The NPR Politics Podcast - How Much Sway Does Donald Trump Hold In Republican Primaries?

Episode Date: March 24, 2022

Tepublicans in the Ohio Senate primary are vying for Trump's endorsement to gain an edge in a crowded field. But Trump's approval doesn't mean an automatic victory: the former president just rescinded an endorsement in the Alabama Senate race, and his candidate was lagging in the polls. This episode: Congressional correspondent Susan Davis, acting congressional correspondent Deirdre Walsh, and national political correspondent Don Gonyea. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hello, this is Eric in Plymouth, Michigan, and I'm about to make my first contribution to my local NPR radio station. Where I live, that's WDET in Detroit. This podcast was recorded at 2.05 p.m. on Thursday, March 24th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. All right, here's the show. Oh, that's music to our ears. We love it when you support your local stations.

And from WDET, where I started my career. Special shout out to Don today. Go Tigers! Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Deirdre Walsh. I also cover Congress. And I'm Don Gagne, national political correspondent. The midterm primary races are intensifying. And in Republican primaries, one of the big questions we're looking for answers to is this.

How much influence does former President Trump still have over candidates and voters? Don, you were just in Ohio. I don't even know how many trips to Ohio this makes for you now. I imagine you're probably in the four digits at this point. It's only two in the last month. Just wait. So you were there reporting on the Republican Senate primary. Trump has been a big focus for the candidates in this race.

So talk us through who the top candidates are. There are really five top candidates. There's investment banker Mike Gibbons. He leads in the polls. Then there's former state treasurer and Marine veteran Josh Mandel. J.D. Vance is in the race. He's the author of the bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. Also, former state Republican Party chair Jane Timken and state senator Matt Dolan.

He's part of the family that owns the Cleveland Guardians, used to be the Indians, baseball team. So those are the main candidates anyway. So Trump hasn't endorsed in the Republican primary in Ohio. How are the candidates trying to get his attention and get his support? Well, it's not just a big field. Even though we have Mike Gibbons in the lead, polls say that roughly 40 percent of Republicans are still undecided. So in a multiple candidate race, things could still be very fluid. And I should say that with the exception of Matt Dolan, each of these candidates spends a lot of time showing off their pro-Trump credentials. And, I mean, Trump comes up all the time in their campaign ads. There are pretenders in the Senate race.

Gene Timken is the real Trump conservative. Trump and Gibbons are businessmen with a backbone. Trump saved our economy before. Gibbons are businessmen with a backbone. Trump saved our economy before. Gibbons knows how to do it again. Josh Mandel, pro-God, pro-gun, pro-Trump. So you get the idea there. Yeah, not subtle. Don, you were there, you went to one of the candidate debates earlier this week. One thing that has struck me about this race is it just seems so nasty. I mean, not that primaries are ever sort of nice contests, but this one in particular seems like it's gotten

really personal and really mean. And people will tell you that they do kind of see that as part of Trump's influence on this race as well. People are standing their ground and going at each other. So there have been two debates in the past week, and there's another one next week. But at the first event, a new poll had just come out showing Mike Gibbons in the lead. So the candidate who used to be in the lead, Josh Mandel, went after the frontrunner and went after him every chance he got. And at one point, Mandel accused Gibbons, again, Gibbons, the millionaire investment banker, right? Mandel accused him of selling out Ohio jobs to China.

And Gibbons pushed back hard. Next thing you know, these two guys are chest to chest, making contact, nose to nose, screaming at each other for about a minute. You may not understand this because you've never been in the private sector. No, you don't. I do. You've never been in the private sector. I've worked, sir. Two tours in Iraq.

Don't tell me I haven't worked. Don't tell me I haven't worked. You don't know squat. And I will tell you, being in the room, it was tense and it was also really awkward. And I have not seen anything quite like it. And I've been covering these things for a while. And the audience didn't quite know how to react. And eventually the moderator, an AM talk radio host, had to kind of get in there and break it up.

And at another debate, there was another question that I thought was interesting to ask of Republican candidates. Do you think that for the betterment of the Republican Party, it's time for Donald Trump to stop talking about the 2020 election and move on? So that's a fraught moment, right, for a Republican. Anyway, one candidate, Matt Dolan, raised his hand and he further said, look, there was no fraud in the 2020 election. We did audits here in Ohio. We run good elections. He was, of course, kind of the anti-Trump on the stage, even though he is a conservative and talks about his conservative credentials all the time. But I will tell you, the other four just stood there, kept their hands down. They were not going to volunteer that it was time to move beyond Donald Trump. And I will also tell you that Matt Dolan is polling near the bottom in single digits.

That's very telling. Deirdre, we talk to a lot of Republican lawmakers on the Hill all the time about this. I know you've been reporting on the January 6th committee investigation. You've also talked to and looked at Republicans in the Senate who might want to run for presidents themselves. What do you hear from Republican lawmakers about this same question? I mean, is this something that the people that are already in Congress want to move away from? Or like in Ohio, are most of them still willing to say that this is a fight worth having? It's a pretty tricky line. I mean, they don't, they know how popular President Trump is with the Republican base, and they want to make sure that

they hold on to that support in the upcoming midterms. But they don't really want to relitigate the 2020 election. I mean, they want to talk about the midterms in the frame of being a referendum on President Biden's record. Basically, like, they want to litigate 2021, not 2020. But they're very mindful about how powerful trump's voice is and how much sway he has with the base so they instead sort of pivot to other issues that are identified with trump that are still very popular there's a lot of talk about border security about increasing crime rates so i think they want to focus on the issues that can link them to Trump and to link them to Trump's policies. But they want to stay away from the January 6th topic.

