At one point this past fall, I counted no less than 15 people who were at one point in time over the last year at least running the traps on a possible run for the White House – Chris Christie, Chris Sununu, Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Mike Pompeo, Tim Scott, Rick Scott, Nikki Haley, Glenn Youngkin, Larry Hogan, Mike Pence, Greg Abbott, Kristi Noem. And that’s before Asa Hutchinson and Vivek Ramaswamy got in, and that’s not counting Larry Elder, who is strongly toying with an announcement to run very soon.

So what happened between last fall and now? Reality hit, and hit hard. In 2016, it was a free-for-all, and nobody really took Trump all that seriously, instead focusing all their fire on each other. Once the survivors realized Trump’s support was real and building, it was too late to do anything about it. But the memory of that primary is certainly playing a factor into a lot of decision making now.

Tom Cotton was the first one to make the calculation that this cycle probably wasn’t the one for him to test out a run for the nomination, and since then, he’s been joined by Larry Hogan, Rick Scott, and to a large extent Greg Abbott and Ted Cruz have all but ruled out campaigns. And just in the last 96 hours, Mike Pompeo and Glenn Youngkin have pulled back from any kind of run in ’24,as Ed wrote about Saturday. So we are now seeing a field of Trump, Ramaswamy, Haley, Hutchinson, probably Tim Scott very soon, Ron DeSantis joining either in May or June after Florida’s legislative session ends, and maybe Chris Christie. Sununu is still toying with the idea, but at the NRA convention over the weekend said what makes him the most nervous is all the GOP in-fighting. Know what helps de-clutter the in-fighting? Isolated matchups.

In football and basketball, there is an expression called isolating a key matchup. You might have an outstanding cornerback, but one who just doesn’t match up well against the other team’s star wide receiver, and so you have the offense running plays to isolate that perceived mismatch and exploit it for all its worth. Same thing in basketball. If there’s a particular height advantage or disadvantage, depending on which team you’re for, you will see the floor clear out and leave those two alone to do a little one on one over the course of a game to see if the mismatch is real or just on paper. That’s what I see happening right now in the Republican field.

I have many facets of my life that have nothing to do with political talk radio. I umpire Little League games. I’m still on loan frequently to our local high school as a band dad alumnus. I help out with Girl Scouts. I’m still the Grinch around the holidays and have fun in a booth hassling kids about what I’m going to take out of their stockings. I have a rich, robust, varied life outside of radio. But virtually everyone I know that knows what I do for a living, when the conversation ends up talking politics, asks the inevitable question – what about Trump?

What about him, I always answer. I never know ahead of time whether the person is pro or anti-Trump, and I’ve found that few people care much about politics at all, but what little politics they know, it’s usually the question of what to do with Trump. The predicate of the question can be from a pro-Trump or an anti-Trump angle, but the thrust of the question always ends up, does he and do Republicans know he’ll lose and we’ll be stuck with Biden again?

I know there are a ton of Trump supporters that are only Trumpers. It’s either the Big Guy or nothing. I have no answer to that. If Trump is the nominee, glad they’re on board, because we’re going to need every last one of them to stay close. If Trump’s not the nominee and they bolt, they’re really not Republicans, because abandoning the country to the likes of the Marxists running D.C. right now because they’re having a cult of personality crisis is not really all that conservative.

I’ve heard the question at least a hundred times framed something like, “I voted for Trump, loved him as president, but we have to move on…”. I’ve also heard it framed in this fashion. “I didn’t vote for Trump in 2020, will never vote for him, but I’d vote for any other Republican running over Biden because Biden is that bad.” And then they ask me if the GOP has lost their mind trying to run 30 candidates again so that Trump can win a plurality and get stomped by Biden again in 2024?

What I see taking place, and actually has been taking place a bit at a time for a while, is that potential candidates have been canvassing the country on their own to see if there’d be support for them. They’re canvassing political donors. Some of them have written books. Others have visited early primary states and given speeches. They’ve done all the things one would do to begin a campaign. But while the Republican Party does a lot of things that drive Republicans crazy at times, the national party itself doesn’t pick their candidates. They just don’t put their thumb on the scale. That’s what Democrats do, and you have to look no further than to this cycle in New Hampshire and South Carolina for the Democratic primary. The national party broke New Hampshire state law and are trying an end run specifically to protect Joe Biden and play favorites against any potential challenger he may face. Democrats do group think. They like to game the system. They have a hive mind mentality. They have no problems cheating to win. Republicans never really have perfected that, even when people want them to.

Instead, what you’re seeing is individual candidates, or potential candidates, that are looking at the upcoming year, and their analysis is resulting in the same conclusions that all of these people questioning me have concluded – that Trump can’t be beat in a primary with a thousand people in it, and in a general election, at least for this cycle, the Republicans’ best chance is probably DeSantis.

Again, I’m not backing DeSantis, I’m not opposing him at this point. He’s not yet a candidate (although writing a memoir, and going to every early primary state for speeches and events, New Hampshire being the most recent over the weekend sure acts like a campaign forming). I’m merely reflecting hundreds of conversations I’ve had. And even hundreds of anecdotal conversations are really only hundreds of pieces of anecdotal evidence, and nothing more. But if you end up seeing a primary field in debates this summer consisting of Trump and a possible attack dog/person auditioning for VP against Ron DeSantis and another attack dog auditioning for DeSantis’ VP, with Ramaswamy running to be the eventual winner’s Treasury Secretary, and maybe Chris Christie in there to prosecute Trump in debates, and Asa Hutchinson in there to say Remember J6 every 30 seconds, that’s probably your field. And I’m okay with that matchup.

A smaller field means more time to answer serious questions at debates, provided that the Republican Party does retain strict control over who moderates and broadcasts the debates. The principal contenders will not be able to run the clock out by having 20 other people yell at each other for an hour before they’re on the spot again.

All eyes are going to be on Mike Pence and Chris Sununu in the coming weeks. If one or both end up demurring from campaigns this time, the isolated matchup between Trump and DeSantis will be all but set. And that would be a very good thing. It would be the nominating process working its way out in an organic manner, and it would mean that the party’s individual stars, of which there are lots, are showing they’re learning the lessons of history from 7 years ago.