Trump owes it to GOP voters to explain how he can actually beat Biden
Zachary Faria
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Former President Donald Trump is already signaling that he is going to dodge any GOP presidential primary debates. Regardless of whether he joins or not, there is one thing he has an obligation to explain: how he can actually win a general election.
Trump’s reasons for wanting to dodge a debate are clear. He leads in the polls (even though it’s only April 2023, and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), his only real challenger, hasn’t declared yet). He also wants to avoid being directly confronted about the mistakes he made that Republicans might find problematic — for example, about how he let Dr. Anthony Fauci run his pandemic response and how he criticized states that didn’t adhere to Fauci’s authoritarian lockdowns.
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That’s a good strategy to win a primary if Republican voters really don’t care that Trump was Fauci’s biggest enabler during lockdowns. But how exactly does Trump beat President Joe Biden, someone he already lost to? What is going to be so different about 2024 compared to 2020?
If polls are the basis for Trump dodging debates, it should be noted that Trump is regularly running behind Biden (and DeSantis) in general election polling. A Wall Street Journal national poll found DeSantis leading Biden by 3 points while Trump trailed Biden by the same margin. Swing state polling shows DeSantis leading Biden in Pennsylvania and Arizona and Trump losing to Biden in those same states.
Trump’s net favorability is 18 points underwater in Arizona and 16 points underwater in Pennsylvania. Trump trails Biden among independents in Wisconsin by 9 points. What is Trump going to do differently to win those independents over? He hasn’t said, nor has anyone on his team.
This is before you even get to his ludicrous claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. If that’s true, then what has changed between 2020 and today to prevent that from happening again? If the election was already stolen from him under his nose when he was an incumbent president, how is he going to win the same election with Biden in the White House and Democrats controlling more of the levers of power in Arizona and Michigan? Again, no answer.
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Biden is a bumbling fool who can barely speak in coherent sentences most of the time. He was exactly the same during the 2020 campaign when he defeated Trump. Biden has become more unpopular since then, but so has Trump, which is why Democrats successfully held off what should have been a red wave in the 2022 midterm elections.
If Trump wants to be the GOP nominee for president, the least he should do is explain how he can actually become the president again. He’s lost Republicans three election cycles in a row. If Republican voters want their party to win for a change, they should expect the front-runner to explain how he can do it.