The Trump Inevitability Question
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Are you excited to be the random people just talking into a microphone in the subway? Yeah, I was thinking, like, it's also New York, and so, like, you know, you're like, is this person famous or they're just a conceited jerk? And we're definitely going to be the latter. That's the run-up! Oh, my God, that's the run-up! From the New York Times, I'm Astead Herndon, and this, of course, is the run-up. April 4th was a little surreal.

That morning, instead of sitting down in front of my computer, we're heading into the Times building. It's 9:38. We are on our way to the Manhattan courthouse. I met up with my colleagues, Kaitlyn O'Keefe and Anna Foley in Brooklyn. All right, we have arrived to Canal Street and we are going to find our way to the courthouse. How long is the walk? Do we know? And we headed to the courthouse in Lower Manhattan.

for the arraignment of Donald Trump. Across the street, there was this park. So I think in this area is where we have most of the Trump supporters who are here.

and walking through the crowd. I'm trying to look for someone who feels earnestly here because they actually care, you know? Everyone seemed like they were there. We should talk to somebody, though, but... Do you want to find someone or do you want... It's still on the scope. Yeah. To be part of a spectacle. This lady vaping with the American flags.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. With the skull guy? The MAGA skull guy? Oh yeah. Yeah. To see and be seen.

Hi. Hi. My name's Caitlin. I'm with the New York Times. Do you have a minute? Ah, New York Times. Yes, of course. What's your name? My name is Karen. Last name is L-I-C-H-T-B-R-A-U-N. I've had practice. Not your first interview today? No. How many have you done? At least ten. Wow. Yeah. What brings you here today? President Trump. I stand with our last president. And to express my dissatisfaction with the sham, my dissatisfaction with D.A. Bragg,

Can you say more about that? About D.A. Bragg? He's fake charges, charges that have no foundation. Meanwhile, there are daily shootings in New York City. He's releasing criminals who have rap sheets the size of toilet paper rolls. Lots of people had lines like these. People talked a lot about political overreach. They said that Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg was turning what was essentially campaign finance charges into a series of felony offenses.

that Trump had been targeted by liberals. Can you just describe what you're wearing? Oh, I got my MAGA jacket from his rally in Pennsylvania. Is that Save America? It's Save America. What's the shirt and what's the hat, too? Okay, uh, Trump won. And Trump was right. And as we see him getting indicted, yes, Trump was right. About the witch hunt part? What about what? About the witch hunt part. About everything. But I wore it today specifically about the witch hunt. Okay.

They said that despite criminal charges. This was actually a good thing for Trump's presidential campaign. More than anything, it all took me back.

You know, the scene reminds me of things I used to see in 2017, 2016, right after the election, where it was just chaos, more so than it felt like an organized political event. There's someone spinning basketballs on top of American flags. It's not really Donald Trump, more so than it is, like, you know, there's a person here in the big Elvis t-shirt. Like, it's just a collection of characters, and he is the main character.

But these are people who just want to get in on the action. We started making our way to the other side of the park. And there's a row of people. They all have signs. No one is above the law. Trump is a crime boss. Innocent until proven Trumpy. Trump, con artist, check. Racist, check.

Coup plotter check. Nuclear spy question mark exclamation point. Where the anti-Trump crowd was posted. And then some pictures of Trump behind bars. Hi. Fred. Good to meet you. Hi, Fred. How are you? Well, what brings you here today? Oh, just, I guess, really the spectacle of it. Also, because I feel like this guy has been...

He's an old school New York con man who's been doing this for a long, long time. I've lived here my whole life. So, you know, he's an entertainer and he kind of turned politics into professional wrestling for four years, maybe seven years, I guess it is now. And it's just it's about time he got his comeuppance. Do you think that that's what this will be? Trump facing his comeuppance? I don't know if it's going to happen in this particular case. I think more so with the other cases. They have more teeth to them, but...

I think down the line, hopefully. The hope was that this arraignment was just the beginning. He needs to be held accountable. Well, I think it's good that he's being held accountable. Nobody's above the law. And as Trump's legal charges mount...

his political problems will get worse. Now, this isn't the most egregious offense, but, you know, at least it's the start. There's the Georgia probe, and then there's now the document stuff that came out with the morgue. I'd like to see the domino effect, where it all comes crashing down. Again, being optimistic, but this is a nice first step, I suppose. Trump's arraignment was set to begin at 2.15. We headed over to where we thought he was going to enter—

on the side of the criminal courthouse. We were far from the first to arrive. A wall of media. Oh my goodness.

