By Michael Shepherd - Aug. 23, 2023
Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up.

The former president commands the Republican primary, but Maine shows his vulnerabilities. The first debate of the 2024 Republican presidential election comes Wednesday night in Milwaukee. It will be somewhat anticlimactic because former President Donald Trump, the frontrunner, is skipping it for an interview with Tucker Carlson.

It remains a good chance for the other candidates to emerge as a Trump alternative, something that is not going well for the field right now. National polls show that Trump's standing is improving on the heels of indictments that may threaten his ability to run an effective campaign aside from the fact that he is a risky general election candidate against President Joe Biden.

While recent polls in the early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire show Trump in a weaker spot, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has been seen as the major rival for the nomination, was still 23 points down in Iowa and behind former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in Maine's neighboring state.

They will be among the eight candidates planning to attend the Milwaukee debate. But Trump's dominance in the fractured field is already leading to calls for winnowing the field. New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a Trump skeptic, wrote a New York Times guest column on Monday to say the field must shrink to three or four candidates by the time his state votes or risk Trump losing to Biden and dooming the party's candidates down the ticket.

His argument is that Trump's support is broad due to name recognition but soft in that many Republicans are looking for a safer bet. Maine, which will switch to semi-open primaries when we vote among more than a dozen other states on Super Tuesday in March, has not had any primary polling to date, but there is little reason to think it would differ much from New Hampshire.

In Maine, Republicans seem to be struggling with this choice. There are lots of examples of grassroots support for Trump, but the party's elected leaders have been either quiet or skeptical. Former Gov. Paul LePage, who has all but left the political stage since losing to Gov. Janet Mills in November, looks unlikely to lift a finger for Trump after blaming him for Republican losses in 2022.

That's a far cry from early 2016, when LePage and Christie became the first sitting governors to endorse the former president as he kept surging through a big field, and 2020, when the former governor chaired Trump's campaign. While support from big-name leaders does not necessarily lift you up in the polls, those early endorsements were key to cementing Trump last time.

None of this means big-name Maine Republicans won't support Trump if he wins the nomination. Almost all of them will. It does mean that many party leaders would like someone other than Trump to emerge. For now, they aren't willing to back a losing candidate. This has the effect of freezing the race in place. If nobody emerges, Republicans will get the status quo.

Even the grassroots are treating things cautiously. Rep. Katrina Smith, R-Palermo, is advertising a debate watch party at the Elks Club in Augusta tonight. But she noted that the club has four TVs, so the group can also show Trump's interview with Carlson.