On Wednesday night, a panel of Republican candidates will take the stage and argue that they are the best choice to prevent President Joe Biden from handing another victory to Donald Trump.
More and more surveys disprove this theory.
The former president is no longer trailing or even tied with Biden in general election polls, so he is clearly not a political problem.
A increasing majority of Republican primary voters support Trump, and most Republicans believe he has the best chance of defeating Biden in the general election. With just over a year until the general election, poll after poll shows that Biden and Trump are virtually deadlocked.
Many of the points made by Trump’s opponents at the first debate last month are rendered moot by this. Rather from concentrating on 2020, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has urged his party to “look forward” and embrace “the message that can win in November of 2024.”
Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who is currently in third place in the polls behind Trump and DeSantis, elaborated.
“Trump is the most despised politician in the United States,” she remarked. To paraphrase, “We can’t win a general election that way.”
As seven of Trump’s lower-polling opponents are ready to take the stage in Southern California, let’s take a look at how the race has altered since the first debate and what to make of the “Trump won’t win” thesis that is still being pushed by his opponents.
While Trump is still seen as the most viable candidate among Republicans, both DeSantis and Haley have compelling arguments to make.
Republican voters haven’t been convinced by DeSantis and Haley, despite their best efforts, that they are the best candidates to replace Joe Biden in November.
Republican voters were questioned in a new poll from Monmouth University if they thought Trump was the best Republican candidate to beat Biden. Fifty-eight percent voted “definitely” for Trump as the strongest candidate, and another 24% voted “probably” for him. The combined total of 72 percent was up from 63 percent in May, when they believed Trump to be the strongest candidate.
25 percent of Republicans thought another Republican would “definitely” or “probably” be a stronger general-election candidate than Trump.
This doesn’t imply that DeSantis and Haley will back down on the electability front in the rematch.
A pre-debate email written by DeSantis campaign manager James Uthmeier referred to the Florida governor as “the only candidate that can beat both Joe Biden and Donald Trump,” a reference to DeSantis’ second-place finish and largely positive reputation with Republican primary voters.
Even though DeSantis is 43 points behind Trump in the latest NBC News poll (59 to 16), 37% of Republicans still choose him as their second choice. Totaling first- and second-choice votes, Trump has 70% support, but DeSantis isn’t far behind with 53%. Nobody other even cracked the 20% mark.
Recent national averages from RealClearPolitics have Biden ahead of DeSantis by 2.5 points, while they put Trump ahead of Biden by 1.5 points. However, the presidency is not decided by the popular vote, and DeSantis, who was re-elected with a landslide in Florida last year, may be better able to win back some of the Sun Belt states Trump lost to Biden in 2020, such as the historically Republican strongholds of Arizona and Georgia.
According to the polls, Haley may have a more convincing case for electability. While pollsters do not frequently propose her as an opponent for Biden like they do for Trump or DeSantis, the RealClearPolitics average shows Haley with a 4.3 point edge over Biden.
According to an NBC News survey, Haley led Biden by four percentage points, 46 to 41, while Biden and Trump were deadlocked and Biden held a slim one-point lead over DeSantis. Haley was “the only candidate who handily beats” Biden, as her campaign put it in a press release on Tuesday; viewers should expect to hear similar language during this debate.
Since the first debate, Haley has gained ground while Ramaswamy has lost ground.
It’s easy to infer that the first GOP debate last month had little effect on the campaign in light of the dominant reality of the GOP primary: Trump’s rising dominance of the field.
There was a clear reshuffling of the contenders below Trump after the debate, which bodes ill for the prospects of choosing the already-indicted former president.
DeSantis’s national average on RealClearPolitics is 14.5%, which is up somewhat from his 14.3% average on the day of the first debate (August 23) but still more than 42 points behind Trump.
Haley, meantime, rose from third place at 3.2% on August 23 to second place at 5.6% today.
She replaced Vivek Ramaswamy, a businessman who had been the target of the most criticisms in the first discussion. After being at 7.2 percent before the debate, Ramaswamy is currently at 5.1 percent.
The other four candidates who met the threshold for participation in Wednesday’s debate are former VP Mike Pence, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum. All four of these men are polling at around 4 percent, which is where they were before the first debate.
On the other hand, Trump has made some progress since the first debate. According to the most recent RealClearPolitics average, his approval rating is at 57 percent, up from 55.4 percent on August 23.
While it may appear that Trump is unstoppable, his support did drop in the weeks after his decision to boycott the first debate, suggesting that the other contenders could really utilise Wednesday night’s discussion to lessen his grip on the primary. However, Trump’s support is higher now than it was before the first debate.
How should we interpret Trump’s current lead over Biden? (Spoiler alert: it’s not ten points.)
The political establishment has been in an uproar this week over an ABC News/Washington Post poll that shows Donald Trump leading Joe Biden by 10 percentage points among respondents. But that’s probably an aberration; most polls show a tighter race in the anticipated rematch between Biden and Trump next autumn than Biden’s 2020 victory.
Other September surveys included in the RealClearPolitics database showed Trump ahead in 5, Biden ahead in 5, and the two candidates deadlocked in 4. And pollsters themselves are concerned that Trump’s possible candidature may dilute the reliability of future surveys.
When Joe Biden was having trouble making headway in the 2016 Democratic primary, his supporters often cited public polls showing that he would be the most competitive Democrat in a general election against Donald Trump.
And the results were eye-openingly large. According to the RealClearPolitics average as of today, Biden had a 9.5-point advantage over Trump. In surveys conducted by Fox News (14 points) and ABC News/Washington Post (15 points) in September 2019, Biden was ahead by double digits.
Since Biden has been doing poorly with crucial segments of the Democratic coalition — such as young voters and African-Americans — who they see as likely to come home over the next 13 months, most Democrats and even some Republicans believe the recent polls overestimate Trump’s position.
The Biden team and its allies have begun airing commercials in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in an effort to win back those voters. National polls are imperfect surrogates for the Electoral College contest because there is a lack of polling data from certain states at the moment.
The fact that we’re already discussing the general election is further evidence of how boring the GOP primary has been. The electability argument isn’t the silver bullet the former president’s challengers anticipated it would be, though it’s unclear whether anything that happens on the platform without Trump on Wednesday night will change that.