's not going to happen. There's no way that Donald Trump will win the nomination because, I don't know, something, something, something, magical thinking.

And in the end, the role that Reince played was to basically completely capitulate to Donald Trump because they were absolutely terrified that Donald Trump would run as a third party. And so they surrendered to him. But I do remember back then, there was still this thing, this feeling or this belief, this fantasy, that somehow the grownups would be able to stop this from happening. And of course, that seems like a very long time ago, that doesn't exist right now. I mean, in the era of Trump, the Republican National Committee just seems like this sort of, you know, pale, limp-wristed sort of waving, you know, whatever you want, Mr. Trump. We won't even pass a platform because it has nothing to do with us anymore. the question about political parties. So I guess we've been dancing around the big question. And again, you know, keeping in mind that predictions are very, very dangerous and usually ill-advised, but I'll ask for one anyway. I mean, is this thing over? Because there seems to be a conventional wisdom settling in that, you know, despite how big the field is, or maybe because of it,

that Trump's lead is so great, it is so dominant, that we're just going to do the same old thing all over again. So your sense, and also, I guess the question, is there anything conceivably that will happen that will change this dynamic, by which I'm obviously referring to more indictments, more cases, more details? Do they just strengthen Donald Trump's hands? Or in your mind, do you see any possibility that the cumulative weight of all of this will add up to people saying, yeah, we just can't do this again? What do you think? I've actually just been looking at the data from my recent survey on this about, you know, asking people if they're considering Donald Trump. And conveniently, I was running this survey at the time that the most recent indictments came down,

so you can sort of do a little before or after, and it looks like, you know, support for Trump in my survey increased after the indictments came down, which, again, that's consistent with some other polling we've seen that's consistent with what happened back in April, and, you know, all this is suggesting that, you know, all the trouble he gets into, it just seems to strengthen his hand in the nomination. It probably weakens him as a general election candidate. But for the nomination, yes. Probably. One thing I would say against this is that if his nomination were inevitable, you wouldn't be seeing a different candidate jump in the race every week.

Right. There's a lot of people who are running and most of them aren't running very strongly against him specifically. They're actually being relatively kind to him and kind to his supporters. My impression is that, you know, folks like Tim Scott or Nikki Haley or others are operating in a world where they probably don't think they can personally take down Trump in this environment, but they're expecting that something else might. And that could be that, you know, all these indictments actually force him to leave the race, or he's actually convicted of something, that something could actually take him out of contention. A meteor, a Big Mac, something like that. I think there's obviously some of them are figuring,

I just want to be standing here, you know, if he goes down to have that opening. Others, I do wonder whether they're actually running for president or, and I've said this before, whether they're running for something else, whether they're running for vice president, whether they're running for a bigger speaking gig, whether or not they have some other agenda. Because one of the ways of becoming a celebrity is to run for president. So it does seem as if there are the opportunists who think there might be an opening that something, something might happen versus others who are just like, why the hell not? I mean, let's face it. I mean, a lot of these candidates, there is no plausible way to think that they will actually become president of the United States. So what are they running for? I tend to have this impression that running for president is actually a huge pain and that you don't do it unless you actually have some belief that there's some way you could end up in that office. You would think so. You would think so.

But it's possible that some of these folks probably look at the two dozen or so Democrats who ran four years ago, and that didn't really seem to hurt any of them, right? No, none of them really. And it might have actually helped a few. Pete you know, Pete Buttigieg would be no one today had he not run for president. Correct. That did not hurt him. So maybe, maybe you make some friends. Interestingly, all the people who ran against Donald Trump back in 2016, you know, his running mate was someone who didn't run against him. He was looking for, you know, something completely different. This is a very interesting point because, again, here's the contrast. So all the Democrats that ran in 2020, they're all fine. All the Republicans who stood on the stage, and I can still remember

all of them, stood on the stage with Donald Trump have been absolutely crushed and broken. These are broken men. You know, remember when Marco Rubio was on the cover of Time magazine, the savior of the Republican Party, and there was Ted Cruz, you know, who had to, you know, grovel on Trump's feet after he called his wife ugly and after he called Donald Trump a serial liar. You know, Jeb Bush, please clap. I mean, every one of these guys was destroyed. And yet this year you have them all lining up to say, yeah, I want to be on that stage. Even though the track record of running against Donald Trump in a Republican primary is to be roadkill. Pretty guaranteed, you know, at some point they're going to be humiliated.

