The Collective Action Problem: Why Donald Trump is a Giant Favorite for the 2024 Republican Nomination
Why distrust and a lack of cooperation dooms Trump's Republican challengers
Note: It’s been a while since I published as I’ve had quite a bit covering Baylor basketball, working as a prosecutor and writing on an article that Lakshya Jain and I just published for the University of Virginia’s Crystal Ball. But I will at least publish weekly going forward. We’ll take a look at some 2020 results, explore some interesting counterfactuals and revisit conventional wisdom about 2012 and 2016 in light of 2020. But today, we start with why I think Donald Trump is a gigantic favorite to win the 2024 Republican nomination.
While some folks are ready to move on from Donald Trump because of Joe Biden’s victory, Trump has an overwhelming chance of winning the 2024 nomination. He is the best positioned candidate in the modern era—likely even stronger than Al Gore in 2000.
Trump’s advantage starts with Hillary Clinton’s strength in 2016. Clinton created a self-fulfilling prophecy that allowed her to consolidate the field. While some viewed this as “The Party Decides Theory”—the idea that endorsements from the party organization dictate who wins—Clinton’s purported strength drew few viable alternatives.
In 2016, Joe Biden passed on running. Bernie Sanders was the only elected member of Congress to run. Martin O’Malley, a man that will end up best known for the inspiration for a character on The Wire, finished third in that race; no elected governors or former cabinet members ran. Anyone that ran risked looking like a loser with a terrible finish against Clinton. And those losers would create animosity because their only path to victory involved nuking Clinton. As Omar said in the Wire, “You come at the King, you best not miss.” And most Democrats feared they’d miss by going after Clinton, which would leave them persona non grata with the Clintons and Democratic voters in 2024.
With a small field, Clinton did not face many attacks. The race came down to her and Sanders. That allowed Clinton to consolidate her support and weaken Sanders on issues like gun control and immigration. Sanders made surprising gains with the anti-Clinton vote—perhaps a sign that a larger field could have worked to attack Clinton— but he could never peel off enough of her support to mount a realistic path to the nomination.
Trump has that same advantage Clinton enjoyed in 2016. Tons of Republicans would like to be president. If there’s any doubt about that proposition, look at the large 2016 field, and a bevy of candidates that jostled to prove their MAGA bona fides if 2024 had been an open contest to succeed Trump.
Any candidate that runs knows Trump starts with overwhelming support. Winning likely requires attacking Trump. And once again, if a person fails, they risk being a loser—in the case of Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie and others, multi-time losers—and angering the Republican base that strongly supports Trump, for their apostasy. When a candidate believes their odds of winning are very low, and the magnitude of harm from attacking Trump is high, the calculus will likely lead to most strong candidates foregoing the 2024 nomination.
That first advantage makes Trump a giant favorite for the 2024 nomination. If he can naturally draw weaker opponents like Clinton did in ‘16, he’d be in a strong position. But Trump enjoys more than that.
Trump’s second advantage is that his opponents have a collective action problem. In a reprisal to 2016, the non-Trump alternatives all want to be the sole Trump alternative. To avoid the pitfalls of angering MAGA folks by attacking Trump, the best bet for a Trump opponent is to have someone else bring Trump down. That was Cruz’s strategy in ‘16, and for a time, Rubio’s. Each felt that if they could just become Trump’s main opponent, they’d win the nomination. But in a Catch-22, to weaken Trump, someone has to attack him. But nobody can attack him because it weakens them too. So in the end, nobody can attack Trump because each person loses individually doing it.
Christie actually did break out of the collective action problem before the New Hampshire primary. The problem was that he didn’t attack Trump. He ended up in a murder-suicide with Rubio. Christie went after Rubio in a New Hampshire debate by saying he gave a, “25 second memorized speech his advisors gave him.” Rubio then repeated the exact line about “let’s dispel with this fiction…Obama knows exactly what he’s doing…” Instead of finishing second and clearing Kasich and Jeb Bush from the field, Rubio cratered; he finished fifth, which allowed Kasich and Bush to slog on to South Carolina. With a larger field in the Palmetto State, Trump edged out Rubio and went on to win the nomination.
The reason the Republican party has been unable to stop Trump will reappear in the 2024 race. If every candidate and elected official stood up to Trump, then it could truly make a difference. Early on, it didn’t take every candidate attacking Trump, but it took more than Bush. By the time Cruz got to him, it was too late.
Once Trump won the presidency, elected Republicans faced the same collective action problem. Each member individually could say, “I alone can’t stop Trump. And if I weren’t here, someone even crazier and more sycophantic would enable Trump more.” While that’s true if everyone believes everyone else will act that way, in the aggregate it produces a far worse outcome. If nearly every official stood up to Trump and attacked him, Trump would face a much more daunting situation. He can attack the few folks that hate him as RINO’s and say the attacks are isolated. He can’t attack everyone.
In 2024, Trump’s rivals individually can’t win attacking Trump. And because they know that they can’t win as the only person attacking them, they’re left in a prisoner’s dilemma. There’s an information asymmetry where none of Trump’s rivals can be certain that Trump’s other rivals will also attack him. And because the best outcome is to be the one person that doesn’t attack Trump—so you can win both the MAGA votes and any alternative votes—then all the alternative candidates have to be scared that not everyone else will go through with attacking Trump. And once you believe that someone will not follow through on attacking Trump, then you have no incentive to go down swinging and missing against Trump.
The rise of Trump is the story of individuals along the way making small concessions they knew were wrong to achieve what they thought would be the greater good: their own election or elevation. But somewhere along the way of acquiescence, Trump became too powerful to be stopped. By then, his opponents knew that it took way too large of a collective group to stop him; if any of them attacked him individually, they were done. And once that calculus applied, then nobody would risk being one of the few standing up to him. By then, it became impossible for the Republicans to stop him.
Trump has become so powerful on the right that ironically, he’ll prove that the only man that can actually stop him from winning the Republican nomination is himself. Unless he decides not to run or is physically incapable of running, I’d bet a substantial amount of money he’ll be the 2024 nominee. All those folks that decided to countenance Trump’s rise won’t do anything individually to ensure his fall.
Kendall Kaut is an assistant district attorney, sports editor and election analyst. If you like the newsletter, please forward it and tell others to subscribe. You can follow Kendall on Twitter @kendallkaut