Nearly two-thirds of the electorate say they won’t or ‘probably’ won’t vote for Trump
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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With one week before the first Republican debate and five months until the Iowa caucuses, the party’s presidential contest is still far from over. Still, despite the 91 criminal charges and impending financial drain because of his legal proceedings, former President Donald Trump remains the dominant front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, with a 40-odd point national lead over his closest competitor, Ron DeSantis, and comfortable double-digit margins over the Florida governor in the crucial early primary states.
But Trump’s odds in a general election are far less comfortable. The latest findings by the Associated Press spell out the peril posited by a third time with Trump at the top of the Republican ticket, and those wishing to fire the senile, corrupt, and cantankerous Joe Biden from the presidency would be wise to heed the warning.
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A majority, 53%, of those polled by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research would not vote for Trump in a general election come 2024, and another 11% say they probably would not. That’s 64% of the entire electorate, and at least 15% of the winnable moderate electorate, that will likely not or absolutely will not vote for Trump over Biden. For his part, the president is still more popular within his own party than Trump. More than 4 in 5 Democrats say they will support Biden as the party’s presidential nominee, whereas fewer than three in four Republicans say they will back Trump. More than a third of Republicans polled say that Trump should not even be running for the party’s nomination.
Both Biden and Trump are historically unpopular and historically ancient. If elected to a second term, Biden would be 86 and Trump 82 on their respective last days in office, both nearly a decade older than the average American male life expectancy.
There is a lesson for Trump’s primary challengers on the data. While DeSantis’s disappointing campaign launch, one laser-focused on fringe culture war issues and scandalized by surrogates fired for flirting with white supremacy, led to a crisis in confidence in his polling, there is ample room in his reboot to try and reclaim the mantle of electability. While Trump has his finger on the pulse of the party with some social issues such as gay marriage and abortion, the dominant issues of the next six months will not be socially conservative crusades from 2004. They will be inflation, which has reduced the real purchasing power of the average paycheck by nearly 20% since Biden took office, and (unfortunately) the string of indictments levied against Trump.
DeSantis is correct to call for widespread reform of the Justice Department and the post-9/11 security state, but the polling makes clear that he is allowed to call out Trump as a candidate unfit not just for the presidency but also for a robust campaign to unseat Joe Biden. After all, the majority of Republicans polled by the Associated Press say that Trump was not acting to defend democracy during the aftermath of the 2020 election. And, with regard to his handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and attempts to interfere in Georgia’s 2020 vote count, more Republicans think Trump’s actions were illegal or unethical than innocuous.
Republicans can’t set the news cycle, but they can capitalize on it, and the fact is that just 5% of those polled by the Associated Press say that they have been mercifully spared from hearing about these indictments. DeSantis and any other serious Trump challenger ought to start saying the obvious: The best guy to beat Joe Biden is not the one siphoning off tens of millions of dollars of campaign donations to defend in court his actions that the majority of the GOP base refuses to even condone.