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Is the race for the Republican 2024 nomination over before it starts? Former President Donald Trump’s lead over his presumed main competitor — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) — continues to grow, even as Trump faces possible indictment in New York.
But can polls be trusted this far out? Straight Arrow News contributor David Pakman says history suggests early primary polling is not a reliable indicator of who will win a party’s nomination, but the unique circumstances of the 2024 GOP primary certainly favor Trump.
The reality is, it is not uncommon that the leader at this point does not become the party nominee. And we have a number of examples of this even just looking recently. If you look at 2016 … in March of 2015, Donald Trump was not winning Republican nomination polls. But as we know, he eventually became the Republican nominee and the president. If you look at 2008 and the Democratic primary, at the equivalent point, meaning March of 2007, Barack Obama was not winning the Democratic primary polling, but he eventually became the nominee. And also looking at 2008, at this point…it would have been March of 2007, in the Republican primary, Rudy Giuliani was leading the Republican primary polling and as we know, John McCain became the eventual nominee.
Okay. So second part of the question, how often does polling in March of the year before tell us who becomes the nominee? And the answer is, it’s not always that reliable.
And then we get to the third part of this, which is: Is there something special or unique this time around? And the answer is, absolutely. We have a situation that I don’t know if we’ve ever had in the history of the United States, which is, in the Republican primary we have a former president who ran for re-election, lost, and is now running again in a contested Republican primary. I don’t think that that’s ever happened before. And if it has, it is extraordinarily rare.
Those are very different circumstances, which if I had to take a guess, are in the pro-Trump column. And what I mean by that is, even though we can find many instances in history where the March of the year before leader did not become the nominee, the power of previous incumbency and of the bully pulpit — that is, being a former president — does give Donald Trump an advantage that many candidates do not have.
So my position right now is that this really is Trump’s nomination to lose.
