While moderate, abortion-friendly Larry Hogan has decided to sacrifice his pretend presidential ambitions to try and defeat Donald Trump, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a quasi-clone of Hogan, isn’t ready to stand down.
In a splashy Wall Street Journal article out on Sunday, the newly re-elected governor of the Granite State lays out his case for why a moderate, pro-choice candidate would be the best chance Republicans have at taking back the White House in 2024. After I clean up the coffee I spit on the keyboard, it’s worth a discussion for discussion’s sake.
You don’t need to go much further than the first few paragraphs of the article to understand where Sununu is coming from. He’s likely to enter the race as the antithesis of Trump, and DeSantis, for that matter, to try and take up residence in the John Kasich lane:
Gov. Chris Sununu says abortion should remain legal in New Hampshire well into the second trimester of pregnancy. He opposed Republican legislation that could have forced schools to reveal a student’s sexual orientation to parents. He killed a GOP plan to redraw a House district boundary in the party’s favor.
It is an unusual record for a Republican, particularly one now testing whether he can win the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination.
Mr. Sununu, who has started raising money to assess support for a possible presidential campaign, is not trying to win over the Republican Party’s most ardent and ideologically driven voters, or those focused on battles over racial diversity or gender identity.’
Rather, the governor is offering his party the prospect of winning back the more centrist Republicans and independents who dislike the GOP’s turn under former President Donald Trump and want a calmer tone in politics. He is banking that his brand of small-government, socially moderate politics can regain support from voters who turned against Mr. Trump’s bid for re-election and then rejected many of the former president’s endorsed candidates in the 2022 midterm elections.
“I do not believe they want candidates that are only about the fight,” Mr. Sununu said.
For starters, DeSantis has a solid record as a successful governor and Trump has a solid record as a successful president. There is a lot more to both candidates than simply being “only about the fight.” They fight and they very often win. Sometimes they fight and lose but the point is that they are sticking up for principles and sticking up for their voting base. They also don’t avoid the fight, something many Republicans simply choose to do because they’re afraid of the media and afraid of angry libs on social media.
It was Trump, during the 2016 campaign, that wrestled the Republican Party out of the hands of the Bush-McCain wing and gave it back to the grassroots and populist, working-class base. Sununu would be a return to the Bush wing of the GOP, perhaps with less social conservatism but the same level of moderate capitulation.
Sununu, with the old folksy tripe about appealing to independents and trying to win back the middle without standing for any socially conservative beliefs, is basically a retread of McCain 2008 and Romney 2012, but probably more liberal.
Can a moderate, pro-choice candidate become the Republican nominee in 2024? Not a chance.
The Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade was one of the biggest corrective legal actions of all time. It was the culmination of decades of grassroots work, prayer, and timing. Espousing a pro-life position has been a litmus test for Republican presidential candidates in every recent election cycle of the past couple of decades. In essence, the Republican Party is the pro-life party. If that plank dissolves and neither national American political party stands for protecting innocent, unborn human life, then the country has desperately lost its way.
Sununu is living in the same fantasy world that John Kasich was living back when Trump and Ted Cruz were battling in 2016. If Trump and DeSantis are at each other’s throats, then surely someone like Sununu will save the day, or so their flow chart goes:
“You can put together a nomination for president that allows DeSantis and Trump to go off and fight like hell on the right, and meanwhile he’ll continue to be steady and straightforward for the rest of the Republican Party that doesn’t want to get involved in that catfight,” Tom Rath, a Republican and former state attorney general, said of Mr. Sununu.
Wishful thinking and not gonna happen. If the party is set on nominating a strong conservative fighter like DeSantis or Trump, they’re not going to hand the consolation prize to Chris Sununu and hope for the best.
The humorous point is that Sununu is actually polling worse than Larry Hogan yet it’s Sununu that’s actually considering launching a campaign. The New Hampshire Governor is grabbing around 0.4% on average over the last 60 days, roughly half the support of Hogan.
Sununu is good for filling magazine pages but will be less successful when it comes to winning the 2024 GOP primary, assuming he decides to run.
