Even with Ron DeSantis now falling off, he just proved how weak Donald Trump’s Republican primary support is
Now that Ron DeSantis’ national rollout has gone very poorly for him, Donald Trump (and most of the media) can’t stop talking about how Trump is surging in the 2024 Republican primary polls. But the numbers say that’s not happening – at all.
Yes, Trump’s lead over DeSantis is growing, but only because DeSantis is faltering. Trump’s polling number aren’t actually going up. In fact they’ve been rather consistent throughout all of this – and not in a good way.
Shortly after Trump left office, polling said he had about 55% of the 2024 Republican primary vote. While DeSantis was surging into a strong second place earlier this year, Trump still had about 55%. Now that DeSantis is cratering of his own accord, Trump still has about 55%. You see the pattern, right?
DeSantis wasn’t taking support from Trump. He was consolidating support among the other 45% of Republican primary voters who have already long ago given up on Trump and want someone else. Now that DeSantis is collapsing, his support isn’t going back to Trump, because Trump never had any of those folks to begin with. DeSantis’ support is going back to the also-rans and the “none of the above” and the “other” categories, which is where DeSantis pulled his support from to begin with.
This still leaves 55% of the Republican primary voting base who wants Trump, and 45% of the Republican primary voting base who wants anyone but Trump – just like the numbers say it’s consistently been for the past two years.
Now imagine if DeSantis had been a big hit on the national stage. Imagine if he had been able to keep keep most of that other 45% of the vote for awhile. That would have given DeSantis momentum, and he’d have used it to try to start chipping away at Trump’s 55%.
Of the 55% of Republican primary voters who have been saying “Trump” to pollsters for two years straight, how many of them have only been doing so because they haven’t seen another option, and they’ve figured Trump was their best chance of winning the election?
I’ve been arguing for two years that Trump’s consistent 55% polling in the 2024 Republican primary was a nightmare for him, because it means that nearly half of primary voters are already dead set on anyone but him. If some other Republican candidate gets hot, they’d only need to use that momentum to pull six points from Trump, and suddenly they’d be the Republican frontrunner.
Now ask yourself what impact Trump’s criminal indictment – especially once he’s indicted in multiple jurisdictions – will have on his existing support.
Set aside the simplistic cartoon nonsense you’re hearing from the media and pundit class, and actually think about it. Ignore these clowns who keep trying to tell you that Trump somehow magically has 100% support of the Republican primary race, because you can look up the numbers for yourself and see that it’s consistently been around 55% (not 100%) for the past two years.
If you have the advantage of superior name recognition and recent incumbency like Trump does, and you’re still only at 55% support within your own party’s primary base, you’re a sitting duck for someone else to get hot and use that momentum to take the nomination from you.
That’s why Trump’s indictments will be such a bodyblow right out of the gate to his 2024 prospects. Of the 55% of the Republican voting base that he currently has, how many of them will decide that it’s too risky to nominate someone who could be in prison during the general election cycle?
How many of that 55% will decide that they can ignore one Trump indictment, but can’t ignore two or three Trump indictments, because now they understand that their guy is in real danger of not making it to the general election?
How many of that 55% are going to get turned off by seeing a weak Trump having to stand in front of a judge every few weeks for pretrial hearings and meekly say “yes your honor” over and over? Right wingers like strongmen. His court appearances will make him look weak to them.
Remember, if Trump drops from 55% to 49%, and some newcomer candidate consolidates the other 51%, that’s the ballgame. That’s all it would take to push him down into second place, and hand the nomination to someone else.
“But Trump’s base will never abandon him no matter what!” First of all, if you’re saying that, it’s only because you’ve heard the entire media and pundit class recite it unanimously every day for years. That doesn’t make it true. Simplistic chant-like media narratives, that have to be repeated every day in order to “sound true” to audiences, are almost never true – or else they wouldn’t have to be repeated every day in order to gain traction.
For that matter, it’s intuitively obvious that Trump’s 55% support among Republican primary voters is broader than just his own base. There are, obviously, people who like but don’t love him, who are supporting him for now because they don’t see better odds of winning in 2024.
We’re going to find out how much of that 55% is attached to Trump at the hip and is willing to continue supporting him out of pure spite even as they start to see him unable to function as a candidate due to criminal troubles, and how much of that 55% is just sort of there.
We don’t have any way of predicting how quickly Trump’s criminal indictments will push him out of contention. But we do know which numbers to watch. He’s at 55%. Keep watching that number in the polling averages (not individual polls but the polling averages).
And we know to ignore the hordes of people on TV and Twitter who spend every day chanting that “Trump’s base means he’ll be the nominee NO MATTER WHAT,” because that kind of simplistic premise is easily disproven with polling, numbers, and, you know, any amount of brain function.
Is it theoretically possible that Trump could lock in enough primary votes in the earliest states such that the Republican nomination can’t be wrested away from him even as he’s tried, sentenced, and put in prison? Sure. But that would be the ultimate nightmare scenario for the Republicans. Just try to imagine them trying to undo such a thing at their convention. But given how dangerously weak Trump’s Republican primary support is already, the more realistic outcome is that indictments cause the wheels to come off his campaign before primary voting even gets underway, and then Trump spends the general election trying to destroy the Republican nominee out of spite.
Remember: one of the favorite tricks of the media and pundit class is to take an unrealistic outcome, such as Trump magically shaking off indictment and riding high into the general election, and portray it as having a 99% or 100% chance of happening so that you’ll be too scared to look away from your screen. Your job, as always, is to think critically and not merely fall for the simplistic absolutist slogans that the ratings mongers in this industry spend all day every day chanting at you for effect.
