In April of this year, the news that former Governor of Massachusetts Bill Weld had launched a campaign to challenge the President for the Republican nomination for the presidency, went by largely unnoticed. He’s been overshadowed by the World’s Longest Conga Line currently vying for the Democratic ticket. Since then, Weld has been joined by former Representatives Mark Sanford and Joe Walsh in the fight to wrestle the GOP back from the Trump brand.

The President, who eeked into office via an eccentricity of the US Constitution, faces a daunting prospect. Incumbents usually sail luxuriously to re-nomination, while the other party battles it out in the manner of a particularly militant chicken coop. The last president to face a serious challenge in the primaries before his reelection was George HW Bush, and everyone remembers what happened after. Gerald Ford narrowly won against a primary challenge from Ronald Reagan in 1976, and is now the only president never to have been elected to the Executive.

Speaking of losing votes to a Clinton, the infamously insecure Trump has previously indicated his embarrassment at having lost the popular vote to his opponent Hillary Clinton in 2016. To be clear, by the US Constitution, there is no requirement that the winning candidate also win the popular vote, and presidents have previously been elected via winning the Electoral College alone, as Trump was. Yet, that did not prevent Trump from tweeting in 2016, a fortnight after his election, that he “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

Three years later, his shortcomings were once again on the man’s mind as he tweeted that a report had just been published showing that Google “manipulated” the election results in order to add 16 million more votes for Clinton, which of course meant that Trump’s victory “was even bigger than thought.” This is a man who is known for being anxious when it comes to size.

As the number of Republicans looking to dethrone their leader rises, so too does party anxiety. The Republican state committees of Arizona, Kansas, South Carolina, and Nevada have all elected to cancel their respective primaries, and caucus.

The decision of the South Carolina Republican committee is particularly significant, not merely because challenger Mark Sanford, who announced his bid on 8th September, is a former Governor of the state, but because the state in question is a particularly significant early voting state, usually third in the primary calendar, which can deliver much needed momentum to lagging campaigns.

This was true for Trump in 2016 whose campaign, initially considered a glorified book tour, was boosted by favourable polls in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. When the latter came to cast its votes, Trump won by a third.

In defence of these cancellations, the Trump campaign stated that the Republican Party cancelled eight primaries in 1992, when Bush 41 was being pummeled from the right by Pat Buchanan, and when Bush 43 was running for reelection Republicans cancelled primaries in ten states; likewise, the Democratic Party cancelled eight primaries in 1996 to aid Clinton’s bid for reelection, and again in 2012 when Obama was running.

It should be pointed out, though, that when presidents Clinton, Obama, and George W. Bush were seeking reelection, none of them were facing serious primary challenges and thus voting for their respective re-nominations was effectively a formality.

“Considering the fact that the entire party supports the president,” said chair of the South Carolina party, Drew McKissick, “we’ll end up doing what’s in the President’s best interest,” which is of course a logical inconsistency of surreal proportions. Trump has the overwhelming support of his party, as shown by his gargantuan poll ratings among Republicans, and so it could hurt his campaign to ask his voters to vote for him.

It should also be made clear that the primaries are a vastly over-rated, often criticised, and fairly recent aspect of presidential elections. The Republican Party has only been holding primaries or caucuses in every state since 1976. Prior to that election, nominees of either party were chosen via ‘smoke-filled rooms’, and ease and certainty that such a system affords a race has been sorely missed ever since. The Democratic Party has, controversially, increased the number of ‘superdelegates’, made up of party grandees, voting in its primaries, in order to dilute the votes from its base.

Not only do the primaries extend the political calendar and make it so that presidential elections are two years long, compared to what seems like a neat two weeks in the UK, but they see pathetically low turnout. Those who do vote in the primaries tend to be party diehards, who can boost extremist candidates who are not necessarily representative of the party membership as a whole.

Nevertheless, the last time there have not been three candidates lined up to push a sitting Republican president off the ticket since Eisenhower faced the same number in 1956. The news of these cancellations, in the wake of announcements from Weld, Walsh, and Stanford, is inevitably going to be read a show of weakness.

None of these candidates need to defeat Trump – and it is highly unlikely that they will come anywhere close to doing so – but their greatest success will come from damaging him as he goes into the general election. If Trump loses reelection in November next year, it will be the first win in a long, cold winter for the moderate wing of the GOP.