In 2020, when Donald Trump without evidence alleged election fraud, some of his Republican colleagues openly disputed the former president’s baseless assertion. But there was no organized pushback against the party’s leader from within the GOP.
But the extent to which Trump accepts the results of GOP-administered primary elections in 2024 has some Republican insiders concerned, Politico reports.
Trump has demonstrated a propensity to take matters into his own hands when outcomes don’t match his preferences. Such was the case after the 2020 presidential race, the 2016 Iowa caucuses (when he lost to Ted Cruz) or even the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s projection of a hurricane’s trajectory.
That presents potential headaches for the GOP, should Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, or another candidate win the nomination.
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Party insiders don’t believe Trump could launch an effective third-party candidacy, but the notion that he could plunge the party into chaos by disputing the outcome of the nomination process is making some Republicans uncomfortable, the report said.
The report notes that Trump’s false claims of election fraud in 2020 were believed to be a factor in the Georgia senate runoffs that gave Democrats a majority in the Senate.
“But what if DeSantis does catch up to Trump? The big fear of Republicans is not that Trump will lose the nomination and run as an independent. (There are all sorts of hurdles to that, from ballot access deadlines to “sore-loser” laws in some states.),” Politico’s David Siders writes.
“The real concern, if he falls short, is that Trump will simply claim as he did in Iowa in 2016 — and, falsely, after the presidential election in 2020 — that the results were rigged, depressing general election turnout among the sizable ‘Always Trump’ component of the GOP.”
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