To move past Trump, GOP needs a better way to nominate candidates

Donald Trump’s announcement that he’s running for a second term as president comes at a time when a considerable segment of the Republican Party would like to move on from the former president. Given Trump’s defeat in 2020 and the less-than-sterling midterm performance of his hand-picked candidates, self-interest alone suggests the party would do better if it shed the Trump brand.

But moving on may not be so easy if the GOP stays with its current presidential nomination system. In October, polls showed that 45 percent of Republicans wanted Trump to be the GOP nominee in 2024. In the aftermath of the national election, that percentage has dropped to 35 percent, while Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has surged into the first position.

But Trump’s 35 percent is seemingly a solid bloc of supporters. His partisans have stayed with him through thick and thin. While DeSantis might have high favorability among Republicans right now, this can be damaged by the attacks from other candidates that early favorites inevitably attract or by the inherent difficulty of running on the national stage — something even successful state governors can struggle with.

Trump’s road to the 2016 nomination was built on winning only slightly more than a third of the primary vote. In New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, Trump was the “winner,” gaining more than a plurality of delegates but doing so with less than 33 percent of the combined primary vote of the three states. Super Tuesday played out in a similar fashion. Trump won in seven of the 11 states that day, pocketing nearly 43 percent of the delegates, with under 35 percent of the vote. Georgia, Texas and Virginia repeated this pattern. And while Trump’s overall numbers began to increase with the mini-super Tuesday primaries in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Illinois and Missouri, he never reached the 50 percent mark.

Trump finally sealed the deal by winning primaries with clear majorities in states such as New York and Maryland — states no Republican nominee was going to carry in any case. One would have to go back to Michael Dukakis in 1988 to find a major party nominee with a lower percentage of primary votes. Without a change in how the GOP picks its presidential candidate, Trump could rely on this steadfast core of support to capture the nomination again.

Reforming the selection system is a hard row to hoe. The idea of giving party officials more say over nominee selection is sensible but has gone nowhere. Fixing a primary system whose legitimacy rests on its claim of being more transparent and more democratic would require admitting that popular government, to be both popular and effective, sometimes requires less transparency and less democracy. One doesn’t see many, if any, politicians wanting to make that case these days.

One idea that has gained some currency is a selection system using ranked-choice voting for party caucuses or primaries. Here, if no candidate wins a majority of the votes in a first round of voting, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated but his or her voters’ second choice are distributed among the remaining candidates. The process continues until one candidate gets a majority. Unlike the proverbial smoke-filled rooms of party officials, this alternative would ensure that any winning candidate received the backing, directly or indirectly, of a majority of voters.

Ranked-choice voting incentivizes candidates to appeal to a wider range of primary voters beyond a narrow plurality of hard-core partisans. In theory, this would make candidates more appealing to the now all-important swing and independent voters in the general elections. In 2021, the GOP gubernatorial convention in Virginia used ranked-choice voting, generating a nominee, Glenn Youngkin, who was both conservative and electorally successful in what has become a very “purple” state.

Of course, such a reform cannot fully cure what ails the American polity or even the Republican Party. Nevertheless, if GOP officials are serious about moving on from Trump, then hoping he will simply fade away, as many expected after his 2020 loss and the Jan. 6 riot, is a gamble.

Gary Schmitt is senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in its Program on Social, Cultural and Constitutional Studies.