Fresh off the earlier post of supporters wondering what Trump’s up to following his campaign announcement, a new poll breathes more life into the notion that the 2024 Republican primary will not be a cakewalk for the former President.
New numbers from Suffolk University find that although President Biden beats Trump by 7 points, the same poll found that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is running three points ahead of Biden:
Among all voters, Trump has fallen further behind President Joe Biden in a hypothetical head-to-head. Now, Biden would win a general-election matchup by 47% to 40%. (Because of the effects of rounding, Biden’s margin is a bit wider than that indicates, at 7.8 points.) In October, Biden also led but by a narrower margin, 46%-42%.
While Biden now leads Trump, he trails DeSantis in a head-to-head race, with DeSantis at 47%, Biden at 43%.
The Florida governor, who last month sailed to a second term in the Sunshine State, has significant standing nationwide. Two-thirds of Republican and Republican-leaning voters, 65%, want him to run for president in 2024. Just 24% hope he doesn’t.
This only matters if Biden actually decides to run in 2024, an announcement which he might be set to make sometime in January according to reports. So far, Biden has indicated he intends to run and it appears that he’s re-assembling a campaign team.
If more polls like this come out for DeSantis it’s going to be harder and harder to keep arguing that the GOP belongs to Donald Trump. You can scoff at the numbers and say it’s early so this is meaningless, but Trump’s name is a known quantity. Voters either love him or hate him, there’s very little room in between. If Trump’s ceiling nationally is 40%, that’s going to create a difficult argument of electability moving forward.
Yes, this poll is posing Biden as the 2024 Democratic candidate and maybe Trump would do better against someone else. That’s true, but it might also be the other way around. Maybe Biden’s name is limiting the ceiling on the other side. If, for example, Biden defers on a run and Democrats fall into a primary battle unless Vice President Kamala Harris can muscle everyone else out, there’s bound to be someone more exciting than Biden on the Democratic ticket.
Trump should probably start encouraging more Republicans to run in 2024 as it might create the same scenario which gave him the nomination in 2016:
DeSantis’ success may depend on having a one-on-one contest with Trump, Paleologos cautioned. “Add in a number of other Republican presidential candidates who would divide the anti-Trump vote and you have a recipe for a repeat of the 2016 Republican caucuses and primaries,” he said, “when Trump outlasted the rest of the divided field.”
If the field is small and it’s basically a Trump or DeSantis choice, the former President isn’t performing as well right now as he was just a few months ago. Many recent polls have shown DeSantis with rising support while Trump continues to fall after heavy midterm losses battered his hand-selected candidates.
The question worth asking is whether Trump can rekindle any campaign magic in time for a serious primary run. It’s been bad headline after bad headline recently, one has to wonder if there’s a tipping point among even the staunchest of MAGA faithful.
Poll after poll finds that Republicans overwhelmingly like Trump’s policies but many of them loathe his personality. The magic bullet in this scenario is to take the Trump policy initiatives and repackage them in a better-polished more widely acceptable candidate. At the moment, that’s DeSantis.
A few more polls like this one and Trump will be back to labeling him DeSanctimonious in no time.
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