It was a huge mass of people and cameras. Who do we have here? Do you, like, recognize any? No. And once we found our spot in the crowd... That's Jack Posobiec. Oh, he's here. Yeah, right? Isn't that Jack Posobiec? Yeah. I realized we were standing right next to Jack Posobiec. My bad. He's a cute guy, right? He's a pizza gate. We once had lunch at Trump Tower. Wow. Posobiec is a far-right commentator known for promoting the pizza gate conspiracy theory.

that Hillary Clinton and other Democrats were running a child sex trafficking ring out of a pizza place in Washington, D.C. This is when I was at the Globe. I did the story about how, like, the think tank of Trump was, like, Reddit and the weirdo internet. Yeah. Yeah, we should talk to him. We definitely should. Yeah. And we pulled him aside for the Trump insider perspective. How you doing? How are you doing, man? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we had lunch time. We had lunch at Trump. I was just saying that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do you expect this to help Trump in the short term? Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. And you're seeing that not just in terms of small dollar donations, I think up to $8 million since the indictment came down, but massive resurgence in the polls. But also, you know, I think there's been a question since the 2022 election of people saying, can Trump win back independence? Can he win back moderates? Can he win back this narrative about the suburbs and suburban women in particular? And I think that when you see that...

With Americans, there's the left and the right, but there's all, you know, there's normies, right? There's the people in the middle that just kind of, you know, they want things to be normal. They like normalcy. They want to go back to things the way they were. And there's a strong belief in America of fair play and that,

when they see the system treating someone unfairly, that changes the narrative around from, okay, do you support Trump, do you support Biden, do you support Sanders, whoever. Suddenly it's like the refs have it in for one team and they're putting their thumbs on the scale. So you think this moment is not just good for him from the primary, but there's a way that he can reach independent swing builder, a type of person who

you know, was tough for Republicans in the midterms. Oh, 100%. And that's exactly what I'm saying, because this takes his rhetoric about, you know, the deep state and the route to get me and to go to somebody who maybe doesn't necessarily ascribe to that, that they can look at that and say, well, you know what?

These charges do seem a little silly. And didn't Hillary pay a fine for something like this? Didn't Obama pay a fine for some campaign finance? You know, why is it suddenly it's a crime when Trump has $130,000 payment? And so I think that there's going to be a large number of those independents and moderates that are starting to bear out in polling already that are going to switch on this. They don't like seeing things like this go on. Coming out of the midterms, there was a kind of question of the power of Donald Trump, whether that had diminished significantly.

Is there anything that you think Trump needs to do differently to really shore up some of the support that did seem like it was fading from him in some places? You know, the interesting thing about President Trump, and we had dinner a few weeks ago, actually just before, the night before all of this broke, all this news broke, that

He's a fighter. And what I mean by that is he tends to look at challenges as they come and take challenges as they come. He's totally focused on the fight in front of him. I don't say that as someone who's trying to prop him up. I just say that's my read on it, right? Is that, you know, you spend a lot of time around Republican politics. Is that a good thing? You know, is that the way you would advise him? Well, that's kind of what I'm getting at is that, uh,

For a guy like Donald Trump, you are not going to change his stripes at this point in the game.

You look at a guy, he's already been impeached. I lost track of how many times the guy's been impeached. And we don't even talk about those anymore. Anybody else wouldn't be leading in the polls at this point. Anybody else would be disgraced. But Donald Trump keeps coming back. And so I think that his strength in the polls is testament to that because it shows he does have the ability to withstand other challenges that would decimate. Why is that?

Because he's not a career politician. He's viewed more as this, as a folk hero, almost. And so people view that and say, look, the system hates this guy. There must be something good about him. Good. I appreciate the time. Always helpful. You too, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good seeing you. After I finished talking with Posobiec, I looked at my phone and realized Trump was already inside the courthouse.

So after being on the scene for six hours, we headed out. A cop led us through the barricade, separating the press from the crowd. — Thank you so much. — I'm jealous. — You ready to leave? — Yes. I was ready to leave before I got here. — On the ride back, we caught up on some of the things that had happened while we were out. Trump had pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

And news had come out that the prosecutors were hoping to hold the trial in January 2024, right at the beginning of the election year. Okay. So instead, we have made it back to our corner of the second floor of the New York Times building. Tell me about our day. Yeah, I mean, like, it's a historic day. It's a weird day. You know, I feel like there is undeniably...

faction of Republicans who will never leave Donald Trump. And there is now undeniably a legal train that threatens to put Trump in jail. That is a collision course. So it just feels like it's a day where things have really been set into motion. It sets off a process where the leading Republican candidate of the next election is likely to be facing criminal charges at the same time.

of the race. A president who has made victimhood his weapon, who has made retribution his promise, now feels like he gets a proof point that at minimum will last through the 2024 election. So I think if you're Joe Biden, if you're Ron DeSantis, if you're Nikki Haley, I think you have to recognize that this is going to be the center of the earth. That doesn't mean it leads to Donald Trump becoming president again.

