Is the GOP primary coalescing into a four-way race?
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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Keen to avoid a repeat of the 2016 clown car that ended up coronating former President Donald Trump as the Republican presidential nominee, early backers of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) promised that he would quickly turn Trump’s third shot at the Oval Office into a two-man race. Fewer than four months into DeSantis’s hotly anticipated bid for the top job, he has failed to follow through on that promise.
But the persistence of the post-debate momentum of Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy may actually succeed in coalescing the contest into a four-person race. Following last week’s finding by Trump’s top pollster that the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and the biotech entrepreneur were seeing sustained bounces in Iowa and New Hampshire, a slew of new polling shows that Haley and Ramaswamy are closing in on DeSantis, both in the early states and nationally.
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In New Hampshire, NMB Research found that Haley has actually tied DeSantis at 10% support in the Granite State, with Ramaswamy at 8%. Nationally, CNN found Haley up 2 points from June to 7% and Ramaswamy up 5 points to 6%. Meanwhile, DeSantis has shrunk from 26% to 18%. The Wall Street Journal’s national polling shows a similar squeeze, with Haley up 3 points to 8%, Ramaswamy up 3 points to 5%, and DeSantis down 11 points to 13%.
Recall that the last time Republicans tried to fight Trump for the nomination, the primary field never coalesced around two or three Trump alternatives while dumping the also-rans to the low single digits. On this day eight years ago, a staggering seven candidates had at least 5% in the polls nationally and in New Hampshire, and six had at least 5% in Iowa.
The 2024 primary could be even more concentrated than the polling averages indicate. Thanks to a debate performance too low-key to be considered anything but lackluster, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) has reportedly spooked his donors into considering other viable non-Trump candidates, and both former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Vice President Mike Pence run a very real risk of failing to meet the Republican National Committee’s polling requirements for the second debate.
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To be clear, Trump has remained the dominant front-runner in both the betting markets and the polling since he announced his third presidential bid. But the polling continues to show his vulnerabilities in a head-to-head matchup against President Joe Biden, and the betting markets give Trump only a 1-in-4 chance of winning the presidency overall.
But for those hoping for an actual alternative to Trump, Haley and Ramaswamy seem to be doing what DeSantis was incapable of: icing out the competition to provide voters viable alternatives who both range across the ideological spectrum.