Only 55%?

| 4:54 pm EST February 28, 2021
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Donald Trump’s close allies run CPAC. They set up this year’s conference to be one big Trump worship session. Yet even among CPAC attendees, only 55% say Trump is their first choice for 2024. The other 45% of CPAC attendees have already moved on from him. Trump’s relevance is fading, even within his base.

If just 55% of CPAC attendees see Trump as their first choice now, that number will drop even lower as time goes on and other candidates gain more name recognition and momentum. It’ll go even lower than that once Trump is inevitably arrested in New York, and so on.

This means the GOP has a real problem. It’s still focused on propping up Trump’s ghost, when so many voters – even on the Republican side of the fence – would rather move on to a new con artist instead.

It also means the left potentially has a problem. If it continues spending every day fretting over Trump’s ghost making a magic comeback in 2024, it risks overlooking the threat posed by the new Republican bullshitters on the rise, one of whom will likely be the 2024 GOP nominee.

And no, it isn’t going to be Ron DeSantis, even though he’s currently a distant second in CPAC polling. He’s hilariously in over his head, and may not even survive his own 2022 reelection bid in Florida.

The 2024 Republican nominee will likely be someone who wasn’t even a part of the Trump era and therefore doesn’t have to take a side regarding him. Trump came out of nowhere in 2016 and succeeded in the Republican primary partly because he was new and didn’t have to answer for George W. Bush’s failures and unpopularity. Look for the 2024 republican nominee to similarly be an outsider who doesn’t have to answer for Trump’s failures and unpopularity.