It is an unprecedented time in U.S. presidential nomination politics, but a lot of pundits remain certain that all roads still lead to Donald Trump being the Republican candidate. As analyst Charlie Cook put it: “Barring Trump having some health-related problem before the convention, this nomination is settled.”
But polling following the first debate among Republican presidential hopefuls shows that while Trump is the most likely nominee, there’s still plenty of uncertainty.
Let’s start with the debate polling from FiveThirtyEight/Washington Post/IPSOS. Three candidates stood out according to those who watched the event, with 29 percent selecting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as having the best performance, followed by Vivek Ramaswamy at 26 percent, and former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley at 15 percent.
The key finding in the survey, however, was that each of the eight candidates gained in a critical question: whether debate-watchers would “consider” voting for them in upcoming primaries and caucuses. It’s a good question because the debate to some extent simulates the effects of a campaign. Remember, most voters have barely paid attention to nomination politics so far. With the exception of Trump and perhaps former Vice President Mike Pence, these are not yet familiar candidates to most voters.
As political scientist Meredith Conroy pointed out, “Candidates willing to go after Trump last night (Haley, Christie, Pence) didn’t get punished.” Indeed, not only did all three expand the group willing to consider voting for them, but their net favorable ratings all went up.
It’s true that no candidate has held as large a polling lead as Trump has and failed to win the nomination. But that’s a less impressive statistic than it seems. There aren’t that many cases of big early leads for open nominations during the 50 years of the open nomination system.
The key thing to know about voters and nomination politics, however, is what Nate Silver said. “Most primary voters like multiple candidates, and that makes multi-candidate primaries intrinsically volatile.”
He’s correct. Pundits who marvel at how many Republican voters still like Trump despite the long list of reasons not to are getting it backwards. We should expect most of a party’s voters to like most of the party’s politicians. What’s important about Trump is that many Republicans don’t like him, and that there’s even some evidence that being indicted has eaten away at his support within the party.
But Republicans don’t have to dislike Trump for him to lose the nomination. They just have to like another candidate better, and evidence from the debate suggests that once campaigning begins they’ll find other candidates that they like.
And don’t worry too much about potential winnowing failures — the possibility that several candidates will split the anti-Trump vote. Republicans have already effectively narrowed the candidate field to eight Trump opponents by excluding others from the first debate, and may squeeze one or two more out after raising the threshold for qualifying for the September debate. More will likely follow, and if they don’t formally drop out, it’s hard to see how candidates polling at 1 percent or less will matter one way or another.
To be sure, Trump is absolutely the most likely to win the nomination. But it’s simply too early to be sure and one can’t repeat too many times that everything about this is unprecedented.
Jonathan Bernstein is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.
