It is 2023 and Donald Trump is running for the Republican presidential nomination for 2024. 

He announced this in 2022, historically early, and the question is increasingly becoming is his 2024 primary candidacy already burning out. Let’s make the case for why it is, and then make the case for why it isn’t and see which feels like a stronger case. 

The case for Trump’s campaign already burning out is as follows. Number one, he is a former president, and for a former president to not even be decisively winning his party’s own primary is already a sign of significant trouble. And indeed, if you look at the betting markets like predicted.org, they show Ron DeSantis as a significant favorite over Donald Trump to secure the nomination…despite the fact that DeSantis hasn’t even announced that he’s running yet, and Donald Trump has.

That’s not a very good sign for Trump. Going beyond that, if you look at actual polling of 2020 to 2024, Republican Primary, you see that in some polls, Trump is leading DeSantis. But in some polls, DeSantis is leading Trump. Again, guy who hasn’t even declared he’s running – DeSantis – former president of the United States, and in some polls, DeSantis is winning. Very bad sign. Number three, although Donald Trump touts a very impressive endorsement record in 2022, the vast majority of those wins were incumbents, or the winners of the Republican primaries in very safe red districts. It doesn’t take a genius to make those endorsements, the contested endorsements that made a difference. We’re talking about Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano and Mehmet Oz, we’re talking about Georgia, like for example, Herschel Walker, Michigan Tudor Dixon, and many, many others, Kari Lake and Blake Masters. The ones that really mattered, the ones on which control of the Senate for example, hung did not go Donald Trump’s way. Another sign of his diminishing appeal, diminishing power within the Republican Party. 

So all of those are signs for trouble. Now, what’s the other case? What’s the strongest possible case for Trump? Well, that would be something like the following. In 2016’s primary, which actually started in 2015, Trump’s polling didn’t look good, initially. And he is polling way better now than he was at the start of the 2016 primary where he was pulling 2%. Now he’s somewhere between 35 and 55. That’s already way better for Trump. Secondly, can some of these other people, like for example, Ron DeSantis, can they actually defeat Trump in an ugly national campaign? Because it is true. Although Trump says very strange things and has a weird personality, no sense of humor, etc., he does have an ability with the nicknames and with the insults and with the retorts, or at least he did in 2016. 

We’ll see if he still has it, to make people like Ron DeSantis look really, really kind of dumb. 

And Ron DeSantis is very uncharismatic. He is not particularly likable. And I don’t know that if he does declare, DeSantis and runs against Trump, that he can actually stand up to Trump in the way you would need to to win a Republican primary. 

So those are the two cases. If I zoom out, which do I believe more strongly? Right now, I definitely see a weakened Trump, but I am not ready to count him out. One other empirical element to this; if we look at general election polling for 2024, which has Biden-Trump, and Biden-DeSantis…in Biden-Trump matchups, Biden is winning almost every single one of them. In Biden-DeSantis matchups, that polling is mostly tied, or shows DeSantis ahead.

That is a reason why, regardless of whether Trump still has control of the Republican Party, it may not be in the party’s best interests to nominate Donald Trump. It is so early that all of this is speculative and unpredictable, but we’re going to follow all of it and within six months, we’re going to be very thickly in the middle of this Republican primary. The last component to this, of course, is what happens if Donald Trump is indicted. And there is vast speculation ranging from it has no impact whatsoever, all the way to overnight it ends Trump’s campaign. I think it depends on where he is charged, what the proceedings will look like and how credible the entire thing is presented in the media. We don’t know the answer yet, but we’ll be following up.