The GOP Primaries Were Quick, But They Mattered | Opinion

Former president Donald Trump's demolition of the last vestiges of Nikki Haley's presidential hopes in the Super Tuesday primaries was a foregone conclusion. The same can be said of the entire primary season. But that doesn't mean that the primaries and caucuses and even the debates that Trump snubbed served no purpose.

The many millions donated to Trump's challengers did little but enrich their campaign consultants, and the resources, energy, and attention lavished on the race may all seem to have been wasted. Yet it was a necessary exercise and there was a lesson in it for the GOP donor class and Republican members of the D.C. uniparty, if they are willing to listen.

That lesson can be summed up in some simple truths that were painfully obvious long before the votes started to be counted but even now are hard for some to acknowledge.

The first is that it was always Trump's race to lose.

All the other GOP hopefuls, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, once considered the most viable alternative to Trump, took the hint after Trump's resounding victory in the Iowa caucus. That left Haley with the two-person race she desired. But the results in the primaries that followed in New Hampshire, Haley's home state of South Carolina, and then Michigan before this week's blowouts, demonstrated the same basic truth about Republican voters in 2024: Trump was their candidate and nothing could persuade them otherwise.

That message is often misinterpreted as proof that GOP voters are zombies who have traded in their minds, if not their souls, for MAGA caps. But that's never been true of Trump's voters and is even less the case now.

The overwhelming majority of Republican voters like Trump because they believe he speaks for their concerns about the economy, the culture, and the rule of Washington and Wall Street elites. After all, he discarded his New York liberalism to echo their conservative beliefs when he began his political career. Republican voters not only don't care about his wild exaggerations and crude insults; they like them. They understand that he is trolling the forces—both among liberals and the old GOP elites—they regard as having ignored their interests. And they're not wrong to think no one else had the guts to do it.

It's true that there was initially a powerful argument for moving on from Trump. After three largely successful years as president despite the efforts of the governing class to promote the Russian collusion hoax, Trump's management of the coronavirus pandemic was less than satisfactory. The crisis accentuated his weaknesses as a leader. And even if there were good reasons to regard the 2020 election as unfair due to media and Big Tech interference and the discarding of normal voter integrity guardrails, his reaction to his defeat highlighted his vanity and lack of restraint. The January 6 Capitol riot was not an insurrection, but it was a disgrace and, even if the president wasn't technically guilty of incitement, he couldn't entirely evade responsibility for it.

Trump floundered in 2021 and 2022 as his resentment about his treatment smoldered. That encouraged challengers, and DeSantis' brilliant governance in Florida seemed to offer Trump's policies and appetite for combat with the Left without the Trumpian baggage.

But all that was meaningless once it became clear in the spring of 2023 that Democrats were serious about a lawfare campaign that aimed to keep the man who was still the leading choice of Republicans for 2024 off the ballot. After indictments were filed against Trump in a series of flimsy cases in New York, Washington, and Atlanta, Trump's Republican rivals should have just given up. Most Republican voters, including many who were tired of the former president, rallied to his cause.

Voters rightly resented the banana republic proscriptions of a regime opponent but considered them doubly offensive coming from a party that disingenuously claimed to be defending democracy.

Moreover, the primary process was a reminder that the Trump takeover of the GOP was not just an embrace of a real-estate mogul turned reality TV star. It was a devastating rejection of the Republican ruling class and its contempt for rank-and-file conservatives as well as of working-class voters who no longer had a home in a Democratic Party that cared only about Wall Street, credentialed elites, and impoverished minorities.

Trump's trouncing of Haley, despite her lavish spending and fawning media coverage—which would have turned into the same smears directed at other Republicans had she actually become the nominee—was important.

Haley is a strong campaigner. She has a good resume and outlasted the GOP "fellas" who also wanted to replace Trump. But her stances on the issues were just as important to her failures as was the party's loyalty to Trump. Her lack of interest in the fight against the woke catechism of diversity, equity, and inclusion—demonstrated by her opposition to DeSantis's stand against the Disney corporation—and her echoing of the D.C. uniparty's embrace of the Ukraine war, which most conservative voters believe is a mistake, both demonstrated that she was a candidate out of a different time.

Haley's rhetoric seemed aimed at winning the nomination of the Republican Party that nominated John McCain and Mitt Romney, not the party of working-class voters who turned to Trump. Her campaign seemed based on the myths promulgated in the post-2012 GOP autopsy that Trump's 2016 victory exposed as the death rattle of the establishment that had promoted the Bushes and their allies. And her attacks on Trump were seen as helping Biden while doing nothing to boost her cause.

Whether Haley meekly returns to the GOP fold in the hope that her turn may come in 2028, crosses the aisle to run as a "No Labels" candidate or even seeks to use the applause she generated in the liberal media and the remnants of "Never Trump" Republicans to embrace the Democrats, the new Republican base is not going away. Her defeats in the primaries were a necessary rebuke to the idea that Republican voters will swallow a return to power of the donor class and that they won't tolerate the sinister anti-democratic tactics of Democrats who will clearly do anything to hold onto power.

The Republican Party of 2024 doesn't just belong to Trump. It belongs to the voters who believe he fights for them against both the Left and the old party establishment that despised them and their values. And we needed this year's primaries to make sure everyone knows it.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org and a senior contributor to The Federalist. Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.