How Campaigns Die

Slowly, then all at once.

The most compelling fun in political consulting and media is a big, bruising primary fight.

Either party will do, but it’s the fun of the hustle from one campaign stop to another, from one speech or rally or event to the next, a flickering series of green rooms, press centers, and holding rooms. It’s the geeky thrill of racing through the back of the house with the candidate before he or she mounts the stage, watching from the wings as they either take flight or crash into the unforgiving wall of voter dislike, disinterest, or disgust. It’s the mental work of the deep profile for a big media outlet, or the perfectly crafted ad or speech.

Sometimes, you watch a candidate grow into something bigger and better than expected. Sometimes, it’s just a gig. (Looking at you, Team Dean Phillips.)

And thus, we find the source of so much discontent this election season.

The media wanted a big, hot, dirty primary in the GOP because it’s interesting and fun and feels like history unrolling in front of them. The political consultocracy wanted sweet gigs on the SuperPAC side where they could rake off millions — as the leader of the Ron DeSantis SuperPAC Jeff Roe has done to the tune of 67% of the total DeSantis spend — into their own companies.

With Trump in the race, the 2024 GOP primary never really mattered. It would never end in any way other than the wet flop of a body hitting the floor. Now, as Trump’s number seems stuck in the immovable 50s, I’ll tell you why I think the GOP primary campaign will end soon…and why.

Second Place Is First Loser

The undercard race for President has a problem.

It’s called “math.”

Headlines about a Nikki Haley surge in Iowa can simultaneously be true and be made almost entirely in the service of what Tim Miller calls “The Horserace Industrial Complex.” The media really, really, reallllly wants that hot, sweaty, nasty, clickbaity primary.

It’s all a Potemkin village.

Trump has stacked the deck, and winner-take-all primaries mean, as I’ve pointed out, to the limits of sanity, he’s going to win the nomination. An awful lot of statistical faffing is going on about the new DMR poll in Iowa, showing Desantis falling 3% and Haley rising 10%, leaving them tied at 16%. The rest are cats and dogs, with that one big exception: Trump is still at 43%.

The race isn’t even that statistically noisy; some swapping for second place (e.g. first loser) and the rest as complete nonentities. There is no primary.

Source: DMR, Cited above.

No One Is Really Post-Trump

First, eliminate Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson. Their symbolic campaigns were signifiers of their contempt for Trump but with no real electoral path in the MAGA GOP.

There was never a magic phrase from a secret focus group that would ignite the passions of the MAGAs to move them past the Dear Leader. We studied it in 2016 and 2019; MAGA voters are locked in.

Telling MAGA primary voters the hard truth never worked before, so it was never tried this time. None of the viable (-ish) candidates ever made a real case against Trump. 2016 looms large in their minds, and they’ve missed that Trump is a meaningfully diminished figure.

They’re all flawed copies of a flawed candidate, replicated on a machine that throws errors with every iteration.

This race is over.

Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis are still on the struggle bus, gamely trying to frame Trump as a loser, erratic, compromised, and the past, but the base has stubbornly shown their disinterest. DeSantis is politically deader than last week’s roadkill, he just won’t stop

Haley’s recent attacks on Trump and foreign policy are — and hold your smelling salts close right now because I’m about to say something nice about her — refreshingly Bidenesque. It takes guts to be pro-Ukraine in a field of Putin-worshipping GOP dudes.

For all that, she will come in a distant second in her home state. The last survey there had Trump averaging around 48% and Haley around 17%.

Desperate megadonors can’t save her, Tim Scott, or Chris Christie. They’re delaying the inevitable.

As I’ve repeatedly said, you can’t make a horserace out of horseshit. (I say “manure” on television because of my reputation for saying Bad Words on cable.)

The Old Paid Media Model Is Broken

In the Before Times, a candidate’s fundraising strongly predicted victory. Money bought media, and media moved votes. This was before the means and modes of political messaging evolved into the post-linear TV and cable model and towards a fluid digital and social media placement approach. It was before smart organizations learned to use earned media beyond the old-style press-release garbage and instead use it to set narratives and expectations effectively.

(As an aside, it’s the most common misconception about our work at the Lincoln Project; “You’re not spending 3000 GRPs on broadcast TV, direct mail, and yard signs, therefore, it’s not real.” Go buy a buggy whip, grandma; it’s 2023. “I’m not seeing your ads here in ______________.” No, and you likely never will since you’re not the target audience.)

None of the GOP primary candidates can spend their way to victory. It just doesn’t work that way in their Campaign Cycle of Our Lord 2024, kids.

In an odd way, it’s a return to the past. America’s earliest campaigns were word of mouth with rallies, drinking, and speechmaking. Print media rose in the 1850s as both technology and growing literacy made it more viable. Radio in the 1920s, television in the 1960s, and cable in the 1980s all placed intervening layers between the candidate and reality. It was why advertising in those eras was a profound game-changer.

Until it wasn’t.

The strong, square-jawed, clear-eyed men (and they were, in that era, almost all men) we crafted for so many campaigns were more often fiction than not. The modern era leaves less room for media consultant magic; we are live, everywhere, all the time, and every verbal slip, wrong answer, fart, belch, and screwup is forever. We see the candidates as they are, not as we wish them to be.

It is why Ron DeSantis can’t hide his fundamental strangeness and cruelty. It’s why Vivek Ramaswamy comes across as the scammy hustlebro; because he is. It’s why Tim Scott’s girlfriend is never seen in public. (She lives in Canada, and she’s a model. You wouldn’t know her.)

Chris Christie’s refreshing bellowing fuck-youse to Donald Trump isn’t hidden behind a bowdlerized ad or a pretty speech. It’s why Mike Pence dropped out; he can’t hide his fundamental dullness.

Ads placed to very, very finely-tuned audiences of very defined targeted voters still persuade and move elections, but the ads shaping the personal image and story of the candidates had better match up with reality.

Big Republican Donors Flopped

The mini-rebellion of the GOP donor class will rank as one of the most impotent moments in the history of electile dysfunction. Ron DeSantis ran what was essentially an extortion racket wrapped in a post-Trump campaign pitch.

Lobbyists, business interests, and GOP megadonors desperate to find an alternative to Trump shoveled buckets of money his way, all to see it incinerated by a consultant so venal and ineffective it defies imagination.

As I’ve written here before, the big donors will all slither back to Trump. It’s happening right now. The last-gasp major donor money leaving DeSantis and going to Nikki Haley won’t shift the final, inevitable capitulation.

The primary is over.

It’s just that no one wants to admit it.