Trump's Primary Challengers: The Little Engines That Couldn't

Since World War II, only three incumbent Presidents have lost re-election.  All three of them had something in common.  They all faced strong primary challengers that weakened them heading into the general election.  Incumbent President Gerald Ford found himself uniquely vulnerable in 1976, considering the fact that the American people had never elected him President or Vice President.  President Richard Nixon picked Ford, who served as the House Minority Leader at the time, to become Vice President when Spiro Agnew resigned the post.  Ten months later, President Nixon himself resigned ahead of almost-certain impeachment.  Ford picked liberal New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller as his Vice President.

Ronald Reagan, the former Governor of California, emerged as a strong primary challenger to Ford.  Ford found himself at odds with the party’s increasingly conservative base.  His biggest legacy, the appointment of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, ended up having disastrous consequences.  Stevens ended up voting with the liberal justices on the Court nearly all of the time; including by upholding Roe v. Wade in the case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, striking down a partial-birth abortion ban, and dissenting in the Bush v. Gore case, which ordered the neverending recount fiasco in Florida to come to an end.  He has spent his retirement advocating for the abolition of the Second Amendment.  Great job, Gerald. 

 Reagan nearly beat Ford in 1976.  In an effort to appeal to more conservative voters, Ford replaced Rockefeller with Kansas Senator Bob Dole as his running mate.  Ford narrowly lost re-election to one-term Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, despite winning more states than Carter. 

Four years later, Americans realized that they elected a man who was in over his head. From a liberals’ perspective, Carter did not exactly line up with the philosophy of Democrats like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson when it came to massively expanding the role of government via social programs.  Sensing an opening, Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy challenged Carter in the Democratic primary.  Kennedy did not end up defeating in the primary but many of his supporters flocked to liberal Republican John Anderson, who ran as a third-party candidate, in the general election.  Reagan, who ended up as the Republican nominee in 1980, ended up becoming President in a 44-state landslide.

The American people liked Reagan, giving him a 49-state landslide in 1984 and electing his Vice President, George H.W. Bush to succeed him in 1988.  President Bush ended up disappointing conservatives by walking back his “read my lips, no new taxes” promise by caving to Democrats’ demands to raise taxes in order to cut the deficit.  While a victory in the Cold War and a strong appearance of leadership in the Gulf War enabled Bush to enjoy sky-high approval ratings for a time, the end of the Cold War dramatically changed 20^th century politics.  Running on an anti-communism platform suddenly did not mean so much with the Soviet Union defeated.  This resulted in the American people focusing on economics, not foreign policy, in the 1992 Presidential Election.  Democratic Presidential candidate Bill Clinton coined the phrase “it’s the economy, stupid.”

President Bush attracted a primary challenge in Pat Buchanan, who attempted to appeal to dissatisfied conservatives.  Buchanan did not carry a single state in the primary but dissatisfaction with President Bush bled over into the general election. Billionaire Ross Perot ended up playing a major role in the general election.  Perot agreed with Buchanan’s contrarian approach on trade, coining the phrase “giant sucking sound” to describe all of the job loss that he thought the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would cause.  A similar “giant sucking sound” emerged on November 3, 1992; when a plurality of the American people voted to suck President Bush out of the White House in favor of Clinton.

In other words, primary candidates do not emerge to satisfy disaffected moderates.  In Republican primaries, challengers emerge to appeal to disaffected conservatives.  In Democratic primaries, challengers emerge to appeal to disaffected liberals.

President Trump’s enemies know that a primary challenge may weaken President Trump ahead of the general election; making him vulnerable to defeat.  Several candidates have thought about challenging President Trump in the Republican Primary.  Unfortunately for the left, none of them will do the trick when it comes to appealing to disaffected Republican voters.

Former Massachusetts Governor William Weld has formed an exploratory committee to run in the Republican Primary against President Trump.  Weld ran as libertarian candidate Gary Johnson’s running mate in the 2016 Presidential Election.  The website Reason describes Weld as a ““pro-choice, pro-amnesty, ‘Libertarian for Life’ who backed Barack Obama in 2008.” These views definitely do not represent the feelings of the Republican base.

 Besides Matthew Dowd of ABC News, it looks like Weld has absolutely no appeal among the Republican electorate as a whole.  In his announcement speech, Weld argued that President Trump lacks the temperament required of the President of the United States and claimed “the lights are on at the White House but nobody’s home.” Twenty years earlier, Senator Jesse Helms concluded that Weld was unfit to become United States Ambassador to Mexico in part because of his pro-choice views.  Weld had resigned the Governorship in order to focus on his nomination; which he ultimately withdrew.  If Weld’s pro-choice position made him unqualified to serve as United States Ambassador to Mexico, then they most certainly would make him unqualified to serve as the Republican nominee for President of the United States.

