Is Trump especially vulnerable to primary challenge?
by Byron York
| February 24, 2019 07:43 PM
| Updated Feb 24, 2019, 08:21 PM
It's become a common talking point for "Never Trump" Republicans seeking to defeat President Trump in the 2020 GOP primaries: Polls have found that a substantial number, maybe 40 percent, of Republican voters say they would be open to a primary challenge to the president. Those surveys, the "Never Trumpers" argue, show that Trump is particularly weak and vulnerable to a serious primary challenge.
The problem is that it is common for voters to say they are open to a primary challenge to the president of their own party. It happened to former President Barack Obama in 2010-2011, before Obama went on to win re-election. It also happened to Bill Clinton in 1994-1995, before Clinton went on to win re-election. It did not happen to George W. Bush in 2002-2003, but that was because of strong Republican support for a wartime president.
In other words, today's poll results about President Trump are not at all unusual.
Talk about a primary challenge to Obama intensified around the 2010 midterms, when Democrats lost 63 seats in the House in an election Obama conceded was a "shellacking." The idea that Obama might face a challenge had been around since his divisive 2008 primary battle with Hillary Clinton. Democratic strategist Ed Kilgore wrote in the New Republic that by 2010 those tensions had "gotten worse with the rise of the 'angry left,' which thinks Obama has been too eager to compromise with Wall Street and Republicans, and considers itself the representative of the Democratic base."
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