The Hill reports: “Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) says former President Trump will face a lot of competition in a Republican primary if he runs for president in 2024.” “I think we’re going to have a crowded field for president,” McConnell is reported to have stated.
One might think that robust competition would make it less likely that Trump would win the GOP nomination. In fact, a crowded field is likely to mean just the opposite. As in 2016, Trump could benefit from Republican Party rules that would permit him to capture a majority of delegates even if he secures only a plurality of votes in a fractured field. If the 2024 Republican presidential primary is just a two-person race between Trump and DeSantis, DeSantis might defeat Trump; yet if Trump faces not just DeSantis but a group of other candidates, it could be another divide-and-conquer situation. As Washington Post columnist Mark Thiessen notes: Trump “won the 2016 nomination by prevailing over a divided field with the support of about one-third of Republican primary voters. He could do so again in 2024.”
The Republican Party could change its rules. The Republican Party could make clear that, because of Trump’s unconscionable behavior with respect to January 6, 2021 (if for no other reason), it will not welcome Trump as a candidate for its presidential nomination in 2024. The list of resolutions that the Republican National Committee has made since Trump left office makes clear that the RNC, if it wished, could adopt a resolution condemning Trump’s conduct rather than applauding him.
But if the Republican Party lets Trump become its 2024 nominee with a mere plurality of votes (because of a fragmented field of candidates), the question then is whether Trump can go on to win the Electoral College without majority support as he did in 2016. Not only did Trump fail to win a plurality of the national popular vote in 2016, he won the Electoral College without winning a majority of the popular vote in the battleground states that gave him his Electoral College victory. (Analyzing how that could happen was the premise for the research that led to Presidential Elections and Majority Rule.)
The November 2024 presidential election undoubtedly will have more than just the Democratic and Republican nominees on the ballot. (The Libertarian and Green parties, among others, will surely field candidates.) The question is what role with third-party and other candidates play. If Trump wins the GOP nomination without majority support, will he also win the presidency again without majority support? Or, instead, this time will some third candidate–perhaps Chris Christie running as an independent if, and only if, Trump and not DeSantis wins the GOP nomination?–prevent Trump from being a plurality winner of the presidency, just as the split between Taft and Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 caused Woodrow Wilson to win?
Much uncertainty lies ahead. The only thing that’s clear, unfortunately, is that just because a candidate wins a presidential election, it does not mean that the candidate is actually the preferred choice of the electorate among all the candidates who run that year. The office of the presidency is important enough that the winner ought to be the candidate whom the voters would prefer to win. Maybe sometime in the history of this nation will be able to have a system designed to achieve this. But if you have read Alex Keyssar’s Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?, don’t bet on it anytime soon.