Donald Trump’s glass is half empty after all

| 9:09 am EST January 25, 2024
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I’ve spent the past three years pointing out that Donald Trump has been unable to get his 2024 Republican primary poll number any higher than around 50%. For someone with superior name recognition and a recent incumbency, Trump should have been polling much higher than 50% within his own party. All along it’s pointed to Trump’s 2024 campaign as being extraordinarily weak and vulnerable.

Of course during these same past three years, most of the major media outlets (on both sides) have referred to Trump having an “ironclad grip” on the 2024 Republican nomination, or some similar verbiage. This narrative has always been based on the premise that Trump’s base is the Republican base. But if that were true, wouldn’t he be getting the support of more than half the voters in his own party?

The kicker is that Trump never could get the support of more than about 50% of his own party, regardless of how the other Republican candidates were doing. When the media built up DeSantis in early 2023, he and Trump were each at around 45% in primary polling. After DeSantis collapsed, his support shifted back to various other candidates. But Trump didn’t gain almost any of what DeSantis lost, and remained at around 50%. Half of the Republican primary voting base simply doesn’t want Trump under any circumstances.

Sure enough, after three years of hovering around 50% in Republican primary polling nationwide, Trump went into Iowa and New Hampshire and only managed to get around 50% of the Republican vote in each state. In Iowa the other 50% was spread evenly among a number of other Republican candidates, while in New Hampshire most of the other 50% went solely to Nikki Haley. But once again, no matter what the competition looked like, Trump could only get around 50%. If feels like if Haley dropped out next week, Trump would still only get 50% in the next primary state after that, with the other 50% going to whoever else is left on the ballot.

Getting just over 50% within your own party (in the face of no truly viable competition) may be enough to win a nomination, but it’s not enough to be considered viable in a general election. It seems that this basic truth may finally be breaking through. At one point yesterday MSNBC had a chyron about how Trump “struggles to win half the primary vote.”

It’s about time we finally see somebody talking about this. Trump’s unpopularity within his own Republican Party voting base is a huge story, and has been a huge story for three years now. With the various other Republican candidates dropping out or becoming non-viable, Trump should have been able to climb well above 50% by now – yet he just can’t do it.

Whether Trump ends up with the nomination will come down to a number of things. How many criminal convictions will he have by the time the Republican National Convention comes around this summer? How much more senile will he be by then? Will the purse string pullers within the RNC be looking to use the convention to replace him with someone more viable? We’ll see. But it sure is a bad sign for Trump that he’s still stuck at around 50% within his own party. It’ll make it a lot easier for the party to dump him as the nominee, both logistically and in terms of optics, if the party ultimately chooses to go that route.