But I think it definitely leads to Donald Trump being the center of the presidential election again. And he already was going to be. Yeah. Yeah. I think there was a little bit of a staleness as to what he's saying. He now has something that looks ahead to make his victimhood arguments rather than looks backwards. Yeah, which is exactly what everybody at the RNC says he needed. What we've been hearing for months is the thing that they want him to do. 100%.

I feel like this is actually a new moment, but I feel like the people who will define how this new moment lands are not the people we saw today. For the politics question about does this make him more or less likely to be the next president, that's not the rabbit fans or the anti-fans. That's everybody else. I don't think we know how that goes.

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- Hello, this is Yuande Kamalefa from "New York Times Cooking," and I'm sitting on a blanket with Melissa Clark. - And we're having a picnic using recipes that feature some of our favorite summer produce. Yuande, what'd you bring? - So this is a cucumber agua fresca. It's made with fresh cucumbers, ginger, and lime.

How did you get it so green? I kept the cucumber skins on and pureed the entire thing. It's really easy to put together and it's something that you can do in advance. Oh, it is so refreshing. What'd you bring, Melissa?

Well, strawberries are extra delicious this time of year, so I brought my little strawberry almond cakes. Oh, yum. I roast the strawberries before I mix them into the batter. It helps condense the berries' juices and stops them from leaking all over and getting the crumb too soft. Mmm. You get little pockets of concentrated strawberry flavor. That tastes amazing. Oh, thanks. New York Times Cooking has so many easy recipes to fit your summer plans. Find them all at NYTCooking.com. I have sticky strawberry juice all over my fingers.

In the week since Trump's arraignment, a lot's happened. President Joe Biden officially running for re-election. Joe Biden has formally announced he's running for his second term. He hopes the American people will let him, quote, finish the job, calling the race a battle for the soul of America. And he's leading hard into the anti-Trump message again.

And on the Republican side, poll numbers show Republican voters largely shrug at both the legal troubles facing him and his political liabilities. At least part of Posobiec's prediction has panned out. And among Republican voters, it appears that the New York indictment only galvanized his support. Trump's upping the polls. He's raising more money. The campaign has raised millions of dollars in recent days, even offering a T-shirt with a fake mugshot.

And at the same time, You know, Ron DeSantis has become Ron who? his strongest expected challenger in the primary is down. Have you ever had a chance of taking on Donald Trump? Of consolidating the various wings of the Republican Party and being a credible challenger? Boy, he has really blown it. There's a sense that the momentum of the race has shifted. At least at this moment, all momentum is with Trump. And that now, more than any time since the midterms, Trump's nomination is starting to feel like a done deal.

But what feels true isn't always what is true. So after being at the arraignment and spending so much time talking to party insiders and political figures, I wanted to gut check what those people have told me against what we actually know. Is Donald Trump as inevitable as everyone seems to think? Hello, can you hear me? I can hear you. Awesome.

So I went to my colleague, Nate Cohn. You've been like a dream guest for me. So I hope you know that there's no pressure, but like some of it, because I'm pretty sure this is going to be great. All right. Well, that's a high bar to clear. I don't know if we can get there, but maybe we can aspire to it until proven otherwise. Nate's job as chief political analyst at The Times is to understand the electorate.

So outside the courthouse, I heard a lot of people make kind of guesses about where they think this might impact the presidential race. I wanted to ask you, as someone who lives in the numbers and the hard data, what do we know about how the indictment is landing?

So far, I don't think there's a lot of evidence that the indictment has really changed the race because the race was already changing before the indictment came. For many months, Donald Trump has been gaining ground in the polls and DeSantis has been losing ground. And this latest wave of polls after the indictment shows a continuation of that trend. It's a little hard to know whether it's the same trend where DeSantis is just still losing ground as if the indictment never happened or if maybe these additional gains for Trump since the indictment you can attribute to the indictment.

Either way, it's not that much different than it was before. On the specifics of the indictment itself, most of the polls show that Republicans are prepared to defend the president. They think that it's a political indictment. They think the charges are bogus. That doesn't necessarily mean that people who previously opposed Donald Trump as the Republican nominee are now willing to support him.

