The Trump Gut Check
The Trump Gut Check
One year out from the first primaries, the 2024 race is still his to lose
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Can you believe it? I put out a subscription newsletter called “Eyes on the Right,” and it’s been 2-1/2 months since I’ve written a post primarily focused on Donald Trump.
True, he does come up a lot. Numerous posts highlight various aspects of his political rise, his style of politics, and its likely influence on the political present and future. But it’s been quite a while—basically since he launched his 2024 election bid in mid-November—since I’ve taken a closer look at where we are when it comes to Trump and his ambition to return to the White House.
There are good reasons for having focused on other things. The first is simple Trump fatigue: I’ve written hundreds of columns about the guy since 2015, and I wrote several in quick succession during the summer and early fall of 2022, making the case against prosecuting him. (Those appeared here, in The New York Times, and in Persuasion.)
After that, I needed a break, and circumstances conspired to make it possible. The fact is Trump hasn’t been much in the news these past few months (at least judged by his usual absurdly high level of media attention). That’s left precious little to think or talk about. Though of course that hasn’t kept people from thinking and talking about all kinds of things.
Around the time of Trump’s campaign launch, I was firmly in the camp of those who assumed he was a shoo-in for the GOP nomination. Then Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis started grabbing headlines (or rather, he continued to grab them in the wake of his genuinely impressive, nearly 20-point re-election victory in early November). That led to stories about how he might be the frontrunner for 2024. Those takes were buoyed by some national and state polls showing him tying or even besting Trump—and also by Trump’s own seeming lethargy through this period. He was staying out of the limelight and avoiding rallies and other public events in favor of posting short, rabid statements on Truth Social, golfing in all his girthy glory, and hosting dinners with neo-Nazis at his luxury resort.
Was this what Trump now considered a presidential campaign? Might he seriously believe he can run and win the Republican nomination from his gated compound in Palm Beach, Florida? If so, might he be much worse off than I originally assumed?
The Horserace Today
Roughly a year out from the start of the primaries, I’ve moved past those doubts to end up right back where I was on the day Trump launched his campaign. Which means I’m sticking with my conviction that the 2024 race is still Trump’s to lose.
That doesn’t mean it’ll be a cakewalk. DeSantis is quite popular in his home state. He is beloved by lots of conservative writers and media personalities, who think he’d perform far better in the general election than the man who weighed down the party in 2018, 2020, and 2022. And so far, he’s playing things smart: Announcing aggressive moves on culture-war issues in his home state in order to grab headlines and win fawning covering from right-wing media outlets while ignoring Trump’s steadily rising drumbeat of attacks.
The result: DeSantis is rising in the polls. But how much? That’s proving to be surprisingly difficult to measure with any precision.
The aggregate GOP primary poll at RealClearPolitics has Trump up by 15.6 points nationally. In the five most recent polls included in the aggregate, Trump bounces around between 40 and 55 percent, while DeSantis comes in between 28 and 35 percent. (The rest of the field includes former Vice President Mike Pence at 6.4 percent, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley at 3.2, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz at 2, Florida Sen. Rubio at 1.7, and everyone else below 1 percent.)
That sounds like a solid Trump lead—and it is. Except for all of that noise in Trump’s number. In one of those recent national polls, Trump leads DeSantis by just five points: 40 to 35 percent. That’s close enough a year out from the first ballots being cast, long before most of the country has begun to pay close attention to the race, to raise my eyebrows.
And then there’s the still-extremely-important GOP primary in New Hampshire. Party primaries are dynamic events in which later contests are shaped by the outcome of earlier ones. A strong early showing by an underdog can change perceptions in decisive ways. And when we look at the last four polls of New Hampshire—conducted in July 2021, October 2021, June 2022, and January 2023—they tell a very clear story. In the earliest poll, Trump led by 28 points. His lead shrank a bit, to 25 points, in the next poll. But by last summer, DeSantis had already taken the lead by 2 points. And the most recent poll from just a few weeks ago? It has the Florida governor beating the former president by 12.
Finally, there’s the new national poll of Republicans (and Republican-leaners) by The Bulwark and GOP pollster Whit Ayers of North Star Opinion Research, which shows DeSantis beating Trump solidly in three different scenarios and the latter maxing out at 30 percent support. That’s an outcome consistent with considering DeSantis, and not the 45thpresident, the frontrunner in the race.
The Horserace Tomorrow
But wait—didn’t I say I’m sticking with my conviction that the 2024 race is still Trump’s to lose? Yes, I did.
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