Ready, Set, Go! It’s officially after Labor Day, the time of year when campaign season, both locally and nationally, kicks into another gear and voters start paying more attention. Think of September as the unofficial opening first lap after months of warmup.
If your name is Donald Trump running for the 2024 Republican nomination, despite ongoing legal battles, things are looking pretty good right now heading into the fall. If your name is anything other than Trump, it’s a time of reflection and recalculating as campaigns must now decide how to spend their money and time.
According to new bombshell poll numbers from the Wall Street Journal, Trump is now leading the field by a healthy 46 points, according to Politico:
Donald Trump is dominating the GOP primary field with the support of 59 percent of surveyed voters, according to a Wall Street Journal poll released Saturday.
The former president holds a 46-point lead over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, according to the WSJ, which polled 600 Republican primary voters at the end of August through telephone and web surveys.
The survey found DeSantis down 13 points to Trump in April, before he launched his candidacy, highlighting the governor’s difficulties in attempts to sway Trump voters and reflecting his recent polling troubles elsewhere.
DeSantis’ favorability also fell since the April survey, with the share of respondents that reported a favorable view of him dropping from 84 percent to 70 percent. Trump’s favorability fell from 78 percent to 75 percent between the same two polls.
You read that right. Following Trump’s decision to skip the first GOP debate back in August, his poll numbers have gone up and his rivals have gone down.
Here’s the visual of the entire field as things stand today. Trump’s pulling in nearly two-thirds of the GOP primary electorate while the rest are fighting over table scraps:
DeSantis is doing well as a “second choice” option, and that could serve in a contest like the Iowa caucuses where voters may be forced to make hard choices during the actual vote-wrangling caucus procedure. However, it’s less meaningful in later states like New Hampshire.
While the DC beltway and establishment were a buzz after the first GOP debate, singing the praises of DeSantis and Haley, it seems the rest of the Republican voting base shrugged it off as a sideshow. There were very few punches landed against Trump that voters hadn’t already heard, and no one takes Chris Christie seriously as a candidate, anyway. DeSantis kept his nose clean and out of the fray, Haley had her 15 minutes of fame scolding Ramaswamy, and the rest of the stage faded into obscurity. Doug who?
The winner of the debate remains Donald Trump for choosing not to participate. Given the resulting polling bounce, the chances that Trump steps foot on any future GOP primary debate stage remains slim.
The WSJ poll numbers also signal a stalemate on the question of a Trump-Biden rematch next year:
If the 2024 presidential contest were held today between Trump and Joe Biden, the poll found the two even at 46 percent, with 8 percent saying they were undecided, among a larger survey pool of 1,500 registered voters. Adding in the choice of third-party candidates, the survey has Trump leading Biden 40 percent-39 percent, with the lesser-known third parties collecting single-digit support and 17 percent saying they were undecided.
That’s a large number of undecided voters which isn’t trivial, but it’s also a nod to the fact that Biden remains an incredibly weak incumbent.
A lot can happen between now and the Iowa caucuses, of course, but the nomination is still Trump’s to lose.
