Could Trump Really Be President Again?
It's not nearly as far-fetched as most of us would like to believe.
CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten argues “The chance of Trump winning another term is very real.”
Aside from the obvious “Dumb and Dumber” jokes, my first thought at seeing the headline was that, given the fact that we have only two viable political parties and Trump seems to be running away with the Republican nomination, of course the chance is real. But Enten’s point is less prosaic.
Donald Trump is facing two indictments, with the potential for more. Political wisdom may have once suggested the former president’s bid for a second White House term would be nothing but a pipe dream. But most of us know better by now.
Trump is not only in a historically strong position for a nonincumbent to win the Republican nomination, but he is in a better position to win the general election than at any point during the 2020 cycle and almost at any point during the 2016 cycle.
Emphasis mine. That seems nuts, right?
Again, the first piece seems to be baked in but Enten really hammers it home:
No one in Trump’s current polling position in the modern era has lost an open presidential primary that didn’t feature an incumbent. He’s pulling in more than 50% of support in the national primary polls, i.e., more than all his competitors combined.
Three prior candidates in open primaries were pulling in more than half the vote in primary surveys in the second half of the calendar year before the election: Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush in 2000 and Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016. Gore remains the only nonincumbent to win every single presidential nominating contest, while Bush and Clinton never lost their national polling advantage in their primaries.
Today, Trump’s closest primary competitor, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has fallen below 20% nationally. No other contender is at or above 10%. This makes the margin between Trump and the rest of the field north of 30 points on average.
A look back at past polls does show candidates coming back from deficits greater than 10 points to win the nomination, but none greater than 30 points at this point. In fact, the biggest comebacks when you average all the polls in the second half of the year before the election top out at about 20 points (Democrats George McGovern in 1972, Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008).
Obama did fall nearly 30 points behind for a brief period in the fall of 2007, though his comeback the following year and that of Republican John McCain (another eventual nominee who trailed by over 10 points nationally) points to another reason why Trump is so strong right now.
Trump is leading not just nationally but in the early-voting states as well. He’s up by double digits in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
Obama was within single digits of Clinton and Iowa poll leader John Edwards at this point in the 2008 cycle. Similarly, Clinton’s edge was in the single digits over Obama in South Carolina at this stage of the campaign.
On the Republican side in 2008, the primary deck was much more unsettled than the national numbers indicated at this point. Rudy Giuliani was up nationally, but he lagged behind Mitt Romney in Iowa and New Hampshire. Romney couldn’t get much above 30% in either state, unlike Trump right now.
McCain (whose candidacy is often held up as an example of how DeSantis might come back) was always considerably closer to the national and state front-runners than anyone is to Trump at this moment.
As much as I’d like for a non-crazy candidate to emerge as the GOP nominee, getting us on the road to having two reasonable parties, Lloyd Christmas has better odds.
Of course, winning the primary is one thing for Trump, who has led in almost every single Republican primary poll published in the past eight years.
What should arguably be more amazing is that despite most Americans agreeing that Trump’s two indictments thus far were warranted, he remains competitive in a potential rematch with President Joe Biden. A poll out last week from Marquette University Law School had Biden and Trump tied percentage-wise (with a statistically insignificant few more respondents choosing Trump).
The Marquette poll is one of a number of surveys showing Trump either tied or ahead of Biden. The ABC News/Washington Post poll has published three surveys of the matchup between the two, and Trump has come out ahead – albeit within the margin of error – every time. Other pollsters have shown Biden only narrowly ahead.
That’s just nuts, right?
But, sure enough, RealClearPolitics has Biden with less than a 1-point margin over Trump in their polling aggregate. And most of the polls are of registered voters—likely voters historically skew more Republican. FiveThirtyEight doesn’t seem to be aggregating the Trump-Biden polls just yet most of their head-to-heads show Trump with a lead—although they seem all over the place. (Interestingly, Biden does considerably better against DeSantis while Trump, DeSantis, and even Trump Jr. wipe the floor with Kamala Harris.)
