Republicans plotting against Trump over fears of 'electoral oblivion': analyst

Fears that Donald Trump will be at the top of the 2024 ballot as the presidential nominee has galvanized the Republican Party establishment to work together to derail any momentum he has in an effort to forestall a repeat of the 2022 midterms where Trump weighed heavily on the poor GOP election results.

According to longtime political analyst Karen Tumulty, Republican insiders and donors see no path back to the White House for Trump in the 2024 general election should his supporters turn out in force during the primaries and make him, for the third time, the presidential nominee.

As she noted, the highly influential Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity Action has served notice that it will oppose Trump as the nominee, with chief executive Emily Seidel issuing a statement that said, in part, they plan to "... support a candidate in the Republican presidential primary who can lead our country forward, and who can win.”

According to Tumulty, "Though she didn’t say so specifically, Seidel made it clear that candidate will not be named Trump. 'The American people have shown that they’re ready to move on, and so AFP will help them do that,' she wrote."

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That means, the columnist explained, that mainstream Republicans are beating the bushes for one candidate they can all line up behind to take Trump down.

"These Republicans are facing the reality that the only way to stop Trump — and it is far from certain that it will work — is for the party establishment to pick a favorite early and rally behind him or her," she wrote. "Beyond that, they must put their considerable resources into anti-Trump messaging in the key primary states. That step would relieve their candidate of having to go negative on a former president who still has a devoted following among GOP voters."

According to one GOP strategist, "There’s not a day that passes that I don’t have this conversation. In fact, I’ve had this conversation twice today.”

While Trump's top rival for the presidential nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), appears to be on everyone's list, Tumulty suggested there is a growing sense that Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) could also fill the bill since he has battled with Trump before and came out on top.

"There is also a fair amount of buzz lately around Kemp, a solid conservative who won a second term easily last year in what has become a swing state despite being targeted by Trump for resisting the defeated president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 Georgia results," she wrote before adding that stopping Trump is not the only result GOP insiders are hoping for.

"With a 2024 Senate map that favors his party, National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Steve Daines (Mont.) has indicated he will be working to weed out the kind of fringe characters (for the most part endorsed by Trump) who blew what should have been easy wins for the GOP in 2022," she wrote before adding, "... what has finally dawned on the Republican establishment is that continuing to appease Trump while hoping for the best is a ticket to electoral oblivion."

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