Are there any "normal" Republicans left?

Enter Chris Sununu.

The New York Times is out with a profile of New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu today. At the heart of the piece lies a fascinating question: Can someone like Sununu, a self-confessed “normal” Republican, really have a chance at winning this party’s presidential nomination in 2024?

Here’s the key bit — in which Sununu makes his case:

After three consecutive disappointing election cycles for his party, Mr. Sununu says the time for indulging Mr. Trump’s delusions has long passed. The midterms, he argues, proved that the nation, including many Republicans, had little interest in the far-right candidates the former president backed. Even nominating a onetime Trump acolyte from the prospective 2024 field, like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida or the former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, is a misread of the moment, he says…

…His appeal at home, friends say, is approachability as much as any signature policy. “He can tell you the betting line of the Patriot game,” said Thomas D. Rath, a former state attorney general and longtime Republican strategist. “He takes his garbage to the dump on Saturdays.”

And his political mantra — “Be normal,” Mr. Sununu has often said, “keep it normal” — raises two questions of consequence to the Republican future:

Is he? And, in these plainly abnormal times, is he right?

It’s important to define “normal” — or at least understand how Sununu is using it — before we go any further.

It’s a mix of regular Joe-ism (He follows sports! He takes out the trash!) and what we would define as establishment conservatism. “I’m conservative, I’m just not an extremist,” Sununu told the Times. “Sometimes people confuse conservative with extremist.”

(Worth noting here: Sununu comes from a line of establishment pols. His father was governor of New Hampshire and chief of staff to President George H.W. Bush. His brother represented the Granite State in the U.S. Senate.)

Sununu’s bet is alluring in its simplicity: That, after six years of Trump — and 3 disappointing elections — the Republican party is ready to go back to, well, normal. That running away with the circus was fun but now it’s time to come home and settle down.

Count me skeptical.

Sununu’s argument feels a lot like the one made by Republicans who insisted that the Trump fever would break after the former president lost the 2020 election. Or after he helped incite the crowd that wound up rioting in the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Or after his preferred candidates came up short in the disappointing 2022 midterm elections.

While there’s no question that Trump is less popular in some pockets of the Republican party than he once was, I don’t see any sort of broad-scale retreat from him within the party. (In a recent national Quinnipiac University poll, Trump’s favorable rating among Republicans was 79% as compared to 17% who regarded him unfavorably.)

And, as importantly, the 2024 race doesn’t appear — at least not yet — to be shaping up as a referendum on or a rejection of Trumpism.

Consider Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who polling suggests is the only Trump alternative with considerable support at this point.

DeSantis ran explicitly as a Trump acolyte for governor in 2018. This ad tells that story.

And, DeSantis’ success as a governor — in the eyes of the Republican base — isn’t in how he has differentiated himself from Trump. It’s in how he has taken Trumpism even further.

While Trump railed against woke-ism — whatever that is — DeSantis has used the power of the governor’s office to act on that rhetoric: He’s banned the teaching of critical race theory in Florida schools, he’s taken away Disney’s special tax status, he’s fought the curriculum of an AP class on African American history.

In his second inaugural address, DeSantis explained his philosophy this way:

“We reject this woke ideology. We seek normalcy, not philosophical lunacy! We will not allow reality, facts, and truth to become optional. We will never surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”

Notice the word “normal” in there. DeSantis’ “normal” is Trump+ — a policy underpinning for the (mostly empty) rhetoric of the former president. DeSantis isn’t trying to move beyond Trump, he’s trying to build on the foundation that Trump laid.

Then there are the other people either running or expected to run for president.

There’s Nikki Haley, who served as UN ambassador under Trump, once said she would never run against him and has, in the early days of her campaign, been loathe to directly criticize him.

There’s Mike Pence, Trump’s vice president, who stood by his side, literally, for four years and now appears to be setting up to run a campaign in which he takes credit for all the conservative accomplishments while yadda-yadda-ing the whole January 6 thing.

There’s Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state, who is already signaling that he will put Trump’s muscular foreign policy at the center of his own likely campaign.

Those three all take single digit support among Republican voters. Which is, well, more than Sununu gets; Sununu got 0% support in the Q poll. In fact, if you total up the support for Sununu and two others prominent Trump critics — Chris Christie and Larry Hogan — you still get 0%.

In short: There is zero — ahem — evidence that the Republican party is in search of a return to the sort of normal that Sununu is promising.

In fact, the opposite seems to be true. Trumpism appears to be the starting point for the vast majority of candidates with measurable support in hypothetical 2024 polling. DeSantis’ rise, for one, hasn’t been fueled by his rejection of Trump’s tone and style but rather by his embrace of it — and willingness to put policy meat on the bone.

Sununu appears to be pining for a Republican party — and a “normal” within that party — that simply no longer exists. “Normal” for this Republican party is Trumpism. That’s the baseline.