Donald Trump is completely out of gas
The popular narrative is that Donald Trump still has full control over not only the Republican Party itself, but the Republican voting base. It’s pretty easy to poke holes in this narrative, given that for the past year, polls have consistently shown that as many as half of Republican voters would prefer someone other than Trump as their 2024 nominee. But it’s worse for Trump than that.
If Trump’s endorsement is supposed to be worth something, then why is his candidate JD Vance still neck and neck with the other Republican candidate in the Ohio primary race? Why is Trump’s candidate Perdue double digits behind the other Republican candidate in the Georgia primary race? Even Republican primary voters – by definition the most enthusiastic voters within the Republican Party base – don’t seem to give a damn what Trump says anymore.
This is yet another instance in which the actual numbers don’t in any way correlate with the media narratives we keep hearing. If Trump himself were still viable as a candidate, he wouldn’t have such poor numbers with Republican voters. If Trump were still influential as an endorser, his preferred candidates wouldn’t be struggling so badly in comparison to other Republican candidates.
And yet so many Republican candidates are still running on a pro-Trump platform, even though the numbers make clear that it’s not a winning message, even within their own party base. Is he holding something over them that we don’t know about? Are they just falling for the media hype that keeps falsely insisting Trump is popular and influential among Republican voters? Something doesn’t add up – and as more of Trump’s endorsed candidates begin losing their upcoming primary races, the media is eventually going to have to address it.
