2024 Republican primaries may be a rerun of 2016

Last week, Larry Hogan, the former Republican governor of Maryland, announced that he would not seek the GOP nomination for president. To be successful in 2024, according to Hogan, the party must abandon “angry, divisive, politics;” elected officials must “say publicly what they speak freely about behind closed doors,” and “move on from Mr. Trump.” Nonetheless, with Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis “soaking up all the oxygen,” and “the rest of us in single digits,” Hogan decided the stakes were too high for him to “risk being part of another multi-car pile-up that could potentially help” the former president recapture the nomination.

Hogan was referring, of course, to 2016, when GOP rules for allocating delegates in presidential primaries allowed Trump to amass a majority of the votes at the Republican National Convention by winning pluralities in a crowded field of 12 candidates.

As Hogan fears, if there is another multi-car pile-up, history may well repeat itself in 2024.

At the moment, Trump and Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and Trump administration Ambassador to the U.N., are the only credible candidates to have entered the race. But a slew of others — including DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson — are waiting in the wings. “March is a message month,” Hutchinson recently told reporters. Disavowing the politics of “arrogance and revenge,” but in sharp contrast to Hogan, Hutchinson claimed that Republicans “need to have all alternatives” to Donald Trump in the race.

Democrats and Republicans have distinctly different formulas for awarding delegates in presidential primaries. Democrats don’t have winner-take-all contests. Candidates who exceed 15 percent of the vote get delegates in proportion to the votes they receive (statewide and sometimes in each Congressional district). Republicans do not have a one-size-fits-all states system. In 2016, states containing 13 percent of the total nationwide delegate count used the proportional method; states containing 7 percent of the overall count elected delegates on the same ballot as the presidential preference poll, and the remaining states went with some form of winner-take-all, sometimes with a 50 percent threshold and sometimes with no threshold at all. The proportional method was required for all primaries scheduled on or before March 15, but some states set a winner-take-all threshold to get around it.

Trump rode the GOP rules to victory at the Republican National Convention in the summer of 2016. He got 45.7 percent of the popular vote in Florida, for example, and all 99 delegates. In Tennessee, he received 39 percent of the popular vote and 57 percent of the delegates. Overall, Trump got 45 percent of the Republican primary votes, but 70 percent of the delegates punched his ticket on the first ballot at the Convention.

To head off potential challengers in 2020, the pro-Trump forces persuaded state committees to increase the number of hybrid and pure winner-take-all primaries.

Republican state committees have until Oct. 1, 2023 to submit delegate allocation plans, rules governing whether delegates should be bound on the first ballot, and instructions on the adoption of a party platform at the National Convention. The Trump campaign, which appears to be far more skilled at playing the inside game than its predecessors, is working hard, and apparently with considerable success, to stack state committees with MAGA zealots, and influence changes in delegate selection formulas.

It is far too early, of course, to predict a winner of the Republican presidential nomination with any confidence. But it may be appropriate — given the admonitions of Gov. Hogan about the risks of another multi-car pile-up — to identify what appear to be the two most likely scenarios. If, say, a half dozen candidates enter the race and refuse to withdraw, despite disappointing results in more than 20 primaries in February and March, then Trump, with his rock solid MAGA base, could well use the various forms of winner-take-all to build a commanding lead with a plurality of votes. If, unlike Trump’s opponents in 2016, most of them don’t enter the race or drop out early on, leaving Trump and DeSantis as the only candidates, then all bets are off.

The difficulty of imagining credible alternatives to these two scenarios and the refusal of declared and potential presidential candidates to say in public what they say privately about Donald Trump, should remind us that the once-proud Grand Old Party has moved very far from the political mainstream.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. He is the co-author (with Stuart Blumin) of “Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century.”