Trump’s Bush-like path to winning the 2024 GOP nomination

Former President Donald Trump is not a George W. Bush-style Republican, but his path to the 2024 GOP nomination could mirror that of the 43rd president nearly a quarter of a century before.

Trump has a huge lead in the national polls and a smaller, but still quite formidable, lead in the early states.

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If Trump beats Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) in Iowa — and the Des Moines Register poll now shows the former president with an absolute majority of caucusgoers and a 32-point lead — the race will quickly shift to New Hampshire.

Trump could follow up with a win there, where he leads by nearly 26 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average. But his biggest remaining obstacle would be former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.

The threat from Haley is that independents would flock to her in the semi-open primary, with no real competition on the Democratic side and President Joe Biden’s supporters only waging a write-in campaign.

That’s what happened to Bush, after he beat back an Iowa challenge from the right in the form of Steve Forbes and Alan Keyes but then was upset in New Hampshire by John McCain.

This set up a Bush-McCain showdown in South Carolina. Trump and Haley would have a similar fight in the Palmetto State, over a month after the New Hampshire primary. Haley is a former South Carolina governor.

Like McCain, Haley would receive a flood of favorable media coverage but also have to worry about what will happen once the race moves to closed primaries. But Haley might receive an infusion of campaign cash that eluded the co-author of McCain-Feingold.

The question would be whether Trump could re-create Bush’s coalition of evangelicals and Republican regulars to deal Haley a McCain-like defeat. (Trump would certainly relish the phrase.) But a complicating factor would be what’s left of the Republican establishment.

A lot of the GOP’s donor, consultant, and governing class is against Trump, a problem Bush never had. The governor of Iowa is backing DeSantis, and the governor of New Hampshire just endorsed Haley. Nevertheless, there are a lot of Republican elected officials in Trump’s corner. This fact becomes apparent in South Carolina, where Trump, not Haley, gave the keynote address at the state party fundraising dinner and Trump, not Haley, has the endorsements of the sitting governor and senior senator.

Trump has to some degree broken the power of the Republican establishment, even if that has not always been to the party’s general election benefit. But he has actively courted a lot of GOP politicians, and his schmoozing ability has been one of his core advantages over DeSantis.

History doesn’t always repeat itself. DeSantis could disrupt this whole scenario with an upset in Iowa. It’s also possible that with expectations so low, a strong second in Iowa could rejuvenate his campaign and reset the race even more than a similar showing for Haley in New Hampshire.

But Forbes managing to come within roughly 10 points of Bush in Iowa didn’t do him any favors in New Hampshire, where he finished a distant third. Forbes’s 12.66% left him closer to fourth-place Keyes than second-place Bush.

If Haley managed to be McCain in this scenario, the main thing she would want is a different ending. McCain, you will recall, lost both South Carolina and the nomination to Bush.

In hindsight, McCain would have gotten stronger support from independents in the general election than Bush and wouldn’t have needed to rely on hanging chads to beat Al Gore. Haley is sure to bang the electability drum harder, based on polls showing her with a more comfortable lead over Biden.

Yet huge polling leads like Trump’s and Bush’s are hard to overcome. In 2000, McCain managed to make at least a race out of it. So far, neither DeSantis nor Haley has been able to do the same against Trump. If the polls are accurate, they aren’t favored to win any of the early states, and Trump’s 60% in the national polls is a bad sign for what will happen once the candidates need to start competing in multiple states at once.

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The time is starting to run out for Trump’s challengers.

But for Trump, the model for how to close out the primary race could be his least favorite Republican president.