But conversely, there's very little evidence that people who previously liked Donald Trump now want DeSantis or someone else. And why don't we know more about how the indictment's landing?

Well, I think the biggest reason is we don't have as many polls as we used to. Polling has gotten a lot more expensive. It's early in the year. And so if you don't have a very large polling budget, you're saving your ammunition for later. As a consequence, we don't have very many really high quality polls that were conducted both immediately after the indictment and immediately before to give us this really crisp sense of how the race changed. Mm hmm.

So, you know, purses are tight in this moment. And particularly as we're early in the presidential cycle, I understand that. But if we could open up the purse strings here, if we can conduct our own kind of personal polling between the two of us, what would you want to know? What would be the questions you would seek to ask to learn where this primary might be headed?

I have a lot of questions just about the Republican electorate as a whole right now. Like what? You know, we used to have a really clear idea of what the Republican Party was. You know, we used to think about it as a collection of different factions. You may remember the three-legged stool that Ronald Reagan famously characterized the Republican Party as. Can you remind me of the leg? All right, I'll remind you of the three-legged stool. It's very famous.

But one leg was the religious right. Another leg was the business fiscally conservative wing of the party. And the third wing was the foreign policy wing of the party that was focused on anti-communism at the time and later counterterrorism. That immediately hits me as outdated. It is very outdated. That model is totally dead. I think there was something to it as late as 2012, to be honest.

You could fit all the candidates back then into representing one of those legs of the stool. But Donald Trump blew it up. He doesn't fit into any of those categories. In many cases, he opposed each of the legs of the stool. Right. And I don't think that we have very many poll questions that have helped illuminate what the Republican Party is today. What's the new versions of the stool? Yeah. What's the new stool that Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis is going to try and sit on?

It feels like all of this is in service of a larger question, which is, is Trump as inevitable as it seems? And I say it seems not because of the polling, which you have informed me is pretty unreliable, at least right now. But...

in a larger sense where it seems that both parties are in agreement, at least somewhat, about his inevitability. We're at the RNC, we're at the DNC, and that seems to bind them. Is their belief that Donald Trump will be kind of the driver of the next year and a half in presidential politics, is that as inevitable data-wise as the political parties seem to think it is?

I don't think that I could point anything to you in the polls that says he is inevitable. I think that the biggest reason why Trump feels inevitable right now is because he feels like he is dominating Ron DeSantis day in and day out on TV in the media conversation that since January, Donald Trump has gone on offense and,

That Ron DeSantis has gone on defense, that we have mainly been talking about the things that are sort of argued to be wrong with Ron DeSantis, like his support for entitlements or the new abortion bill that he's passed. Or why didn't he punch back against Trump rather than things that are potentially problematic about the former president?

And this has contributed to a sense, and I think a very justifiable sense, that although Donald Trump may be vulnerable and although Ron DeSantis may have an important base of support that potentially could be the foundation of a winning coalition, that this person personally doesn't have what it takes to beat Donald Trump. That's my view of it personally. That's not scientific. That's just me holding my thumb up to the wind and feeling the breeze. But as of today, I don't—

I don't think the numbers look like a race that's already over, even if it feels like Ron DeSantis is getting kicked around every day. And indeed, he may well be getting kicked around every day. And one of the things that came up in our reporting again was the question of how much of the Republican mace remains unshakably by Donald Trump. What do we know about that? How big is that group? So first of all, this does beg a little bit of that question about which polls you want to look at. But if you trust the very best polling,

And you go with the lowest point that Trump was at after the midterms, the Trump floor, that base that seems truly unshakable might only be 30%. And that there's actually a huge group of people beyond that who, like Donald Trump, will vote for him and indeed have returned to his side since Trump's low point in January and December. But...

who I can't characterize as being unshakable if they were willing to support Ron DeSantis as recently as five months ago. One of the things that is a kind of circle I can't square in our reporting is that at the RNC, at CPAC, when we talk about who's driving the Republican Party insiders, it's so driven by that Trump base and by the reality that they are leading the issues and the activists. But when you look at the numbers, to your point, there does seem to be a lot of other Republicans

Republicans. What do we know about those other non-Trump Republicans? I mean, how would we quantify them and how would we qualify what they're looking for in a candidate? That's such a great question. And I think it's helpful to go back to 2016 to remember some of the fissures and fault lines in the Republican Party. You know, Donald Trump won the nomination, but he only won it with 45 percent in the end. And some of those votes were accumulated when he was running essentially unopposed after the Indiana primary.

