Douglas Schoen: California should not repeat Colorado’s ballot blunder

When the Colorado Supreme Court decided in a 4-3 vote to block former President Donald Trump from the state’s ballot, many around the country suggested other states should follow Colorado’s lead and keep Trump off their ballots.

In California, the push to remove Trump has been taken up by Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis, the state’s 2nd highest official, who recently urged the Secretary of State to “explore every legal option to remove former President Donald Trump from California’s 2024 presidential primary ballot.”

To be absolutely clear, California, and no other state for that matter, should follow Colorado’s unprecedented and partisan decision. Without any of the cases brought against Trump yet resolved, and no official findings of legal culpability for any of the 91 charges, seeking to bar a leading candidate for office would be a grave political and legal mistake.

Unfortunately, Kounalakis is not alone. U.S. Representative Adam Schiff celebrated Colorado’s decision, tweeting that “It’s about time” that Trump is held accountable. And locally, State Sen. Dave Min, who represents parts of Orange County in Sacramento and is running for the 47th Congressional district seat that Rep. Katie Porter will vacate, said he plans to introduce a bill that would allow private residents to sue to block candidates from appearing on the ballot.

It is worth noting that Kounalakis, Schiff, Min, and others are at odds with the leader of their party, President Biden, who refused to comment on the legal aspects of Colorado’s ruling, preferring to simply say, “Whether the 14th Amendment applies or not, we’ll let the court make that decision.”

In that same vein, at least one California Democrat is able to see that blocking Trump from the ballot would be a mistake. Gov. Gavin Newsom recently rebuffed his deputy’s remarks, saying, “There is no doubt that Donald Trump is a threat to our liberties and even our democracy. But in California, we defeat candidates at the polls.”

Quite simply, even if justified on legal grounds, which as of now is questionable at best, trying to bar Trump from primary ballots is likely a tremendous political mistake for Democrats, given that recent polling shows that Trump is actually the weakest candidate vis-à-vis President Biden. 

Indeed, in a hypothetical matchup between Biden and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Haley leads Biden by 17-points (51% to 34%), compared to Trump’s 4-point lead over the incumbent (47% to 43%), per Wall Street Journal polling.

This is not a one-off phenomenon. While the media has largely focused on polls showing Trump leading Biden since the bombshell New York Times/Siena poll this October, Trump’s lead has narrowed considerably of late, including a tie (43% each) in Economist/YouGov polling. 

And, as a recent Quinnipiac poll shows, Biden may actually have a slight lead (47% to 46%). Conversely, Haley maintains a 5-point lead over Biden according to the RealClearPolitics average.

All of this is to say that if California, with its 169 GOP primary delegates – the most in the country – follow Colorado’s path and keep Trump off the primary ballot, Democrats may win the battle, but ultimately lose the war to a much more electable Republican presidential candidate such as Nikki Haley. 

With that in mind, the media attention surrounding Colorado’s decision is undoubtedly a boost to Donald Trump. As a person who thrives on portraying himself as a political martyr confronting a weaponized justice system, Trump can now credibly orient his campaign against the efforts of “liberal elites” to attack him, rather than the fundamental question of whether or not he is fit to return to the White House. 

By giving Trump a narrative – one that he will surely use – where he is the ‘target of a conspiracy, run by the media and elites, to silence conservatives’ Trump can now paint all of the legitimate legal cases against him as part of the same conspiracy, deflecting all attention away from his actions in the lead up to, and after, January 6th, 2021.

Further, Colorado’s decision handcuffs GOP candidates such as Nikki Haley, who now have to walk the fine line between not appearing to take advantage of the court’s decision, but also making the case to voters that she is more politically viable than Trump and gives Republicans the best chance to win back the White House. 

Ultimately, the efforts to remove Donald Trump from state ballot’s, especially before the legal cases have been resolved, is a lose-lose situation for Democrats, one they would be wise to stop pursuing. 

In the short term, it hands Trump a cudgel with which to hammer Democrats, the media, and other perceived enemies, thus improving his martyr status among the GOP base and increasing the chances that he is the 2024 Republican nominee for president. And despite polling showing that a race between Biden and Trump may be closer than previously thought, do Democrats want to bet a second Trump term on a coin toss?

In the long term, if a sufficient number of states follow Colorado’s lead and ban Trump, leading to Nikki Haley winning the nomination – admittedly a long shot – Joe Biden would have a considerable uphill climb to defeat her. 

Finally, and perhaps most damaging, is that if other blue states begin following Colorado’s decision en masse, they will have inadvertently validated Donald Trump’s previously baseless claims of a legal and political system biased against conservatives, which uses partisan courts to silence political opponents. Everyone, on both sides of the aisle, should want to prevent that existential threat to our democracy. 

Douglas Schoen is a longtime Democratic political consultant.