I've observed on here no GOP candidate "moderate" or otherwise can win the Republican party nomination without firm support from the base. Trump proved that political reality in 2016, as he took a small dedicated base of voters and carried their support past 15 other candidates and then parlayed that support into the White House. They haven't left him! Matter of fact, that base of supporters has grown since Trump was escorted from the WH to make room for his meticulously installed replacement.
This cycle, it will take an
even greater amount of support for another GOP candidate than Trump currently has to keep him from the Republican nomination. If this past weekend's CPAC is any indication, there isn't another candidate on the Republican side who's going to beat him.
In some ways, Trump may be even more difficult for his Republican rivals to beat next year than he was seven years ago
www.theguardian.com
excerpt:
"as a practical matter, Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 for a very simple reason: he built and kept a large minority of incredibly loyal supporters within the party, while the majority of Republican voters, who would have preferred another candidate, split their votes among too many alternatives. And today, Trump, battered as he might seem, is both a former president and a demigod even to many Republicans who were wary of him in his first run. Barring dramatic, unexpected events – which, in fairness, are always a possibility with Trump – he’ll go into next year’s primary contests as an even more broadly popular and respected figure than he was in 2016, when his favorability among Republicans seldom
cracked 60%."
On top of his obvious popularity among GOP base voters, Trump's got a record to run on, and so far no one willing to challenge him has been willing to offer a better alternative set of policy objectives vs Trump's policy results.
again from above linked article:
"The fact that the candidates thus far seem unwilling to run against Trump’s actual record in office doesn’t help matters. According to Scott, the Trump administration produced “the most pro-worker, pro-family economy” of his lifetime – a sentiment that makes it hard to understand what the substantive argument against another Trump term is supposed to be. The obvious knock on him is that he was defeated in 2020 – but the conservative base isn’t going to want to hear that their preferences hurt the party, and many Republicans
still don’t believe Trump really lost the election in the first place"
It's going to take one Hell of a GOP candidate to supplant Trump from his base. If such a candidate is out there, particularly if they're a so called "moderate" they haven't come forward yet if they ever will?