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan has also indicated that he may challenge President Trump in the 2020 Republican primary.  Hogan has an inspiring personal story; he emerged victorious in the Maryland gubernatorial election in 2014 in what many political observers called an astounding upset.  Hogan has boasted high approval ratings throughout his time in office and easily won re-election to a second term last fall. He has ensured his high approval ratings by appealing to liberals but fortunately, he has not sunk so low as to sign an abortion bill like the one liberal “Republican” Governor of Illinois Bruce Rauner signed. 

In an interview with CBS News, Hogan dismissed the idea of a national emergency and complained that President Trump has “exaggerated what’s going on at the border.” Hogan has apparently forgotten about the havoc that the decades-long illegal immigration crisis has wreaked in his state; especially the rape of a 14-year-old girl at Rockville High School, located in the sanctuary county of Montgomery, which took place at the hands of much older illegal immigrants placed in her grade level due to language deficits.   

If Hogan really wants to earn a spot in the Republican Hall of Fame, he should forget about President Trump and instead campaign for Republicans in the Maryland House of Delegates races.  Hogan should do everything in his power to eliminate the Democrats’ two-thirds majority in the lower House so that way he would have veto power over any new Congressional map that the Democratic-controlled legislature puts together.  During the last round of redistricting, Republicans lost a seat in Congress after the Democratic legislature and Democratic Governor Martin O’Malley conspired to make the western Maryland-based 6^th District unwinnable for Republicans by removing Republican-leaning Carroll County and Frederick County and replacing them with parts of the heavily Democratic Montgomery County.  This gave the Democrats an even more lopsided advantage of 7 to 1 in the Maryland Congressional delegation.  Ideally, Republicans should have three Congressional districts in Maryland; one on the Eastern Shore, one in the western part of the state, and a more competitive district in the southern part of the state.   

Former Ohio Governor John Kasich has emerged as one of the Trump administration’s strongest critics; serving as the chief spokesperson for the GOP #Resistance to the President.  While Kasich has made his distaste for President Trump perfectly clear, he has refused to take the media’s bait when it comes to insulting him. Bill Maher tried repeatedly to get Kasich to call President Trump a “dangerous menace to America” but Kasich refused. 

If Kasich really wants to earn a spot in the Republican Hall of Fame, he should run for his old seat in Congress.  He liked to spend his entire time on the campaign trail bragging about his tenure as Chairman of the House Budget Committee.  He definitely had a right to brag about that since Congress actually passed balanced budgets with him in that position.  Should he run, he will probably hold up his budget-balancing skills as one of the reasons why Republicans should pick him over President Trump.  As Nancy Pelosi has said over and over again in the “national emergency” debate, Congress has the power to appropriate money, not the Executive Branch.  President Trump put forward a budget blueprint that would balance the budget within ten years, only for Congress to ignore it.  Conservatives can thank Republicans who take the John Kasich approach to politics, which consists of letting the Democrats walk all over you in an attempt to win over “moderates,” for the failure of the blueprint to become reality.  Maybe if Kasich ends up in Congress again, he can immediately become Chair of the House Budget Committee and get to work on balancing the budget. But he seems to like the admiration from the mainstream media a little too much.  President Kasich would probably spend his first week in office pushing through a DACA amnesty, supporting a Medicaid expansion, and vetoing a heartbeat bill.

In the wake of President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to secure money for the border wall funding, many of President Trump’s strongest supporters have expressed profound disappointment as his decision to sign a 1,000-page long bill that limited his use of the $1.4 billion in wall funding Congress gave him and gave amnesty to anyone who is part of a household, or thinking of becoming part of a household, that contains an unaccompanied minor...i.e. any illegal alien who claims to be under 18 years old with no parent in the country.” Fortunately, the bill will only remain law for the next seven months.  Many of these people claim President Trump’s signing of that piece of garbage bill signaled a betrayal of his promises on immigration.  Look at it like this: none of the aforementioned potential primary challengers would do a better job at advocating for an America First immigration policy than President Trump.  Until that changes, conservatives do themselves no favors by beating up on President Trump.  Conservatives should channel their justified anger into campaigning on behalf of Senate candidates and House candidates who support the #MAGA agenda, travelling on my proposed Fire Pelosi Bus Tour, and pushing for term limits to ensure the removal of the go along to get along Republicans who put together the garbage “compromise” from office.  To those who haven’t noticed, most of the new Republicans in the House and Senate stand with President Trump.  They would not have allowed Democrats to walk all over them.

I sure hope I don’t have to vote in the Republican primary next year.  At the same time, I hope I live in Virginia or any other state where my vote might actually count by then.  But assuming that any of the aforementioned candidates have done the unthinkable and actually mount a serious challenge to President Trump, I will head out to the Republican Primary, no matter which state I reside in, and support President Trump over any one of the little engines that couldn’t.