The Road Map to Victory for Donald Trump: A Conversation with Democratic Senator Tim DeSantis and K.P. Posobiec
Trump’s hold on the Republican electorate has always been tenuous. He has never won the majority of votes in a Republican primary. At the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting in California this year, one delegate told me that party insiders estimated that about 30 to 35 percent of Republican voters were unshakably with Trump, while another, smaller group was comfortable with him as the nominee while considering other options.
For other candidates, those numbers make up a road map to victory: Consolidate the majority of Republicans who would prefer a different nominee. The Tea Party conservatives and the business-focused moderates who supported John Kasich in the 2016 governor’s race are part of this group.
It is difficult to get them to think in a different way. These groups have historically opposed Trump for different reasons and no candidate has successfully brought them together, but the conditions for an anti-Trump coalition are there.
One route for a candidate like DeSantis or Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who joined the Republican field yesterday, is to win the nomination without crossing Trump. As my colleague Nate Cohn wrote, one strategy for defeating Trump could be to embody his political message without taking him on directly. For some Republicans, this is a welcome direction. My reporting made clear that given the criminal investigations Trump faces, some rivals have banked on him to implode on his own.
However, that strategy is passive, which could play into Trump’s hands. Jack Posobiec, a conservative media provocateur, said that people within Trump’s campaign believed that indictments would embolden him and didn’t endanger his candidacy. He said they believed Trump would have the opportunity to galvanize voters by painting law enforcement as politically motivated and out to stifle his candidacy.
While it’s easy to see Mr. DeSantis’s decline over the last few months as a sign of profound weakness, the volatility of the polling can also be interpreted to mean there’s a large group of voters open to both candidates. They might be prone to lurch one way or the other, depending on the way the political winds are blowing.
Donald J. Trump on social media and the election of a presidential candidate without a TV feature: What’s he going to do?
It doesn’t mean that he’ll come back. The campaign chose to announce his bid on social media in order to take advantage of the television opportunities, but I don’t know how to use the feature. Even if a perfectly run Republican campaign is successful, it will be hard for Donald J. Trump to win the election, unless he successfully fights his legal challenges.