To put that in perspective, Trump never led in a single national poll that met CNN’s standards for publication for the entirety of the 2020 campaign. Biden was up by high single digits in the late summer of 2019. Biden is up by maybe a point in the average of all 2024 polls today.
Surveys in the late summer of 2015 told the same story: Clinton was up by double digits over Trump in late July and up by mid-to-high single digits by the end of August 2015.
Obviously, we’re a long way away from November 2024 and polls taken this far out are pretty meaningless. But it’s astounding that a guy who’s under multiple indictments and was just found civilly liable for raping a woman is essentially tied with the sitting President in the polls.
And, as we all know by now, we don’t elect Presidents in a national popular vote but rather through the bizarre intermediary of the Electoral College, which currently gives a considerable advantage to the Republican nominee.
The fact that the polling between Biden and Trump is so close shouldn’t be much of a surprise. Elections are a choice between two candidates. Trump isn’t popular, but neither is Biden. The two, in tandem, would be the most disliked presidential nominees in polling history, if their numbers hold through the election.
Honestly, I’m not sure this is a meaningful metric. At this point, any major party nominee starts with 50 percent disapproval simply because of partisan enmity.
All that being said, the 2024 election will probably come down to a few swing states. Polling in swing states has been limited because we’re still over a year from the election.
One giant warning sign for Democrats was a late June Quinnipiac University poll from Pennsylvania, a pivotal state for the past few election cycles where Trump rallied base supporters in Erie on Saturday. The state barely voted for Trump in 2016 and for Biden in 2020.
Trump was up on Biden by 1 point in the Quinnipiac poll – a result within the margin of error, but nevertheless a remarkable achievement for the former president.
Why? It was only the second Pennsylvania poll that met CNN standards for publication since 2015 that had Trump ahead of either Biden (for 2020 and 2024) or Clinton (for 2016).
Again, that’s just one poll ridiculously far out. And, even if Trump had carried Pennsylvania in 2020, its 20 electoral votes wouldn’t have been enough to swing the election. Then again, if he’d carried Pennsylvania (which he only lost by .7 points) he’d likely have carried Georgia (.2%), North Carolina (1.4%), and Wisconsin (.6%) as well and easily won re-election.
Honestly, this far out, I’m not following the horse race at all closely. But the underlying dynamics are concerning: the combination of our highly polarized environment and our skewed institutional structures make the possibility of a Trump re-election a quite real possibility.
And if the reporting on the plans to restructure the executive branch, especially the Justice Department, so it is more firmly under the President’s control is to be believed, it is highly likely to be much worse than his first term.
@Kurtz: I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say a second Trump term would mean the end of the rule of law in America, at least at the federal level.
If the US re-elects Donald Trump, I’m outta here. I can see the handwriting on the wall.
The media wants, no, DEMANDS, a close race, hence we get horse race coverage rather than substance, and reports on the polling of people with landlines. A sensible, honest media would be exploring Trump’s likely mental illness and the potential for irreparable harm it poses for America.
In 2016 the probability that trump would beat clinton was in the range of 30-35%, so yes in 2024 trump can win. This AM’s NYT’s as a good analysis of trumps popularity in the R party and it shows that ~75% either support trump or are open to supporting him. The never trumpers are about 25% and they will either stay home or vote for Biden.
Even if you assign the same percentages to R leaning independents, that shouldn’t be enough to elect trump, but, other polls show Dems and Dem leaning independents as being unenthusiastic about a Biden presidency redux, with a significant danger that they won’t show up. This is where the danger of a trump restoration lies.
@Sleeping Dog:
Any Democrat who stays home because Biden’s “too old” or “not progressive enough” or any other reason is a fucking moron who deserves the shitty America their non-participation will result in. It’s just sad the rest of us will have to endure it as well.
Trump is likely to have no money to run in the General Election, as he is spending more than he raises on attorneys…and the Jan 6th Indictment and the GA Indictment haven’t even dropped yet.
If Tom Clancy had written a novel with this plot in 1990, I would have been unable to read it — it would have been too much to ask of my willing suspension of disbelief. I’m still in denial about the idea that nearly half of my compatriots are still willing (even eager) to vote for gangrene.
