This is where the fun begins
Candidates not named Trump are about to get a lot more attention
Some folks are already calling the Republican presidential nomination race for Donald Trump, saying that Ron DeSantis is just a few weeks from bowing out, that this contest is in the refrigerator. Look, it clearly leans in a certain direction, but the next two weeks of August are actually about to make this contest a lot more interesting.
Trump has been dominating media coverage of the contest so far, unsurprisingly. Even if there are Republican voters of a mind to consider someone else, they just haven’t heard that much about other candidates. However, there are three pretty big moments coming up that will change that.
Yet Another Indictment!
Donald Trump will very likely be indicted for the fourth time this year some time in the next week or two, this time by Fulton County, Georgia, for seeking to overturn that state’s presidential election results in 2020. It’s hard to say whether this is the biggest set of indictments against Trump this year, but in many ways it involves the most blatant and easily-understandable alleged actions: the President calling Georgia’s Secretary of State and directly pressuring him to alter election results and falsely call the state’s contest in his favor.
Will this actually erode support for Trump? Given that the previous three indictments have either not hurt him or actually helped him, probably not. It’s always possible that prominent Republican voices will call him out for this, but again, given recent history, they’ll probably rally behind him, invent arguments about how it’s the President’s First Amendment right to aspirationally inquire about changing vote tallies, and most Republican voters will stay in his camp. But for those few Republican presidential candidates who have been willing to call Trump out, this does provide new ammunition for them and a chance to raise their profiles.
The Iowa State Fair!
Yes, Iowans are spoiled by their frequent visits from presidential candidates, and those have been going on for months now. But most of those events with candidates have been quite small, and the people who self-select into those are already very interested in politics and know a bit about the candidates. Below is a photo I got at a Vivek Ramaswamy event at a VFW post in Des Moines in April — it’s pretty intimate!
Conversely, 1.1 million people attended the Iowa State Fair last year. Probably more will attend this year’s fair, which starts today. (I’ll be going at the end of next week.) And not everyone is there to hear politicians. There’s food, music, crafts, livestock, contests, butter, cows, butter cows, fried butter cows, and all sorts of other things. Importantly, people who do not follow politics that closely will learn about some of these candidates, and a lot of the presidential candidates plan to visit. This won’t change things overnight, of course, but people are going to get a lot more exposure to a lot of people not named Trump. Which brings us to the third big event…
The First Debate!
It’s happening! At least eight candidates have qualified for the first Republican presidential debate, a two-hour affair to be held at 9pm EDT on August 23rd. We don’t know yet whether Trump will be on stage. (There’s little upside and big potential downside for someone who’s ahead by so much to participate in a debate. On the other hand, he might want to use that time to drive the conversation rather than be talked about.)
The dynamics of these things are tricky. Typically, candidates go after the front-runner, but we know that most of the field is pretty shy about attacking Trump. Instead, they’ll likely focus on attacking the front-runner in the race to be Trump’s alternative if the legal system takes him out of contention. Which means that a lot of them are going after DeSantis. That could be a rough night for DeSantis. On the other hand, if he comes off deftly parrying attacks and exceeding the fairly low expectations for his stage performances, it could help his flagging campaign.
This will be way more media attention than any of these candidates has received so far. Yes, a debate audience is kind of a nerdy one, but there will be moments of drama and excitement and those will be repeated on TV news and shared on social media so that people who aren’t well attuned to the contest so far will gain some exposure to these candidates.
And the great thing about debates is that you can have moments, whether scripted or unscripted, that elevate obscure candidates and affect the contest. Kamala Harris’ dig at Joe Biden about his busing comments in the first round of debates in 2019 was one of the only times the front-runner actually got hurt, if only temporarily, and probably played no small role in making her Vice President. Elizabeth Warren’s live disembowelment of Michael Bloomberg couldn’t save her campaign but it probably buried his.
Some of these candidates have solid debating skills and are pretty sharp on their feet; they’ve just lacked an audience up until now. That changes on the 23rd.
Anyway, I’m not saying any of this is going to completely overturn where this contest has been. But the next two weeks are going to make the last several months looks sleepy by comparison.
Mike Pence - the ultimate “butter cow.”