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Republican strategists are worried that if former President Donald Trump does not secure the party’s nomination or is kept off the ballot, it will mean a total voter turnout disaster for the party in the 2024 election.
GOP strategists are growing concerned that Trump’s massive coalition won’t turn up to vote in 2024 if Trump is somehow kept off the ballot due to the numerous indictments against him by Democrat prosecutors.
“The conventional wisdom is there’s concern that if Trump’s not the nominee, his coalition will take their ball and go home,” Ohio Republican strategist Matt Dole told The Hill.
“Folks are interested in how that plays out, and so I think right now, they would be happy if Trump’s the nominee — in Ohio, it’s not true across the country — because then his coalition will turn out in November,” he said.
Brian Darling, a Republican strategist and former Senate aide, came to the same conclusion that turnout will plummet if Trump is not the GOP nominee, adding that Trump has a “lock” on the nomination so “the only way he loses if he’s prevented from being on the ballot.”
“If somehow he’s not the nominee, it will hurt turnout,” Darling said. “He’s got a unique coalition. He brings a lot of nontraditional voters to the Republican Party, and it will be difficult to win a state like Ohio” and other Midwestern states “if you lose all those Trump voters or make them disaffected voters, and they don’t show up.”
But Ohio GOP strategist Bob Clegg said Trump will almost certainly win the party’s nomination.
“I think Trump’s going to be the nominee,” he said. “Ever since Trump came down that escalator in 2015, the face of politics in the United States has charged dramatically, and we’re still in that” paradigm.
Clegg warned that if Trump didn’t end up becoming the nominee, that could split the electorate and greatly hurt the party’s chances of victory in 2024.
“I would say there’s two scenarios, either Trump’s the nominee and we just go with it and whatever, or Trump’s not the nominee and then we have a nominee that Trump’s going to be trashing,” he said.
An unnamed Senate GOP strategist told The Hill that rural voters and the MAGA coalition will stay home if Trump isn’t on the ballot, which the party depends on to win.
“What it says about the electorate more than anything is that without a presidential candidate — particularly Trump at the top of the ticket — rural voters do not turn out at the same rate,” the strategist said, citing a recent Ohio special election where an abortion protection proposition was overwhelmingly voted down by college-educated women and suburban voters.
“With controversial issues like abortion in the suburbs, Republicans have to make up for it in rural parts of the state, and without Trump on the ballot, rural parts of the state just didn’t turn out at the same rate.”
“For Republicans, the only hope is that when Trump is on the ballot in 2024…he will turn out rural voters at a rate that overwhelms that phenomenon. It’s certainly possible,” the source added.
David Paleologos, the director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, claimed at least 40% of Republicans are solidly behind Trump in 2024 who may not vote unless he’s on the ballot.
“Conservatively, it looks like 4 out of 10,” he said of the GOP voters. “I haven’t seen many polls where he [is] below 40 [percent].”
“The Trump voters, even from our polling, have pretty much said: ‘It’s Trump or bust,’” he said. “There’s a percentage of voters who won’t even vote Republican if he doesn’t get the nomination.”
The analyses from these GOP strategists contradict several prominent Republican donors and lawmakers, including presidential candidates like Mike Pence, Asa Hutchinson, Nikki Haley and Chris Christie, who have all insisted the party should move on from Trump in 2024.
What they fail to realize is that Republicans, these strategists suggest, have virtually no hope of winning any major elections — federal or state — without Trump in 2024.
But Democrat prosecutors in the DOJ, Manhattan DA’s office and Fulton County DA’s office are working hard to ensure Trump’s campaign is so mired with uncertainty regarding the indictments against him that the GOP won’t risk allowing him to be their nominee in 2024.
Or worse yet, that they are able to convict him and keep him off the ballot.
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