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Twelve or 13 months from now, the race for the Republican nomination for president -- and the race for the Democratic nomination, if there is one -- will probably be over.
Prognostications this far ahead have a sad history. Just ask Rudy Giuliani or Jeb Bush what it felt like when the balloon drop started after their acceptance speeches.
Nevertheless, something can be said about what looks to be a contest between former President Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL). The history of primary contests, since they became the dominant means of choosing presidential nominees in 1972, provides some perspective.
Early on, the Democratic Party often had multicandidate brawls that produced surprise nominees such as George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis and Bill Clinton. Meanwhile, the Republican primaries featured one-on-one contests between nationally known contenders -- Gerald Ford versus Ronald Reagan in 1976, George H.W. Bush versus Bob Dole in 1988 and George W. Bush versus John McCain in 2000.
Since 2000, that pattern has usually been reversed. Democrats had one-on-one races in 2008 and 2016 and quickly settled on one among multiple candidates in 2004 and 2020. Republicans, meanwhile, had multicandidate brawls in 2008, 2012 and, with a field too large for a single debate stage, 2016.
This change reflects a change in the parties. In the 1970s, Democrats held majorities in most state legislatures and had many more primary voters and tended to set the rules and schedule. Now, Republicans have more legislatures and about as large and rowdy a primary electorate. Next year, Democrats may renominate their incumbent president, as they did in 1996 and 2012, while Republicans will probably, despite the announced candidacy of former Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC), be headed to a two-candidate race.
Past contests suggest what this will look like. Republicans' multicandidate races in 2008 and 2012 quickly boiled down to two-candidate runoff jousts. These pitted candidates (McCain, Mitt Romney) who carried counties in major metropolitan areas, where Republican primary voters tend to be college graduates, against candidates (Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum) who carried counties outside major metro areas, where most GOP primary voters are not college graduates.
This was a forecast that few analysts (including me) recognized, of the split between white college graduates and nongraduates, who voted similarly in general elections up through 2012 but have responded sharply differently to Trump in 2016 and every election since.
But the dominance of noncollege white people in Republican primaries can be overstated. If McCain and Romney prevailed by only narrow margins over Huckabee and Santorum in primaries in Michigan and Ohio, Trump won the nomination in 2016 with only a 44% plurality of votes in a 16-candidate field.
In the 31 states that voted up through April 5 that year, Trump had significant leads of 4 points or more over the combined totals of Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) in only five states (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Ohio and Arizona).