I’m exhausted. This is f#cking exhausting.
The GOP is full of idiots. The fact that ANYONE–A SINGLE SOUL–would vote for this felonious nincompoop is distressing.
JFC.
The answer is no.
Benito can win the general election, no question that’s possible. But he showed in his first term that he cannot ever be president other than in title only.
The worse Trump is, the more beloved he is of his fans. There’s nothing he can do that will alienate them.
morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/scenes-from-the-gop-circa-2023
As uncomfortable as this may be for people. This is the only way to truly beat this movement back. There can be no TKO of Trump. He has to be knocked the F@#k out. The monied right wing lords still think he has enough viability to deliver tax cuts that they don’t want to burn a bridge…yet.
Nothing will make them turn both barrels on Trump like being a 2-time General Election loser. They will also drum the rest of the Trump-ites to the margins of the party.
But Dems will need to do the work—they need to energize the Democrats and Never-Trumpers in Red and Purplish states through all media modes and more surrogates.
Will they? That’s the only question
@CSK:
Look in my eyes
What do you see?
The cult of personality
@Jim Brown 32:
This is the part I struggle with. I cannot fathom how anyone could fail to be energized already — if you can see what Trump and his followers are, you’re already terrified. If you can’t, after everything that has happened, what could possibly change that now? Or what cause could get you to get out and vote D even while thinking Trump is not all that bad?
I welcome practical advice.
FWIW, the prevailing narrative about 2022 election polls in October 2022 — just nine months ago — turned out to be pretty meaningless. Let alone what was being peddled last summer.
So a narrarive about 2024 election polls in the summer of 2023? What’s a stronger word than meaningless? Worthless?
Harry Enten to Jake Tapper, in June 2022, five months before the 2022 midterms: Republicans are in their best position since 1938. As Enten noted Biden’s economic approval numbers were the worst since Jimmy Carter, he and Tapper agreed Democrats were in for a “stomping.”
Okay sure.
Enten in July 2023, sixteen months before the 2024 elections: Trump is better-positioned than in 2020 and 2016.
Okay sure.
The 538 guys have to get their clicks and fill space, you can’t begrudge a man for earning his paycheck. So just to be snarky and unfair, I’ll quote Stanford women basketball’s Hall of Fame coach Tara VanDerveer: “A repetition of errors shows a lack of intelligence.”
I’m worried, of course. No one inspires D turnout better than Trump. Fifth Avenue aside, as charges and credible evidence emerge he will drop in polling. But there’s always a chance of Biden having a health incident or other crisis, throwing the election into turmoil. But DeUseless has been the only credible challenger, and I stand by my opinion a DeUseless administration would be even worse than Trump.
The real scandal here is that we have no legal pathway to blocking Trump except, maybe, a conviction for seditious conspiracy. But even that is a legal gray area and the GOPs have six justices on retainer. Imprisonment would allow him to run, win, and pardon himself. A self pardon is also, at best, a legal gray area. How the six GOP justices would go may be a question of who’s veep. Unless the GOPs can organize an Agnew.
You say, James,
Thank you for not saying “back to”. The only way GOPs stop being a faux populist front for oligarchs is if they lose, and lose big time. In the states as well as nationally.
@DrDaveT:
Obviously I’m going to vote for Biden and I will do the standard liberal work of phone banking and whatever…but when the strife that Trump and Republicans seem to live in is so far from your reality, it makes it very hard after 8 years of this stuff to do it again. It’s like the dumb brand that will never die, it just gets reworked over and over. And if Trump gets reelected it’s either go deeper into my bubble or leave entirely.
@DrDaveT:
Trump is a sociopath. The only way to not see that is to very badly want to not see it. Or to be oblivious. I recently read Aachen and Bartels, Democracy for Realists. Somebody, perhaps Bartels, said years ago that the dirty secret political scientists won’t talk about is that the electorate are a box of rocks. The book is a 300 page explanation of that crack.
