On Monday, there was a Bob Costa Twitter thread about how GOP wealthy donors planned to draft Georgia Governor Brian Kemp or Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin to run for president, presumably when Trump implodes and after everyone realizes that Meatball Ron is as unfit to be president as Trump is. I didn’t read it too carefully, just rolled my eyes and moved on so something more realistic. I guess Philip Bump did read it because by Tuesday evening he had a column up, There is no savior who can be drafted to be your party’s nominee.
Costa’s thread was mostly about Kemp, for no other reason that he had just done a long (turgid) interview with him. Bump more or less referred to Kemp and Youngkin as a vat of vanilla pudding that millionaires may like but that normal Republican voters don’t necessarily care about one way or the other, no more than they might care about a vat of vanilla pudding some millionaires had gotten added to the buffet.
Trump really hates Kemp and would not be shy about letting his MAGAt base know-- in no uncertain terms-- that he didn’t want them to vote for him. Trump may not be a big Youngkin fan but I don’t think he especially hates him. “Youngkin’s prospective candidacy,” wrote Bump, “has been bandied about for a while now. He demurred on a prospective bid at one point only to later release the-sort-of-video-a-presidential-candidate-releases video that suggested he was maybe thinking about it. In a Quinnipiac University poll released at the end of May, Youngkin earned 1 percent of the vote in a hypothetical primary contest. Trump got 56 percent.”
True, but what if Trump dies or goes to prison? Where that 56% goes is what’s keeping the rest of the field— declared and potential— hopeful.
There are two arguments that donors would probably make here. The first is that it’s hard to assess how much support a candidate will get until he or she is actually running. Trump was in the low single digits in May 2015, after all. The second is that prominent figures in the party are eager to find someone who might serve as a counterweight to Trump and, should other candidates falter, maybe someone like Youngkin could gain.
To the second point, this is the real danger for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. His position as the leading alternative (25 percent in that Quinnipiac poll) means that he’s well positioned as the non-Trump candidate. But his campaign launch didn’t go that well and he hasn’t improved his position relative to Trump since. (On the day his campaign launched, he was about 33 points behind Trump in FiveThirtyEight’s average. Now he’s about 31 points behind.) That makes someone like Youngkin or Kemp appealing.
But to the first point? We’ve been through this whole let’s draft someone else! rigmarole before. In 2000, supporters tried to get Ross Perot to run as an independent for a third time. (Some friends of Trump tried to get him to do it, too.) In 2004, it was Wesley Clark, a former general seen by Democrats as a credible voice on national security in the post-9/11 world. He got about 3 percent of the primary vote.
In 2008, there were rumblings about recruiting former vice president Al Gore. In 2012, Hillary Clinton. In 2016, Republicans explored a few non-Trump alternatives, including eventual Trump defense secretary Jim Mattis.
Then there’s the guy who tried to buy not just a buffet item but the whole restaurant. Billionaire Mike Bloomberg threatened to run in 2016, out of concern about the major-party candidates. He did run in 2020, spending an exorbitant amount of money for a paltry accumulation of votes.
At no point in recent memory has there been a last-minute draftee for a presidential campaign who has gone on to win the nomination…
Part of it, of course, is that donors often have different interests than primary voters. We can see that in the 2024 field: Trump is coasting with more than 50 percent of the support in recent polls! Less than half of Republicans want an alternative and even those who do still think Trump is a feasible candidate. In a CBS News poll published over the weekend, three-quarters of Republicans said they were considering Trump while only 14 percent said they weren’t. Only half said they were considering DeSantis, with twice as many saying they weren’t.
It remains possible that Glenn Youngkin or Brian Kemp could jump into the race, certainly. They might enter with tens of millions of dollars ready to spend via an affiliated super PAC. But it’s possible that Youngkin, at least, has already done some polling on this question and learned that he’s a long shot for the nomination.
There’s a reason that people who are considered possible candidates end up not running, and it’s rarely that they looked deep inside themselves and felt themselves not worthy. Politicians experience that sensation about as often as wealthy donors experience the sense that maybe they don’t know better than average voters. Instead, candidates who are considered possible contenders often choose not to run because they realize they won’t win. Some might nonetheless embrace spending other people’s money to boost their national name ID if they think that the loss wouldn’t sting too much. So we’ll see.
Or maybe everyone will wake up tomorrow with a hankering for vanilla pudding.
The key to keeping the House of Delegates blue is Jessica Anderson defeating conservative Republican Amanda Batten in a swing district (HD-71, in James City County, Williamsburg City and New Kent County) between Richmond and Norfolk. Although Youngkin won the district in 2021, Kaine was reelected there in 2018 and Northam won in 2017. Anderson is running a very strong campaign and has been endorsed by Blue America.
This morning, Anderson, no fan of Youngkin's, asked “Will he or won’t he run for President? That is the question Youngkin asks himself more often than he changes out his sweater vest. Between an indictment riddled Trump and DeSantis destroying Florida by passing some of the worst legislation in history, the Republicans are left with dire options for a candidate. However, the idea that Youngkin would land at the top of that list, as an alternative, is laughable. He’s definitely started dipping his toe in the culture wars waters; from screaming about bathrooms to targeting parents (who don’t agree with him), while claiming parents matter. The only thing he has proven is that he lacks leadership and is willing to override the people’s voice. For starters, his push to pull out of RGGI, which Virginia joined through a democratically elected legislation to advocating against constitutionally protecting the reproductive rights of Virginians, that more than 70% of voters support. He’s definitely a DeSantis-lite, but too cowardly to stand on his extreme agenda publicly. Republican donors would see more benefit setting their money on fire before investing in a Youngkin presidency, but these are the same people paying a billionaire, ex-president’s legal fees, so… My prediction is when he fails to flip the Senate and loses the House this November, he’ll try to burn Virginia to the ground with the remainder of his Governorship in hopes of earning national attention, like DeSantis. In the meantime, us Virginians will try not to get whiplash from his back and forth of trying to garner a national stage.”
