Donald Trump’s 2024 numbers just got even uglier ahead of his indictment
Any one new poll always has to be taken with a dump truck full of salt. But as we keep seeing, when the polls get it wrong, it’s because they’re off by something like 5% in a race that ends up being decided by 2% or something along those lines. Professionally conducted polls aren’t off by something like twenty points.
So it’s a big deal that a new 2024 Republican presidential primary poll conducted in the state of Utah has Donald Trump in third place among Republicans. Ron DeSantis is at 24%, Liz Cheney is at 16%, and Trump is at 14%. Even if you assume the poll is flawed and you add another five or ten points to Trump’s numbers just for safety, these are still devastatingly bad numbers for Trump.
To be clear, Trump is polling better with Republican voters nationwide than he is with Utah Republican voters. Utah Republicans are a bit of a different breed. But Trump’s 2024 polling sucks nationwide and has always sucked nationwide. He’s never really been in contention for 2024.
When Trump first left office, he had a massive name recognition and de facto incumbency advantage, but was still only polling at about 50% among Republican primary voters. That was devastatingly bad. He should have been at 85-90% back then to be considered viable for 2024.
Now that Trump’s incumbency has faded, and he has actual competition in the name recognition department, he’s down in the forties among Republican primary voters. That’ll drop even lower once he’s indicted, and some Republican primary voters decide it’s not worth the risk of nominating a candidate who’s on a path to prison.
Trump’s only shot was going to be if something caused his pathetic 2024 Republican primary numbers to massively increase. That was theoretically possible, but it didn’t happen, and now it’s too late. Now his already-pathetic numbers are dropping. And they’ll drop further.
The fact that Trump is now behind both DeSantis and Liz Cheney among Utah Republicans is proof that Trump’s downfall is not strictly about the rise of any one candidate. Trump’s pathetic 2024 numbers have made him a sitting duck for two years. Now the inevitable is happening. Now that any recognizable names are emerging, Republican voters are increasingly saying yes, we’ll take anybody, get us off this sinking Trump ship.
Republican voters can’t even agree on whether they want a fascist (DeSantis) or a non-fascist (Cheney). They just agree that Trump is old news, damaged goods, busted stuff, a broken has-been whose life is now defined by criminal investigations, not political viability.
Again, the numbers have made clear all along that there was not a single moment where Trump was ever in realistic contention for 2024. All that media hype you’ve heard over the past two years was merely ratings driven bullshit. All that doomsday hype was for nothing.
As I’ve been warning everyone for the past two years, the 2024 threat is not Trump; he’s finished. It’s probably not even DeSantis; he’s an arrogant idiot prone to self destruction. It’s the Republican candidate, the no-name out there we’re not talking about, who’s the threat.
All this ratings-driven media hype about Trump 2024, and now DeSantis 2024, is a distraction. If we get sucked in by it, we won’t even notice the actual threats who enter the race later. No-names who are evil but get a free pass from the media because their focus is elsewhere.
In any case there’s a reason why losers like Pence, Cruz, Rubio, and even long-forgotten Nikki Haley are leaking that they’re looking at running in 2024. They see a wide open Republican field. And they’re right. It’s been wide open ever since Trump ended his viability the minute his goons breached the Capitol on January 6th.
None of those losers are going to be contenders in 2024. That’s not why they’re running. They just see a wide open Republican field as an opportunity to limp along and stay in the race through the first primary state, drop out, and parlay it into a lucrative book deal.
When people ask me who the “no-name” might be who emerges within the 2024 Republican field, it suggests they’re misunderstanding what I’m saying. I’m not talking about some political outsider you’ve never heard of. I’m talking about a literal no-name, in the sense that you’ve never even heard their name. Some obscure two-term backbencher House Republican who has zero national name recognition and can therefore fly under the media scrutiny radar while the likes of Trump and DeSantis are self destructing. That’s who we have to watch out for.
It’s easy for a pundit to throw around names you’ve heard of. It’s a lot trickier for a pundit to simply admit that there’s no way to know who the 2024 Republican nominee will be, because it’s likely to be some no-name who lies low for the next year and then emerges too late to be vetted. Let’s keep our eye out for that kind of thing as the race goes on. But for now, just keep in mind that Trump was never in 2024 contention to begin with, and that even DeSantis is likely just a “Brand B” placeholder until someone else comes along. 2024 is going to be a wide open Republican race. Thus far there is only one viable 2024 candidate on either side, and in fact he’s the overwhelming frontrunner – a guy named Joe Biden.