But the opposition to Trump couldn't be consolidated against him. There was, on the one hand, a group of very conservative Republicans, sort of Ted Cruz, Tea Party, constitutional conservative types who thought that Trump didn't go far enough in sort of maintaining the old party line of consistent ideological conservatism.

There was, on the other hand, a group of relatively moderate Republicans, people who at that time were backing John Kasich and earlier in the primary considered Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, who didn't like Trump for an entirely different set of reasons. That they were pro-immigration reform, that they thought that Trump was going to destroy our alliances.

that they thought that Trump was going to hurt free trade and business interests and so on. And so although the core of Trump's support may not represent a majority of the party, the rest of it is kind of fractured, and it is challenging to stitch together a coherent anti-Trump coalition. One thing I think Ron DeSantis has struggled at, and one of the reasons he has seemed to fall flat over the last few months is because he's dealing with the challenge of linking these groups. You may remember the controversy over

Whether Ron DeSantis supported Ukraine against Russia enough. Yep. You may remember this fight over abortion today. There are like DeSantis donors complaining about his position on abortion. And well, that's a case where there's real tension between these two wings of the Republican Party that somehow would have to all be stuffed under the Ron DeSantis umbrella to ultimately beat Trump.

I get what you're saying. I think this is a really important point that I feel like just really clicked for me. When you're talking about the Trump base as maybe that 30 to 40 percent, then you see the number of like the 60 percent as the thing that someone would need to consolidate to beat him. But the reasons those 60 percent don't like Donald Trump are varied. And there can be a conservative slice that maybe voted for a Ted Cruz or someone like that who is coming from Donald Trump from the right. And there can be other people.

who are coming from Donald Trump for more of what we consider a traditional moderate Republican base. And the challenge for someone, whether it be Ron DeSantis or any candidate who will want to be Trump in 24, is how to get both of those anti-Trump groups to link up under the same umbrella. That is exactly right. And the first few months of this race has shown that problem for Ron DeSantis. I do think it's worth remembering that

late last year after the midterm election, that challenge didn't look so daunting. And Ron DeSantis sometimes led in the polls. There were head-to-head polls routinely showing DeSantis in the lead. And so I do think that there are a series of special conditions that can come into alignment to bring anti-Trump forces together. What do you mean? But it's very challenging. Well, one is somehow you need to keep the race focused on a handful of issues that do link those two sides. And, you know, I think that

This is Ron DeSantis' campaign against woke. And if you're listening, I've got it in quotes, but I mean it. However, Ron DeSantis means it is how I mean it here. That campaign did link both of these sides. One curious thing about the fight against woke is that like elite moderate Republicans in Manhattan, they don't like the cultural left, you know, in the DEI programs at all.

Goldman Sachs or wherever that they have to go through. And they're not big fans of the gender unicorn being taught in their Park Slope public school or something. And the very conservative Republicans don't like it either. And they may disagree on abortion and they may disagree on all kinds of things, but they actually can be linked in an anti-woke fight against the newer set of issues that have emerged over the last five or six years.

The challenge, it seems to me, is for Ron DeSantis so far has been keeping the conversation about that. You know, Donald Trump has successfully attacked him and made it about entitlements or abortion or Ukraine. And Ron DeSantis has struggled to ever pivot back to the stuff that he was succeeding about, perhaps in no small part because these aren't necessarily disagreements between Ron DeSantis and Trump.

which makes it a little bit harder to make it the centerpiece of a campaign. Right, you're linking people up on terms that Donald Trump would probably agree with. Exactly. That makes it a little bit more challenging, but it's an example of the sort of thing that Ron DeSantis had in December and doesn't really have right now. It seems like the moderate coalition is really key to all this and is a group that kind of gets lost in the shuffle. It's not a group I hear at the RNC that much. It's certainly not a group I hear from CPAC.

How should we be thinking about this group? And is there any evidence that candidate, whether it be Rhonda Sanchez or any of the others, meaning Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, you know, Tim Scott, people have made overtures at that group. Is there any evidence that they have consolidated them in any serious form?

Uh, most of the polls that I have looked at recently, and I can't say this is comprehensive, but most of them show Ron DeSantis doing best among moderates, which is really funny given that, you know, he has sort of positioned himself as being a conservative. Interesting. Yeah. We're the most conservative. And I think the I actually think it may even help explain why he's trying to run so far to the right is that.

Perhaps this indicates that moderates in the Republican Party are going to oppose Trump no matter what. And so the best thing you can do is try and win off those very conservative Ted Cruz voters. And you assume that you can sort of take the moderates for granted.