Chris Christie doesn't give a shit, you know. No, maybe not. He can't get any more humiliated than he's been. He's giving it a shot. Yeah. But I don't see that really getting much traction within the party. I guess in some ways, you know, there's a real chance that Trump won't actually show up for the first few debates. Oh, yeah. And this will be about, you know, who gets to have kind of a moment. That's one of the models I've had in mind for this is like thinking like the 2012 Republican nomination, where kind of everyone knew that Mitt Romney was probably going to get it. You know, he seemed that he had the money. He had the endorsements. He had a lot of the institutional backing.

But also, like, everyone had a moment. Everyone who was running against him, you know, they had a good debate moment or they had a good moment in the Iowa straw poll or something like that. Yeah, Gingrich gets to be in first place for a while. I think Michelle Bachman was actually polling first place for a while. Rick Santorum. Yeah. And I think we could

be seeing a version of that this fall where, you know, someone like Ramaswamy has a good debate night and he could rise up or Nikki Haley could or Tim Scott could, you know, that wouldn't surprise me even if it ends up being Trump. The other model of this is like Hillary Clinton in 2016, where like, you know, the party just is increasingly just rallying behind this front runner. And, you know, everything that happens just seems to confirm that he's the leader in this situation. I think it'll look more dynamic in the fall once debates actually start. But you know, it's a lot of the party already behind him at this point. So do you think it's inevitable? I mean, is that the assumption? I mean, is that settled in as the assumption among the Republican chairs that you have been surveying

that, okay, it's probably going to be Donald Trump again? I mean, do you think that there's a certain inevitability to it? I think people are seeing that. So this was, here was a question I asked in my most recent survey, regardless of who you want, who do you think will actually win? And interestingly enough, most people I spoke to said it would be Donald Trump. But at the beginning of the survey, when I first started asking this, you know, it was like maybe 60% or so saying that. And by the end of the survey period, I had like roughly 90% or so saying that. Just over the last few weeks, there's a lot of just this impression that, you know, Trump just has this in the bag.

I don't think it's quite as inevitable as they do, but that does seem to be the trend. Well, also, I mean, one of the arguments that I think some Republicans were hoping to make was that they were, and this would include even my old friend, Paul Ryan, who was just simply arguing, well, there's no way that Trump will win.

So we'll run against him because he cannot be elected, which I tend simply arguing, well, there's no way that Trump will win. So we'll run against him because he cannot be elected, which I tend to think is true. But that argument doesn't seem to be getting a lot of traction, especially when we have polls that the Trump people can point to saying, well, there's not a big gap between Trump and DeSantis in these public opinion polls. In fact, there are some polls that would show that the race is very, very close, or even that Donald Trump is leading Joe Biden. So that whole electability argument that a lot of Republicans had been hoping was their get out of jail free card so we don't have to attack Trump or talk about his fitness for office, that appears to have been shredded recently. Not to mention the fact that you have millions of Republican voters that simply don't believe that Donald Trump lost the last election. So this whole loser culture thing just doesn't seem to be working right now. What do you think? Yeah, so this has been a big focus for me.

The last book I wrote, Learning from Loss, this was about the Democrats going into 2020. Democrats were unusually focused in that cycle on this concept of electability. And they were looking for a candidate based solely on that one question, who can beat Donald Trump. And that caused a lot of people to rally behind Biden, even when he wasn't really their second, third, or even fourth pick. They just thought he was the one who could win. And there was just a lot of unification based on that. And so I've been sort of curious, like what Republicans would do coming out of 2020, would they have a similar focus on electability? Interestingly, one of the things we saw coming

out of the 2022 midterms last year, for several months, there was this pretty big narrative that really kind of dominated a lot of conversation that the party Republicans had underperformed in part because of Donald Trump, because of the candidates he had nominated or the candidates he'd endorsed, because he made himself the issue. He, you know, did his best to campaign around the country and raise his own image. And, you know, and there was some evidence to back that up. And that was an era in which, you know, you saw Paul Ryan going around the country saying like, look, he's costing us elections. Maybe we should look for something else. And that did have some traction for a few months.

