Trump is Destroying His Political Future
Politics, they say, is a game of math. Every decision made by a successful politician should do one of two things: either increase his base of support or strengthen his relationship with his existing base. If a candidate’s political capital can be measured in volume, the first move – increasing the number of voters who warm to him – counts as widening support. The second – making voters more enthusiastic and more willing to go to the polls – counts as deepening it.
Former president Donald Trump, who has always defied political logic, seems determined to chart another path since his stinging defeat in November 2020. He has taken concrete steps to both shrink his political base and depress the energy of his diehards. Here are three steps he’s taking to undercut his own standing and future in national politics.
Step one is already complete. In my home state of Pennsylvania, voters sided in May with Trump’s endorsements in the U.S. Senate and gubernatorial primaries. But a month later, GOP voters rejected Trump completely in Georgia. The difference? In the Peach State, Georgian conservatives have seen what the post-2020 Trump effect means – and they're not happy about it.
After narrowly losing a contested presidential race, Trump railed against the GOP establishment in Georgia rather than encouraging his voters to turn out for the two U.S. Senate runoffs several months later. This suppressed the Republican vote to the tune of 250,000 voters, helping to hand those seats to Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, and leaving Georgia Republicans holding the bag. Two incumbent Republican Senators lost their seats, and Chuck Schumer gained the keys to the Senate as majority leader.
Step two is in the works. Trump is scaling his Georgia strategy nationally, with rumblings from Mar-a-Lago that he may be planning to announce another presidential bid in September, just two months before a potential red wave that could hand the GOP its biggest governing majority in generations. Such an announcement would make the midterms a referendum on Trump rather than on the Biden administration’s Jimmy Carteresque bungling of economic and foreign policy issues. It would be a gift to a Democratic Party that is shedding working-class voters, disillusioned loyalists, and Independents across the nation.
Announcement of a Trump candidacy before November’s midterms would “energize Democratic voters enough to minimize their losses at the margins” in key House and Senate races, writes veteran political analyst Charlie Cook, and “certainly has the potential to have a greater impact than abortion, guns, and Jan. 6 combined.” The message from vulnerable Democrats will be easy if Trump makes his September announcement: get to the polls and reject Trump, again. It’s certainly more compelling than “vote for us again, and let’s see how much more expensive gas and groceries can get.”
The third step will come in the aftermath of Trump’s potential pre-midterm surprise, when he will once again make himself the center of every political conversation, and voters from Orange County to Atlanta who had been wavering in their support for the inept Democrats will snap back into partisan formation and vote with their party. This could cost Republicans dozens of House seats and numerous tight Senate races, taking New Hampshire, Colorado, and Connecticut so far out of reach for the GOP that it will be useless for Republicans to invest in winning them.
In all, a pre-midterms presidential announcement from Trump will evaporate the red wave just as it’s cresting and show Americans what the post-2020 Trump effect means nationally. The biggest winners will be Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, the Squad, and the Biden administration. The biggest losers will be the Republican Party and its frontline candidates, followed by struggling Americans looking for a GOP-led Congress to rein in the cost of goods and put an end to rampant inflationary spending by the federal government.
But why should Trump care? He’s all about Trump – not veterans, not inner cities, not the middle class, not the police. Which is why he’ll probably make the announcement anyway.
But when he does, we’ll continue to witness the decline in an all-important number for him: the percentage of Republican voters who actually want him to run again in 2024. In recent polling, standout Florida governor Ron DeSantis is hot on Trump’s heels in key states like Michigan and New Hampshire. After Trump helps the GOP lose dozens more House seats and control of the U.S. Senate, how much lower will this metric tick?
Donald Trump has defied political gravity since descending from the golden escalator in 2015, eviscerating the GOP establishment before neutering the Democrats. But even a candidate as counterintuitive as the former president can’t escape the realities of simple math. The success of a third Trump presidential campaign will rely on him widening and deepening his base of political support, and every step he’s taken since 2020 has done the opposite.
It may be true, as Trump once claimed, that he could have shot somebody on Fifth Avenue and still maintained the support of the GOP base – but handing another two years of congressional control to Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, The Squad, and the rest of the Democratic radicals? That’s another question entirely.
Albert Eisenberg is a millennial political consultant based in Philadelphia and Charleston, SC. He has been featured on Fox News, RealClearPolitics, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and elsewhere. He is a MaverickPAC Future 40 awardee. Follow him on Twitter at @Albydelphia.
