From Hoover to Trump, it’s not the primaries, stupid
If you’ve been paying attention to the news — no, I mean the stuff without the president trying to sharpie his way out of a Crimson Tide of a mess — you’ve noticed that the Republican Party is trying to manufacture consent for Donald Trump to be nominated for a second term by removing opportunities for people to challenge him:
“Republican parties in South Carolina, Nevada, Arizona and Kansas are expected to finalize the cancellations in meetings this weekend, according to three GOP officials who are familiar with the plans.
The moves are the latest illustration of Trump’s takeover of the entire Republican Party apparatus. They underscore the extent to which his allies are determined to snuff out any potential nuisance en route to his renomination — or even to deny Republican critics a platform to embarrass him.”
Me, I think the guy who started a trade war that’s going so well he’s having to pay people who lost money because of him—especially if they’re in counties that voted for him in 2016 and Obama in 2012 —
“More than 2,300 counties that voted for Trump in 2016 have received money from the bailout program, and counties that flipped from voting for Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016 were more likely to get money than counties that were red during both elections, according to Environmental Working Group data obtained by the Washington Post.”
— is plenty good at embarrassing himself without help. Plus, again, Trump and the sharpie:
Oh, and by the way, that $16 billion in aid is not coming from China. I promise. Donald Trump is just bad at his job.
Anyway. Partly because he’s bad at his job, and partly because he’s a public relations nightmare, he is being primaried. And $10 gets you $20 that the guy who beat Hillary isn’t going to lose no matter how many farmers get paid not enough money to offset their Trumpian losses, but this does raise an interesting point:
If Donald Trump had to run in a fully contested Republican primary, would he become the second Republican president to win neither a majority of primaries nor a majority of primary votes?
Yes, it’s happened before.
Many of us think of presidents as essentially unassailable outside of November, but the history of primarying Republican presidents is surprisingly robust. George H.W. Bush got primaried by Pat Buchanan, Richard Nixon got primaried by two men, and Dwight Eisenhower (who’d recovered from a heart attack) was not the winner in four states on his way to being renominated, whereupon he smashed Adlai Stevenson again.
Then we come to the curious case of Herbert Hoover, who was blamed for the Great Depression, which makes sense: The person in charge when something awful happens usually gets blamed.
The 1930 election afforded Americans (white Americans, at least; the Republican Party had gone to great lengths to purge black people from its power structure after Hoover won, and that was the black people who could pay poll taxes, pass literacy tests and/or avoid being killed for stepping foot in a polling place) an opportunity to tell Hoover how much they thought of his economic policies, and they told him by newly electing more than four dozen Democrats to the House — a relatively modest number, given the fluctuation of the times: The party gained and then lost 60 seats in consecutive Woodrow Wilson-era elections, and it gained 76 in 1922 before losing most of them in the next few elections. But still, the nation’s rejection of Hoover was clear.
It was about to get clearer still. In 1932, Hoover — he of the promise of a “final triumph over poverty” and the reality of a subsequent descent into abject poverty — was up for re-election.
The primary season did not go well for him. He won the favor of roughly one-third of the vote in the party’s primaries. The problem for the winner of the plurality of the votes was that relatively few delegates came with those votes, which meant that to get the rest of the way there, Sen. Joseph Francis, winner of at least five primaries, needed to have something approaching Hoover’s political backing to get the rest of the delegates necessary to become the party’s presidential nominee.
As you know if you passed sixth-grade history, he did not get that backing, and Hoover was renominated (to relatively little fanfare), whereupon he became an ex-president.
But changing the name of the party’s presidential nominee likely wouldn’t have mattered: 1932 featured a full-on depression, and recessions end presidencies. In fact, in the only year since 1932 in which the White House did not change hands because of a recession or an economic crisis, it changed hands because the guy who won World War II (and indirectly caused a serious spike in alcoholism-related deaths because war is hell) was seeking the presidency against, well, a guy who didn’t win World War II. So with a recession expected next year, Trump can win, lose or sharpie — I mean draw — however many primaries and go down tweeting as the White House changes hands yet again because of economics.