Most of them at least do. All right. Let's take a quick break. And when we get back, we'll hear more about what's happening in Ohio. And we're back. And, Don, we've been talking about the candidates in the Ohio Republican Senate primary. But as you do, you also talk to a lot of Ohio voters. And I'm curious what they are telling you about this race and how closely they're

following the primary race. It feels like they're just now really starting to lock in. The primary is May 3rd, so that's less than six weeks away, though it could be delayed because of legal battles over redistricting. That's playing out in Ohio, as it is in a lot of places. But I will tell you, Trump is very popular among Republicans in Ohio, and it is a bit of a task for them to try to sort out just who's who with so many candidates all claiming the mantle of Trump. I talked to an undecided voter after that first debate. Her name is Kathy Deal. She works at her local church. She's undecided. She's Republican, but she does not know which of these candidates she likes. And she really wishes Trump would help her out by endorsing somebody. Trump has not given an endorsement.

No, he's not. That would definitely seal it, for sure. If he were to endorse. Yes, it would seal it. For you. Deirdre, that's really interesting to me because it's not really surprising that Trump's popular with the average Republican voter. I don't think any of us are surprised by that. But it does seem worth noting that Trump-end Trump endorsed candidates in other races aren't necessarily a lock. They aren't. I mean, this week in Alabama, Mo Brooks, who's the Republican congressman from the state who's

running for the Senate seat there, had his Trump endorsement rescinded by former President Trump. He has been not doing so well in the polls in that Republican primary. And Trump put out a statement basically pulling back his endorsement of Brooks. You know, in other states like Pennsylvania, the former president hasn't endorsed in another crowded Republican primary, sort of like in Ohio. And candidates in that state are also trying to appeal to Trump to get his nod. But, you know, there's some of those candidates potentially have some baggage and different elements of the party are pushing for them. And I think he's reluctant to weigh in because his initial candidate, who he endorsed in that race actually had to drop out for personal reasons. So he's very focused on winning.

So I think Trump may be less and less inclined to pull out the endorsements until he has a better read on sort of where the primary vote is heading. Right. He does not want to pick the losers in these races. He wants to be on the winning side, especially for his own sort of Trump brand seal. Definitely. Also, when it comes to messaging in this election, I think we're seeing more and more from Republicans, the kind of themes that they're going to want to focus on throughout this year into November. We saw it somewhat this week in the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Biden nominee Katonji Brown-Jackson. It was a platform for several Republicans, some of them who may have presidential ambitions

of their own, to sort of test out some of these messages. Deirdre, you've been sort of reporting on this. What were some of those messaging themes you saw in the hearing and sort of why are they focusing on those? Well, as we've seen in the past, the Senate Judiciary Committee's confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominees are sort of a national event. A lot of people tune in from both the Republican base and the Democratic base, and they become sort of a place for would-be presidential candidates to gain a lot of attention, have a moment in the national spotlight.

And there were three Democrats on the committee who ran for president in 2020. And there are at least five Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee now who might run for president in 2024. And many of them definitely took their time in the spotlight to focus on issues they think could give them some traction. And we heard a lot about cultural issues. We heard a lot about things like critical race theory, a legal academic theory that a lot of people in the Republican base are very animated about.

We heard a lot about rising crime rates, the threat of safety, the threat of child predators, which sort of sprang from some conspiracy theories from a right-wing movement known as QAnon, but has had some traction with some element of the Republican base. And several Republican senators, even though some of those issues really don't play a role in terms of whether they come before the Supreme Court, they decided to use their time to speechify and try be replayed, you know, on social media posts or on Fox News or other outlets to sort of show their conservative credentials. One of the things I think is interesting about this right now is that, you know, it's kind of

conventional wisdom that in primaries, candidates can be pushed too far to the right or too far to the left if they're not careful and make them less palatable in a general election. But this time around, it seems like Republican candidates from the top to the bottom, from leadership on down, aren't as afraid of these cultural issues. They don't seem to fear that they could be more alienating in November in a bigger, broader general election. I'm not entirely sure where that is, but I would say that I just don't get the sense that other folks in the party are like, oh, we got to pull back on this. If anything, they seem to be going all in. I talked to one of the Republicans who got a lot of attention during this week's hearings,

Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley, about the pushback he was getting from the White House and from others on the committee about his line of questioning focused on child pornography. And he essentially said, you know, bring it on. So if they want to dismiss parents' concerns about their children's safety, and they want to dismiss concerns about crime as a conspiracy theory, take that argument to the polls. They really do want to turn out the base, not just in the primary, but again in November. And in Ohio, this is not the case in a place like Pennsylvania, but in Ohio, they've got a cushion. Donald Trump carried the state easily twice. So you watch these candidates and it's clear they see very little risk that they're pushing it too far to the right in these primary debates.

All right. Let's leave it there for today. We'll be back in your feeds tomorrow with the Weekly Roundup. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. I'm Deirdre Walsh. I also cover Congress. And I'm Don Gagné, national political correspondent. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.