And I think that just kind of waned with time. I think partially the Manhattan indictments at the end of March and early April kind of created a new story that it wasn't about that anymore. And, like, you actually saw for a little while some differences, some beliefs about electability, some, you know, even those who like Trump were willing to concede, OK, maybe he's not the most electable candidate, but I just like him and I think we can win anyway. Now, I think you see more of a thing where electability is simply another way of saying, well, who do you like? I think that's a good take. Actually, this is a question I should ask you. I've had this impression and I'm trying to write about this, that Republicans and Democrats think very differently about the concept of electability. That, you know, Democrats look back on, you know, the last, say,

50 years of presidential elections, and they see things like, well, okay, McGovern lost because he was too liberal, so he moderated and got Carter and won. You know, Democrats were losing in the 80s because they kept nominating liberals, so they moderated and got Carter and won. You know, Democrats were losing in the 80s because they were kept nominating liberals. So they moderated with Bill Clinton and won. Hillary Clinton was too liberal. They moderated with Biden and won. You know, so they say when we moderate, we win. Whereas Republicans, you know, they say, well, we were told Reagan couldn't win because he was too extreme, but he won. We were told Trump couldn't win because he was too extreme, but he won. And we moderated with McCain. We moderated with Romney because we were told we had to. And those guys lost. You know, I don't know that either side is necessarily right or

wrong in this, but I just think they interpret these election losses very differently from each other. Oh, I think you're absolutely right. In fact, I think this goes back to sort of the legacy of Limbaugh, who kept arguing, who for years argued that we've never actually tried running a real conservative. And, you know, rather than, you know, go to the center and the swing voters, you know, go hard right. And then, of course, that appears to have been validated with the first election of Donald Trump. So, yeah, I do think there doesn't seem to be any major impulse in the Republican Party right now to move to the center. In fact, there does appear to be this contest between Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump, who can move harder to

the right. I mean, DeSantis seems to have created a chart of every position that Donald Trump has taken and then figure, well, you know, what is the more right-wing position that I can take to flank him? And that seems to be the dynamic. By the way, speaking of DeSantis, I have to admit, I haven't paid that much attention lately because I just think the guy is, the more people see him, the less they like him and he's fading. But I was struck when I saw on television yesterday and he had a big backdrop, his slogan that he's really leaning into, which is restore sanity, which I thought was a very interesting kind of troll. I'm not trying to say anything good about Rhonda Sanders, but at least subliminally, we need to restore sanity. And this is not just a one-off. So big sign, restore sanity. What is he saying there?

He's not willing to say, this guy is crazy. He's nuts. Listen to him. So he gave a speech back in March where he said, I will restore normalcy, integrity, and sanity. Now, his defense is, well, I'm talking about Joe Biden. No, he's not. When you talk about restoring normalcy, integrity, and sanity, and you're running against Donald Trump, you are saying something, even if Ron DeSantis can't bring himself to actually say the words. This guy is nuts. He cannot be president of the United States again. But I don't know, what do you think? I mean, that seems to me to be a pretty direct troll. I think it's a pretty clever slogan because you can read what you want in it, right?

Right. Like in the same way that like, make America great again, you can decide when it was that America was great. It doesn't actually say, and yeah, this could be seen as a troll against Trump that, you know, he's, he wants to make the Republican party sane again.

You know, his defense is that, well, I want to make the country sane again. You know, I think probably the best campaign slogans are ones that, you know, basically everyone can read whatever they want into it and it still

confirms what they want. I agree. Seth Maskett, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast. Seth is professor of political science, director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver. And you can read his Substack newsletter, Tusk, where he's covering the campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Seth Maskett, thank you so much for being on the podcast today.

Oh, it was great talking to you. Thanks so much. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow, and we'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.