Yesterday Atrios noted NYT had four headlines on the web front page mentioning Trump and none mentioning Biden. It’s going to be 2016 all over again. Wall to wall Trump and an occasional mention of Biden or any GOP challenger. And the indictments, trials, and rumors of indictments and trials feed that.
@Jen: Moralising about the opponents not having one’s own values is fairly pointless.
Rather more distressing is not that a segment of the right opposition in USA desire to vote for an otherwise incompetent Populist salesman, a master PT Barnum of politics – more distressing is the pattern of the Republican party public leadershi actors like the bungler DeSantis being too timid and foolish to see Trump’s dominance game and their avoidance of attacking him – putting a knife in Trump and twisting so he bleeds out – as their only salvation for their own power.
A contrast example looking to another Anglo realm, the knives that certain actors on Right side were quite willing to put into Boris when it was clear enough he had become a liaibility.
(this taking on board Pr.Taylor’s well-taken emphasis on the weakness of the American political party institutions and their lack of own-control – you do need to go back to old-fashioned gate-keeping and abandon the farcical façade of party democracy)
@DrDaveT:
Banal as it sounds, disinterest in politics explains a lot.
There’s also bothsiderism. It’s not that people don’t see how bad Benito is, but they truly believe all politicians are like that. Not just Biden, but Obama, W. Bush, Clinton, H.W. Bush, Reagan, etc. Never mind the actual facts.
@Lounsbury:
He’s a walking crime wave. That used to matter to Republicans. Do you know how I know that? I worked in Republican politics. For years. This has absolutely nothing to do with me “moralising” about Republicans not having my values. It has to do with Republicans having no values whatsoever.
The only way anything ever matters to Republicans is if they can Own The Libs by saying it. All things they assert D’s should be Held To are immediately forgotten or ignored if any Republican is guilty of that thing.
Republicans don’t have any values or principles — they’re purely about acquiring and acting on power.
That, and tax cuts for the top 0.1%.
I have been on the receiving end of both direct mail and Facebook ads from Americans for Prosperity that scream “if Trump is the Republican nominee, Biden wins.” They seem scared to DEATH that Trump will be the nominee. They are spending a fair amount of money to try and move the needle on this, to no apparent avail.
@DrDaveT: Political engagement and give-a-shit about politics are middle-class and up luxuries. You’ve no doubt been exposed to Maslow’s hierarchy. If you’re in the basic needs rungs—connection between political/economic systems and your life are very hard for the average rung 2 person to draw. They do not care who is POTUS, controls Congress or SCOTUS. What connection do those things have to how the bills will get paid next month? Working class people don’t have the luxury of thinking about 2024 let alone the Presidential election then. That’s thing 1.
Thing 2, is that Trump brought many of his people (Rung 2 people) into the political process by talking to them. His rallies are in their towns. His media campaigns are targeted to people that LIVE in these areas. I say again, most of the Trumpers were politically disengaged, which is why they can hate Republicans so vehemently. They have no affinity to the party outside of it being a vehicle for Trump.
Thing 3 is that Democrats never bring the fight to Republican turf. Republicans, on the other hand, flood the zone where Democrats are messaging with impunity. Red counties are Republican safe spaces. Republicans never have to defend the failure of areas/states they’ve controlled for years. How many times today did urban dysfunction play on Faux? How many times has Mississippi been on CNN and MSNBC?
The Democratic Party needs to use FB, YouTube Influencers, Radio, Billboards, and Church Pastors to name a few—to convey a message in Republican turf, in non-academic anecdotes, of what the Party is fighting for, how the Government guards the rungs of upward mobility, and how the Republicans are the poison pill of plutocracy to destroy people with no money. RW plutocrats are flooding the zone with No Labels. Where is the LW version flooding the zone for purple and light red county candidates?
Is LW populism going to make us all feel a little dirty? Of course, but populism is what rung 2 people responds to. The surest way to stop Trumpism is to contest its rural turf by amping up the people who are partial to LW populism and create a dilemma for Republicans running in primaries.
@Jim Brown 32:
This has all the reality of the Right going on about the secret Commie directives to the Centre Left…. it says rather more about own-ideological prejudices and has very little rooting in actuals on other side, fun house mirror world.
