NO, IT'S NOT TRUE THAT ANY OTHER REPUBLICAN WOULD BE RUNNING AWAY WITH THIS

One day before the election, Matt Yglesias has a Big Idea:

Any Other Republican Would Be Running Away With This

Yglesias's theory:

... almost everywhere you look in the world of affluent democracies, the exact same thing is happening: The incumbent party is losing and often losing quite badly.

It appears that the unhappy electorates are unhappy in fundamentally the same way. Inflation spiked ... and though it’s been tamed, prices of many goods have not fallen to what voters remember, and what’s more, the process of taming has involved higher interest rates, which in their own way raise the cost of living.

So Democrats would lose to any Republican candidate other than Trump, Yglesias believes. He doesn't intend this as liberal-bashing.

It is not a left-right thing.... Center-left governments from Sweden to Finland to New Zealand have lost, but so have center-right governments in Australia and Belgium.

Nevertheless, he concludes:

Under the circumstances, it’s Republicans who should be asking why the race is even close and Democrats who should be breathing a sigh of relief to be heading into a coin-flip election.

But America isn't like most other affluent democracies because we don't have a parliamentary system -- we choose a president directly. Personalities matter a great deal -- and on the Republican side, some of the personalities are as grotesque as Donald Trump without his bizarre charisma. Others are batshit crazy.

Yglesias probably imagines that Nikki Haley would have become the Republican nominee if Trump hadn't run, because she was the last opponent standing in the primaries. But as I've said many times, Haley was the runner-up for the nomination only because Ron DeSantis was effectively the second-choice Trump, a lib-owning authoritarian. In a Trump-less GOP field with only the same candidates running, DeSantis probably would have won. During the primaries, he had a 62.2% approval rating among Republicans, the best of any non-Trump candidate, and nearly 40 points better than his disapproval rating, according to FiveThirtyEight; Haley's approval rating among Republicans was only 43%, with a 39.9% disapproval rating.

So while it's true that Haley seemed like a strong general election candidate -- in polls taken through March of this year, she led President Biden by 4.4 points, according to Real Clear Polling, and some non-partisan polls showed her with a double-digit lead -- DeSantis was struggling against Biden: RCP said he and Biden were tied as of January 2024. When he dropped out of the primaries in January, DeSantis was widely disliked by the general public -- his ratings were 31.7% favorable, 46.7% unfavorable, according to FiveThirtyEight. I think Biden might have beaten him, and Harris might have beaten him handily.

Yglesias seems to assume that Republicans would have nominated a respectable-looking candidate if Trump hadn't run. Why? Why assume that a party whose recent state-level nominees have included Mark Robinson, Herschel Walker, Royce White, Kari Lake, and Blake Masters would pick someone electable? There's a strong likelihood that if Trump hadn't run, the party's presidential nominee would have been a batshit-crazy MAGA influencer -- Mike Flynn, Mike Lindell, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kari Lake, Donald Trump Jr., or some other lowlife.

It's possible that the sheer number of whackjob candidates might have split the whackjob vote and given the race to a respectable-seeming candidate -- but many, many respectable-seeming candidates probably would have run as well: not just Haley, DeSantis, Chris Christie, Tim Scott, Mike Pence, and Vivek Ramaswamy, but also Glenn Youngkin, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Kristi Noem, Greg Abbott, Brian Kemp, Chris Sununu, and others. Trump bashers like Liz Cheney and Larry Hogan probably would have run, and while they would have done poorly, they would have further diluted the vote for top-tier respectable-seeming candidates. And the crazies would have spent the primaries pushing the not-quite-as-crazies to the even more extreme right. There's no reason to believe that the candidate who emerged from that process would be certain to win a general election.

It's possible that a Trumpish whackjob could have won this election. But it's not inevitable. There's no reason to assume the GOP would have chosen a better candidate.