If you listen to the Democrats and the left-leaning news media, you would be inclined to believe that former President Trump has a lock on the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. At the same time, they opine that Trump could never win the 2024 General Election. That is why they want him to be the GOP nominee – and are trying to insure he is.
If they really thought he could win, they would not be spending so much time and energy trying to get him the Republican nomination through self-proving prophesy. They believe he is not only a loser, but that if he was the presidential candidate, he would sink the GOP across the nation.
Democrats are giddy at the thought of running against Trump – and raising all the same old issues with which they have been pounding Trump and the GOP for the past five years. They would see his capturing the nomination as further evidence that the Republican Party has become a cult of personality. They believe that the Republican campaign of 2024 is part of Trump’s insurrectionist plan – and that his election would bring down the Republic and launch an era of a Trump dictatorship.
Nutty as all that is, it is what Democrats are peddling and their media allies are trumpeting as if the left-wing propaganda is true. In fact, they are trying to make Trump the deciding issue in the 2022 midterm election even though he is not on the ballot.
Democrats and the media rest their entire campaign strategy on one foundation – that Trump could be, or will be, the GOP presidential candidate in 2024. They base it on polls that seem to show that most Republican voters want Trump as their next presidential candidate at this time – and they assume he will be.
But not so fast.
I have previously expressed my belief that Trump will NOT be the Republican presidential candidate in 2024. The flaw in the Democrat thinking is that Trump is popular with more than 55 percent of the GOP voters.
Those poll numbers may reflect Republican voters at this moment, but maybe not so true as other candidates explore the race. While the left’s theory hangs by a single thread – those current polls – there is ample evidence that Trump is not the people’s choice for 2024 – at least not the likely Republican voters.
The first question is, how accurate are the polls in determining opinions three years in the future. One of the things that drives up Trump’s current numbers is the lack of a clear alternative choice. Another is that many are picking Trump as a pushback against all the unfair and dishonest attacks on THEM – the Republican voter. The left uses Trump to demonize the GOP voters and so the GOP voters are pushing back by defending Trump.
There are other more targeted polls that suggest that a lot of Republicans who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 would prefer that he NOT be the standard-bearer in 2024 – me included.
Trump has not been popular with most of Americans – and even most people who vote Republican. Like other candidates who win upset elections, they come to believe it was their popularity. What got Trump elected was the momentum of the GOP going into the 2016 election AND the aversion the voters had for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. And Trump would not have won the GOP nomination in 2016 had there not been such a large field to divide up the vote in those early primaries – the ones he was winning with less than 30 percent of the vote.
Outside of a few later 2016 primaries – when Trump appeared to have a lock on the nomination – he never received the support of more than 50 percent of the voters. In fact, he lost the popular vote in the 2016 election – and arguably lost it again in 2020. It is a fact, that most Republican voters wanted someone other than Trump – and that is significant because it does not appear that he has increased the size of his base.
In a recent interview, Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy gave the case as to why he also believes Trump will not be the Republican candidate in 2024. And while Cassidy has made his opinion public, he may represent a rather large constituency in the Republican Party – officeholders, candidates and voters.
Although Trump claims a popular vote victory in 2020, the Trump team has been myopically focusing on flipping a couple of states that would have given him enough electoral votes, but not so much on the popular vote.
Cassidy points out that in addition to falling short in the popular vote in 2016, Trump subsequently lost the House, the Senate and his own re-election – controversy notwithstanding. That was the first time that happened since 1932, when the Great Depression swept Republicans out of office across the land.
If there are only one or two credible Republican candidates to oppose Trump, I believe that he will not win the nomination if he chooses to run. Democrats and the media are working overtime to discourage competition – hoping that Trump will get the nomination. They know any credible alternative candidates would reduce Trump’s chances to the point of eliminating them.
There is also the possibility that – despite Democrat/media narratives – Trump will not run in 2024. There are a lot of good reasons why he might choose to take a pass. His age, legal entanglements, a perception that he cannot win and just the realization that he can be a political force without all the constraints of the presidency to name a few.
In the meantime, those on the left will keep propping Trump up as the number one news item in America in the hope that it will sink GOP chances of taking the House and even the Senate in 2022 and lose the presidency in 2024. Personally, I do not think it is going to work.
So, there ‘tis.