@Jen: Rather.
@Jen: It is in fact your moralising about the otherside, via comment, really not particularly useful. (Republicans not themselves being a single unit, as one can see in roughly 1/3 MAGA [who simply do not see the crimes and therefore it is misplaced framing for them], 25% Anti-MAGA and rest free floating hesistators).
The incapacity of the party political public leadership to informally cohere around putting the knives in Trump out of pure self-interest – although the Prisoners Dilemma does provide game theory analysis of the why – is rather more criticisable.
@Jen: The Koch’s didn’t get rich by being stupid. 80 million people voted for Biden…a very strong signal that Trump would lose a rematch. More directly to them however, is they’ve been moved to Trumps outer orbit. So not only is their opposition personal, but they also need another sugar daddy that they are in the inner circle of.
Trump is riding with a different group of Oligarchs.
@Jen:
“…felonius nincompoop…”
You do have a way with words, madame.
@Lounsbury: Fun House mirror. I like it. I like it even better as description of your commentaries here.
@gVOR08: I fear you may be right. In any given news cycle, Trump sucks the oxygen out of the room. It’s damned near impossible to compete with that. I hope I’m wrong.
I have two concerns about 2024.
One is there may be a recession by then. If people are out of work, losing their homes, etc., Biden will suffer at the polls. Benito may then squeak in as he did in 2016 with an EC inversion.
The other is Biden’s health and mental state. There are no hard rules on this, but I’m sure we’ve all seen an older person deteriorate dramatically in a short time.
Yes, I know El Cheeto has already undergone his dramatic deterioration. But his fanatics don’t seem to give a damn.
@SC_Birdflyte:
He has an editorial in Newsweek today. I put the link in the open forum.
@Lounsbury:
Go back and read Jen’s comment again. Earlier you said:
Jen can correct me if I’m wrong, but she was talking about ProPols. She worked in party politics some years ago. So, no. But keep making the same remark, one day you will make it fit.
And BTW, DeSantis has aimed attacks at Trump. But his persona is off-putting.
He comes across as creepy guy in the corner who only got invited because he had the combination to the liquor cabinet.
People tried to engage him when the party started and he said weird shit like, “I don’t lift, but those bodybuilders are the ideal of masculinity. Look at those glistening, bulging biceps.”
Now everyone is trying to figure out how to get him out of the house without risking him coming back with a gun.
Like Jim Brown I see the majority of the people around me paying next to no attention. We all talk about other thing except when presidential elections draw close.
I am waiting for the R debates. Trump is a bully ripe for a taking down, and at least Christie seems to recognize that. Trump has a record (of losing) to defend now, not like 2016. Trump may dodge the debates entirely, but all the contenders know they must go through him to have a chance. The opportunity to paint him as a loser is clear, child’s play to assemble, and can even be iced with a comment about a bimbo bilking him for $130 large.
This is when people will start paying attention. Most, anyway.
it might not come together exactly the way it did in 2016, but it could definitely happen again. We know that Republicans have been working the states to make it difficult for Democratic constituencies to turn out to vote in 2024.
Trump broke the seal, and at least 74 million Americans are in synch with his retribution/nihilist message. Are we willing to take another swim in the Trump cesspool? I’ll take the under, but I’m not especially sold on my bet either.
I don’t doubt that Trump has a chance. Remember, he can lose the popular vote by 5-7 points and still win the EC. And there are enough people in this country who want a “benevolent dictator” … or least a dictator … that he can get in.
The biggest thing that needs to happen is that the D’s need to get their heads out of their collective backsides. Progressives have gotten some of what they want and the economy is good. Biden has a decent track record as President. A Trump victory would present very real dangers to abortion rights, LGBT rights, free speech, fiscal sanity and the rule of law. When they are going to start acting like it?
@Kurtz: You are correct. Thanks.
The 22nd amendment says. “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” Ask any MAGA adherent, and they will tell you Donald Trump was actually elected in 2020. Under a textual interpretation of the 22nd amendment, if he WAS actually elected in 2020, the answer is NO – he cannot be elected again under the law.