Oh, okay. I think this is another Nate Cohn realization here. I think there's been a lot of talk about why Ron DeSantis has moved in this sort of direction, particularly when we think about things like the abortion ban or kind of shift to the right. You're saying that because there's some evidence that he's still doing well among those moderates, it could be a situation where you focus ideologically on the rigid people who are most conservative, underdog.

under the hope that the moderates and the Republican Party will basically do anything to beat Donald Trump. I think that's it. Look, I don't know this. I haven't reported it out on top of the DeSantis people, but that's my best effort to reconstruct a logic to what they're doing, even if it may or may not be working for them. And I could see a basis for it. Mm-hmm.

One of the things that has come up in the last four months has been the other candidates who are not Trump or DeSantis really focusing on DeSantis to try to bring him down. I'm thinking about Nikki Haley and Mike Pence who seized on that Ukraine moment. I'm thinking about other candidates who have seized on his abortion shift. Is there any way that their impact in the race could be in bringing DeSantis down and making his ability to put together that coalition just making that harder?

Absolutely. I think that if Ron DeSantis is strong enough, I think that a lot of them will fade on their own, to be frank. Like, I think that if there's someone who just looks and feels like the strong anti-Trump candidate, that that person will naturally have a certain gravitational force that sucks the oxygen away from these other candidates. If

the anti-Trump candidate like a Ron DeSantis looks weak and there's oxygen for someone else, that may prevent Ron DeSantis from ever taking off again. And they could get a little foothold that becomes hard to shake them from. In some ways, it feels like the big function of the Haley, Scott, Pence campaigns could be in helping Donald Trump become the nominee. Absolutely. I think that's a very easy scenario to see happen. That's

That said, I don't know whether it's sustainable for all these various candidates to hold 5% of the vote and continue to stay in a race at that level of support. I think someone would need to break out a little bit more for me to be more convinced that this is what's going to happen, that by the time we're in Iowa, that this will be a serious problem for DeSantis. It certainly could be. I just –

I don't know that at this current moment that they are the core of DeSantis' issue or even a very serious obstacle. And I would also just say that if they're a serious obstacle to DeSantis, I would question whether it was really them who were the problem or DeSantis. For them to be a problem, he had to be weak enough to let this space open up. So,

I'm open to the idea that it would be more symptomatic than the cause of his demise. That's a good point. Okay, so in the absence of robust polling heading into the Republican primary, and particularly as we're in this moment, can you give me some questions that you think we should be asking to see where this might be headed?

Sure, I'll give you a few. You know, one is just the old fashioned questions about electability. Just do you want someone who's most electable versus who you support most on the issues? And then secondarily, of course, who do you think is most electable?

I think that in a Republican primary, it is unlikely that a majority of voters will care about electability. But the higher that number is, the better for DeSantis, of course. I also am curious about Trump's brand of cultural conservatism against DeSantis' brand of cultural conservatism. What do you mean?

The Trump brand is something like stopping illegal immigration and crime in China from taking our jobs. And the Santa's version is more stopping the radical woke left activist teachers and media from taking

changing America. And although I didn't formulate a precise poll question there, hopefully you can see the foundation of a poll question that offers Republicans a choice. Who's the biggest villain? Is it kind of an elite wokeism class or is it the kind of classic immigration class that we have seen Donald Trump really sees on? Right. And I think that's so important for my the question I sort of noted earlier about like whether you can really ride, quote, woke to the presidency. Like,

Clearly, if you can make the election about who is the most anti-woke candidate, that would be really good for DeSantis. It would unify those two disparate groups, and he's the natural candidate to do that sort of thing. And I just don't know whether it has the juice when it's matched up against alternative forms of cultural conservatism to be the animating thing that when voters are thinking about who they want to be president, that they're sort of thinking about the guy taking on those issues. This is a personal question.

thing that I have always wanted to see someone ask about. I'm curious about whether people find Trump fun and entertaining. I think that's one of the most important dimensions of Trump that makes him different from other candidates. Can you explain what you mean by fun or entertaining?

I'm going to define it in a weird way, but like, yeah, no, no, I'm saying in your lens of how we understand that, right? You know, when, when friends of mine and people who aren't political journalists text me random things that Trump has said with like, lol or a ha ha, you know, like that is to me like a really important part of what binds people to Donald Trump. That if you're a conservative and if you're a Republican, it gives you the steady stream of positive emotions that's tied to this guy.

