Indictment fears and DeSantis could derail Trump in 2024


Donald Trump wasted no time in declaring he’s running for president again in 2024. But is Trump’s campaign in danger of burning out before it even begins? Polling shows Trump’s hold on the Republican Party is weakening, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis emerging as a prime challenger for the 2024 nomination. Fellow Republicans openly criticized Trump’s impact on the November midterm elections, and there are the legal worries surrounding the Georgia probe into possible election interference in 2020. Straight Arrow News contributor David Pakman says indictment fears and DeSantis could derail Trump in 2024, but warns it’s too early to write off the former president.

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 polling 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.