If you blinked — if you were on vacation, buying school supplies for the kids, or moving your college student into their dorm — you just missed the most important week of the 2024 campaign thus far. Maybe the most important week until the Iowa caucuses in January.
You want decisive moments? There were four, enough to shatter the classic 16th-century thesis of drama: the “unity of place” principle stipulating that the action of a stage drama should occur in only one venue. These modern moments occurred in Milwaukee, Atlanta, Des Moines, and Concord, N. H.
You very likely missed at least two of them. Here is the gazetteer of the week’s events:
— Concord. Earlier this month, I sat for 40 minutes with Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire in his State House office. He argued that Donald Trump was unfit for a second term and that, as governor of the state with the first primary, he would work to winnow the field of Republican candidates, making it more difficult for the former president to slide to the nomination with his core of 40%.
It was bracing talk — but this week, Sununu went further. Where a few weeks ago he wanted the field narrowed by Super Tuesday, which likely will occur March 5, he now has moved up the deadline to around Jan. 17, a few days after the Iowa caucuses and a few days before the New Hampshire primary, which may be held on Jan. 23.
That’s not all. Sununu signaled this week what he resisted telling me earlier this month — that he will endorse, and actively work for, one of the candidates to be the Trump alternative.
He was 14 years old when the endorsement of his father, former Gov. John H. Sununu, catapulted Vice President George H.W. Bush to victory in the 1988 New Hampshire primary and set him on the road to the White House.
“New Hampshire governors have the powers to do that,” the elder Sununu told me the other day.
The Sununus are close. The family’s three top New Hampshire elected figures — the former governor, the current governor, and former Sen. John E. Sununu — live within five minutes of each other on the state’s seacoast. When they get together at Christmas, as they always do, it will be less than four weeks from the primary. There they likely will consolidate their strategy for defeating Trump. “We will continue to be outspoken,” the elder Sununu said. Watch out.
Gov. Sununu isn’t letting on whom he will endorse.
“As of now,” he wrote in The New York Times, “it’s anyone’s for the taking.”
All things being equal, and they are not, he might lean to Doug Burgum, but the North Dakota governor is so far down in the polls (4% in New Hampshire, according to the Emerson College poll) that that’s unlikely.
The anti-Trump bombast of Chris Christie surely appeals to Sununu, but though the former New Jersey governor may poll well in New Hampshire (if you consider a 9% second place a strong rating), he’s at 4% nationally — which prompted a top New Hampshire Republican strategist to tell me that Christie “is on a kamikaze mission but shouldn’t expect to be able to get back to the aircraft carrier.”
Sununu wants a winner. Watch this space.
— Des Moines. The new Iowa Poll showed, predictably, that Trump has an enormous lead in the caucuses, with 42%, the usual Trump figure. That’s the surface reading, and it is significant. But remember that there remains 58% who are not for Trump — hence the Sununu algebra.
But let’s examine the innards of the poll, the elements that don’t capture headlines. There’s essentially a tie at the top of those who have favorable views of Trump (65%) and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida (66%), with Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina relatively close at 59%. That might change your perspective.
And if you add up the portion of Iowa Republicans who rate the candidates as their first or second choice or say they are actively considering supporting them — the candidate’s “footprints,” in the graphic image employed by the cerebral Des Moines pollster J. Ann Selzer — Trump and DeSantis are in a virtual tie, with Scott within striking distance. Watch out.
— Milwaukee. The ghosts of Trump past (election denial) and Trump future (the eight contestants eager to topple him from his commanding lead) were surely present at the Republican debate. Indeed, before the event even began, the Trump team leaked a provocative excerpt from his conversation with former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, with the former president describing the press and his liberal critics as “savage animals, they’re people that are sick.”
Vincent Benigni, a professor of communication at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, said Trump’s absence was a factor for the former president — and for the others.
“The message was that Trump is a figure of the past. Several of the candidates brought up the idea that we are moving into another period. That could be the overarching theme of the debate.”
Trump’s absence from Fiserv Forum also served to underline his isolation, in part a reflection of the cocoon in which all former presidents reside, but also a reflection of Trump’s inclination and his apparent refusal to spend as much time campaigning in person as his competitors, who surely need the exposure more than he does. But Iowans and New Hampshirites insist on seeing candidates in person. Watch out.
— Atlanta. On Thursday, Trump reported to court and pleaded not guilty. We’ve seen that before. The spectacle of a onetime Oval Office occupant being summoned to a courthouse — even the heretofore unheard-of notion of the word “president” and “arrested” appearing in the same sentence — has lost the power to shock.
This dreary ritual is getting repetitive for all but Trump’s rivals, who are still waiting for the erosion they hope will accompany the threat that the frontrunner faces prison time. Watch that space.
All of this is reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln’s remark about the 1864 election, conducted amid the Civil War. The people of the United States, he said, were “divided and paralyzed by a political war amongst themselves.”
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