And I think that one thing that hurt Donald Trump a lot between the end of the 2020 election and let's just say January of this year is I think he stopped being fun in some important ways. This was someone who was sort of seething in resentment, who was talking about how he was denied the last election. And I don't think that the fun Trump that sort of won him the presidency in the first place came out.

And I think that that's some of what's come back over the last few months. You know, a lot of people texted me about Meatball Ron when Meatball Ron was said. You know, I know that's silly, but I think that that positive emotional connection that gets built by that kind of conduct is amazing.

really central to the way that he manages to rebuild his base. I just wonder, I do wonder about whether fun Trump persists in a world of criminal indictments. You know, I think that's a difficult thing to measure. I don't know whether I have a great poll question that would get at that, but that's the sort of thing that I would love to be able to track. I'm also curious about whether Republicans are loyal to Trump, perhaps whether they're loyal to Trump or loyal to the Republican Party. I'm curious about people who

like him on the issues, but not his conduct. I think that's another area where DeSantis has a potential opportunity. So those are all... Trump without Trump. That was supposed to be the original conceit of this DeSantis campaign. Yeah. And that's clearly not where it's quite headed. But I still think that figuring out whether that is a constituency is really important. It could be the case, you know, if we had this polling data that maybe that's exactly the sort of group that moved between

December and today. I don't know that, but perhaps it's true. I'm going to spend a minute on Dems, even though this conversation is largely on hold to the general, because when we were at the DNC, it really felt as if they were really locking in a vision of how they thought this election was going to go very early, not only choosing the stability policy,

Joe Biden, but just banking on the chaos on the other side. What, if anything, should we look at during this time of the primary season on the Democratic side that could help us learn whether that decision that the Democratic Party has clearly made, how it's landing?

I am very curious to watch the trajectory of Joe Biden's approval rating. It's not very high right now. It's in the low 40s. It's not unprecedented for a candidate to go from the low 40s today to reelection in 2020.

18 months, however, it is however many months it is away. But it is still a long slog. And it's something I would expect to see to begin to creep up sooner than later as the Republican primary gets underway. You expect Joe Biden's approval rating to go up? I would. And I expect it because one of the bigger theories behind why presidential approval increases in the run up to a reelection campaign is because voters go from judging voters.

the president in isolation to against the alternative. And the alternative becomes evident once the other primary gets underway. And so I would expect that when Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump start taking up the media environment, that a critical sliver of voters starts thinking that maybe Joe Biden isn't as bad as they would have told a pollster a year earlier. We've seen this movie before with Democrats. And with Joe Biden specifically. And I think

Really would like to see this play out among a couple of groups that Joe Biden has been weak with many times before. Young voters, a lot of different problems for Joe Biden all come together in young voters. He's probably a little too moderate for a lot of them. He's certainly too old. Young voters are hit pretty bad by inflation as well.

I want to see movement for Joe Biden among non-white voters. In the most recent polls against Donald Trump, Joe Biden is underperforming his 2020 support by 11%.

Is that just not my groups at large or is there a group that's driving that? So one problem that we have is that because the polling that we have is so small and because the polls themselves have gotten smaller over time, that pollsters are not breaking out demographic groups in as much detail as they have in the past. And the individual estimates for each group are a little less reliable for good measure. But my best guess is actually that it is all of them.

And that even black voters who in 2020 did not shift in any material way towards Donald Trump seem to be giving Donald Trump 17 percent on average against Joe Biden in the polls. That would be a big shift if true.

And there is a big, if true, you know, caveat there, given what I said about the nature of these polls right now. But I if you're a Joe Biden fan or if you're in my shoes looking to see whether this is playing out for Democrats the way they want to, you want to see him get those numbers back up into the range that we expect for a Democrat.

And the final group is low-income voters who are obviously very vulnerable on inflation and maybe just as importantly, I think, are relatively unlikely to be voting on sort of liberal idealist ideas like freedom and rights and abortion and democracy and bodily autonomy. These are people who are Democrats in no small part because they believe that the Democrats will advance their material interests. That's what got them to the Democratic Party in the first place. And

You know, Joe Biden has a pitch to them, I think, with like low unemployment and whatever policy accomplishments he would prefer to cite to them. But it's clearly a weakness today and inflation doesn't help. And it was Donald Trump's relative strength in 2020. So if you're a Democrat, you're definitely looking to see Joe Biden's numbers improve there as well.

