Trump-Pence: The Hug and Pray Strategy

Donald Trump has a running mate and with it a strategy he may or may not be able to implement.

Donald Trump won the Republican primary because of multi-candidate field dynamics and the party’s nomination rules. But that’s not necessarily Trump’s conception of how he won, nor is that the “feeling” around his victory. He seems to have won because he ran against the Republican Establishment and beat it badly. This is correct to a degree. Party leaders did not respond to the threat in time. That does not mean, however, that there were more Trump voters than Establishment voters. Many people within his campaign therefore believe that peace with the Establishment is required for victory. Likewise, many in the Establishment believe they need to support Trump to avoid problems with their own base. 

 This is where Governor Mike Pence comes in. Pence seemed to be the highest ranking member of the Republican Establishment who was willing to accept the vice presidency. A lot of other establishment names were considered but in the end it was Pence who was willing to take it. For Pence, being Trump’s running mate seems like the most likely ticket to the presidency for himself.  A respectable performance sets him up well for 2020 and gets him out of a potentially difficult governor’s race.

The Republican Establishment will hug Donald Trump and pray such a strategy will keep the race close and minimize down ballot losses. At the same time, Donald Trump will attempt to seem a bit like an ordinary Republican in the hope that will enable him to add the roughly 5% of the vote he is going to need to win.

There is clearly a great deal of ambivalence about this strategy, however, from both sides as evidenced by: leaks that Trump was having second thoughts about Pence; Jeb Bush’s anti-Trump column for the Washington Post; and John Kasich’s continuing refusal to support Trump even though the convention is in his home state. Trump also has had some trouble controlling himself. For a while it seemed as if Trump’s twitter feed was contained but then he again attacked Elizabeth Warren for little reason.

The strategy also has a downside in possibly yoking Trump to really unpopular rightwing Republican positions that he was hiding from (such as privatizing Social Security). Trump also might face the core contradiction that while he brags about his opposition to the Iraq invasion, he picked one of the war’s biggest cheerleaders for his V.P.

Still a unity strategy is probably better than public fighting. Hug and pray is probably what both sides needed and what they are going to be doing.