Thank you to everyone who came to my Comedy Cellar event last night with Galen Druke and Clare Malone.1 I was dealing with a little jetlag2, but the energetic crowd helped me to push through it! Although the show was billed as a “Republican primary draft”, as you can see from the video, we got a little distracted with all the news about Texas, Iran and AI. So the draft part got slightly cut short: we went four rounds instead of six like we did for the Democrats.
And that’s probably a good thing because — man, it was much harder to come up with good picks for this one. Not that Democrats don’t have their problems, but they at least have some good prospects in the form of consistently electorally overperforming governors and senators.3 But with Trump having dominated the Republican Party for 12 years now, both squashing potential rivals and tainting potential successors as he grows increasingly unpopular, the GOP side is more like the infamous 2000 NBA Draft.
So here were my picks (⭐), as well as my reviews of Galen’s and Clare’s choices. The scoring system is the same as for the Democrats: the goal is basically to identify the eventual nominee, but you can pick up incremental points if your candidates officially run and reach various other milestones.
JD Vance (Galen). To stretch the fantasy football analogy, perhaps this would have worked better as an auction rather than a draft, since Vance is trading far higher than anyone else at prediction markets. Though now he’s slipped to 42 percent from a peak of 59 percent in November, which seems like a more reasonable price. Vance isn’t popular with the broader electorate, though he’s less unpopular than Trump. But not unlike Kamala Harris, he’s going to be tagged with whatever dissatisfactions voters have with his boss while struggling to forge his own identity. And I don’t know that Trumpism without Trump works — it certainly hasn’t produced good outcomes for the GOP in midterms and other elections when Trump himself isn’t on the ballot. Also, like Harris, Vance has an underwhelming electoral track record. Before the vice presidency, Vance had only run for office once, winning his Ohio Senate seat by 6 points in 2022, a notably lower margin than Trump’s 11-point margin there in 2024. He’s a smart guy, and he was good in the VP debate, though it helped that Tim Walz was as visibly nervous as a 16-year-old asking a girl to prom. But … if not Vance, who else is it going to be? He’s way ahead in polls, and the early polling frontrunner wins more often than you might think.4 And he already has some institutional support, having been endorsed by Erika Kirk.
⭐ Marco Rubio (Nate). I was skittish to make this pick, having been burned in my fruitless search for Rubiomentum in 2016, when I was far too late to acknowledge Trump’s staying power. (Hey, he did win Minnesota.5) But I think Little Marco is the fairly obvious number two. It’s not at all uncommon for presidential nominees to do better on their second or third try: see Mitt Romney or Joe Biden, for instance. Rubio has a longer and more impressive résumé than Vance, and his electoral performance in Florida was pretty good, even considering the state’s increasingly red tilt. One can also imagine Trump going into reality TV show mode, auditioning various candidates for his endorsement and eventually preferring Rubio to Vance. The obvious liability is that Rubio is going to be associated with Trump’s increasingly unpopular foreign policy, with Iran already causing major divides in the GOP — and wars usually only get more unpopular the longer they go.
