How Donald Trump’s DIY self-funded candidacy in a post-Citizen United world will encourage other billionaires in 2020 and beyond.
With his solid wins in Nevada, South Carolina, and New Hampshire, Donald Trump is now the uncontested front runner for the Republican nomination. If anybody would have predicted this a year ago, they would have institutionalized or laughed out of the Republican Party. No serious pundit ever thought that Trump, who descended down an escalator in front of paid applause for his campaign announcement, would be within an arm’s reach of any nomination. This was supposed to be Jeb Bush’s year but as we watch the civil war between the Republican voter and donor base, we are seeing a total unraveling of what was once Ronald Reagan’s Grand Old Party.
The Nevada results should serve as a wakeup call for both John Kasich and Ben Carson, who are both lagging badly. The air is almost out of the Carson balloon as he founders downward. As for Kasich, any hope for a post-New Hampshire bounce has long faded. Both candidacies are at a point where each family gathers around the hospital bed and waits for nature to take its course.
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That leaves Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. So long as both remain in the race, Trump will continue to win decisively. Rubio seems to be inheriting the remnants of the GOP establishment while the movement conservatives are flocking toward Cruz. Neither shows any desire to step aside for party unity. Perhaps Donald Trump understood the primary calendar better than anybody because he framed it as a long reality show, something which low-information voters could intuitively understand.
You have to go back as far as 1940 to see something this unthinkable in Republican presidential politics and people forget just how crazy that Philadelphia convention became. Why?
After being politically sidelined for 8 years with FDR and The New Deal, Republicans thought that Roosevelt’s missteps by trying to pack the Supreme Court offered a way out of the wilderness. When the convention rolled around, there was a candidate for everybody’s tastes but nobody could claim enough delegates to win the nomination. 11 announced candidates showed up at the convention. Isolationists and Internationalists split between Senators Bob Taft and Arthur Vandenberg. The darling of the Republican primaries was a 38 year old crime busting Manhattan DA named Tom Dewey, who was still two years away from being elected Governor of New York. There were a number of candidates who polled like newspaper publisher Frank Gannett as well as powerful Senators like Styles Bridges of New Hampshire and Charles McNary of Oregon. While it is astounding to believe today, even Herbert Hoover felt that he could make a credible comeback and he threw his hat into the ring.
Somewhere in the pack was a public utility executive named Wendell Willkie, who had been an active Democrat until he switched parties in 1939, only a year before the 1940 Republican convention. He was young internationalist who supported aid to Great Britain while the Nazis rolled through Europe. Like Trump, conventional wisdom believed that Willkie’s candidacy would be a joke because he had no visible means of political support. However by the 6th ballot, the delegates coalesced around Willkie which became one of the greatest upsets in American political history and the best example of a “runaway convention” since William Jennings Bryan was nominated in 1896.
What makes Trump’s self-funded campaign interesting is that other Republican mega-donors are asking, “Why not me?” The growth of self-funded billionaires who bypass super-pacs and instead run for high office on their own might be the unintended consequence of the Citizen United. Mega-donors like Home Depot founder Ken Langone, mutual fund pioneer Foster Friess, or the Koch brothers might ponder cutting out the middleman and running themselves. Right now the spigot of super-pac money has slowed after millions went down the rat hole of the Bush campaign and I wonder if Trump’s success may empower these billionaires to fantasize about their own Potomac dreams.
Now that the Republican Party is in free fall, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is already flirting with the idea of an independent bid. Bloomberg has strong name ID and three terms in what John Lindsay once called “The Second Toughest Job in America.” Beyond Bloomburg, only David Koch has that kind of experience, when he ran as a third party Vice Presidential candidate as a Libertarian with Ed Clark in 1980. By dumping any limiting partisan labels, billionaire mega-donors can bypass the messy primary calendar and aim squarely for the fall election as an independent. The ego-driven Trump campaign must seem like catnip to these guys.
Between 1952 and 2004, there was a Nixon, a Bush, or a Dole on every Republican ticket, with the exception of 1964. Jeb Bush discovered the hard way that nobody gets their turn anymore as the Trump campaign roughed him out of the race. With that in mind, what’s to keep an ego-driven mega-donor from thinking they could do a better job as a candidate than any of these elected officials?
In 1992 my college roommate’s father, a wealthy retired tech CEO, threw his hat into the Republican New Hampshire Primary. He finished third behind George Bush and Pat Buchanan but I’m told he had a blast. Four years later, Michael Lewis toyed with tire baron Morry Taylor as he floundered through Iowa before dropping out and having any lasting impact.
However, the Citizens United case has not only reopened the financial spigots because justices extended the faulty logic that that money equates to free speech. In this environment, where massive funds need to be raised for the campaigns and equally massive funds need to be raised for a series of “independent” super-pacs, mega donors like Sheldon Adelson have become political celebrities unto their own right.
As Donald Trump has proven, it doesn’t take too much to transform celebrity and a deep wallet into political capital.
The Big Question. Who will be the next self funded billionaire to jump into the race for the White and when will it take place? Our crack team of political expert will declare a winner. Send you answer to Bob.McBarton@comcast.net
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