Okay, so let's try to synthesize this. If there was one key question that you, yeah, you're already sick of this question. If there was one key question that you would drive at in service of our ultimate kind of goal of figuring out whether Donald Trump is as inevitable as he seems, what do you think you would point at? I think that I could imagine a question that just directly asks this kind of question about

How voters feel about Donald Trump in the primary. I can imagine squeezing them into three categories. I do not want Donald Trump to be the nominee. I think Donald Trump should be the nominee. And I would be fine if Donald Trump is the nominee, but I'm open to someone else. And if Donald Trump is inevitable, I think that I want Donald Trump to be the nominee category should be inching toward and potentially over 50. Yeah.

But anything below that, and we've got a race. I mean, it doesn't necessarily mean it'll be a close race in the end, but inevitable would be the wrong word to describe it. I mean, inevitable is a strong word to me. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I mean, it's a strong word, and it also feels an earned word because I feel like I was personally...

kind of shook by the level of inevitability that these folks were speaking at. And particularly after midterm elections, where a country seemed to universally send a different type of message.

It doesn't seem to have shaken the course that the presidential race was on. If you could explain that to somebody as to why that is, why so many people came out, why so many people said that, you know, the kind of Trump politics was not what they wanted in the midterms. How are we still getting that in the presidential? How does the question still come back to the same guy? So I don't have a great answer for you, but I'll offer two and you can answer

decide that they add up to a full explanation or probably something short of that and you can judge it you know exactly how much credit you want to give it but one is the republicans had a tough midterm but this was not such a complete humiliation that they have to go some way else

The second thing I would note is that we live in an era of really highly engaged ideological partisan politics. And the attachments that the voters have to their politicians and ideas I think is different than it was in earlier eras.

And that because the parties are so ideologically consistent, because voters are so much more engaged and educated on the issues and have sorted into the right party that corresponds with those ideas and so on, that it is much harder for parties to really break from what they've done in the past than it used to be. And I think that's probably true for both parties. Like if you could imagine hypothetically that the Democrats were in the wilderness over

support for Black Lives Matter or abortion, could they really go in a different way there? I don't know that I think so. Right, right, right. The core is so rooted to a set of ideological beliefs that add up to something that included Donald Trump that it's hard for the party to shift, particularly so quickly. And even if

There is electoral evidence that it didn't align with a lot of where maybe swing voters and critical battleground states were. Absolutely. And again, it's not like our politics are non-competitive. We live in an era of close elections where it does feel like even when the parties make the worst choices they can make, they still have a shot.

And if you were judging these things strictly based on electability or the best electoral path, clearly the best thing Democrats could have done in 2020 was to nominate Joe Biden as they did. And clearly in 2024, it would be to find someone other than Donald Trump if you're a Republican. But if the Democrats had nominated Elizabeth Warren in 2020, would it have been over?

No. Is it over in 2024 if the Republicans dominate Donald Trump? No. So as long as that's true, it becomes harder to justify doing the thing that you don't otherwise want to do. It does feel like we're in this really –

narrative-driven moment where so much of what is driving how we're thinking about this race, how people like DeSantis are being judged, where money is flowing, the decisions these party insiders are making are not really due to hard and fast evidence, is what I hear from you. That they're really doing this

based on their own decision-making as they are interpreting evidence that could certainly lead to a desired result, but could just totally be their own priors really coming through.

I also think we should remember that I don't think a lot of this stuff is necessarily based on like rational interests of the party at all. Many of these people have their own personal interests. They're tied to Donald Trump after six years of hanging by his side and they don't want to be attacked by him. Or alternately, there's some issue that they've always supported and we're going to support no matter what. And they've managed to concoct a rationale that's.

that allows them to think about it as something they can stick with um so i you know i i actually would go even further than that i'm not sure that very many of these actors at all are you know looking at the evidence to reach their views i think that their views often stem from you know somewhere else and then they backfit the evidence-based rationale to defend it after that i think

Are there and they're not I want to ask this question clearly. There's not enough moderates in the Republican Party, as we traditionally view as moderates, to beat Donald Trump by themselves. Yeah, no way. Well, it's not it's not even close. Yeah. Cool. Got it. Because like, look, this was a one on one race between Nikki Haley and Donald Trump. I don't think that any state would be competitive.

Yeah. Maybe Utah? Maybe? Awesome. All right. This was great. This was a real, and this is also, you know, like, you know, I knew it'd live up to it. All of this left me wondering, what are the moderates doing? That's next week.

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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company & Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. The Run-Up is reported by me, Ested Herndon, and produced by Elisa Gutierrez, Caitlin O'Keefe, and Anna Foley. It's edited by Franny Kartoff and Lisa Tobin, with original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, and Alisha Ba'i-Tub. It was mixed by Isaac Jones and fact-checked by Caitlin Love.

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