This may indeed be the case, but if they kick him out of the nomination, they will lose even bigger and the disaster to the GOP will be even more complete.
If the powers that be force Trump off the ballot, then an significant portion (possibly even a majority) of their base will go ballistic, and it will be open civil war within the party. The Trump cultists will invent a wide array of conspiracy theories about the remaining GOP, and in all likelihood will run off to found their own MAGA party. Dooming both themselves and the GOP, and leaving the Dems an easy march to victory across the country.
Even in your worst case scenario where Trump comes across as a demented drooling Nazi it is much better for the GOP to stick with Trum accept the 2024 loss and all the stain that comes with being associated with Trump, but hope that being a two time loser will cause Trump to lose his luster with the base and the party can start edging back towards sanity over the next few cycles.
Those people who are still angry over the lockdowns are going to vote for DJT just as they did in 2016 and 2020. They aren’t reachable voters and they’re dead to us. As I recall, lockdown orders came from governors and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmore did pretty well in 2022 despite the right wing conniption fits over the 2020 lockdowns. It’s a dead issue.
So, the trope that Trump’s support increased after the indictments and after the Jan 6th hearings is false. His support may have gone up among Republicans, but that is because fewer and fewer people are identifying as Republican. You know the ones that Trump and Marge say should be expelled from MAGA? The ones voting for Haley, or donating to her? After Trump warned that anyone donating to Haley would be forever banned from MAGA, she got a flood of donations. Half of Haley voters in Iowa said they would vote for Biden over Trump. A significant percent of Republican voters have indicated that they will not vote for Trump if he is convicted of a crime before the election.
MAGA has been distilling itself into a toxic swill, ejecting and shunning any conservative that doesn’t toe the line. They have purposefully reduced their own numbers to just the remaining MAGA cult. It’s about 27%, which is about the same number of them that still supported W after he left. The crazification factor. They’ve cooked themselves down into a noxious demi glace of pure hate and rage. So of course, among those remaining his support has gone up. Don’t mistake that with overall support. I’m not worried about general election polls because number 1, who is paying for these polls, and number 2, how many polls have been run but not released to the public, and what did they say?
I hope this doesn’t come off as the ravings of a liberal lunatic but I think some part of Republican leadership would not be dismayed by Trump’s sudden demise.
The smart ones know that a party in the throes of a downward spiral will need to come to grips with the country’s changing demographics and the repair efforts cannot begin as long as Trump is hogging the news cycle day after day.
I’m not supporting Trump, I’m just explaining what I see. I think it’s amazing that the same people who think that vaccines are a globalist plot to kill them still support Trump, who was one of the early champions of the vaccine. And they hate Fauci, but it was Trump who deferred to him. They hate lockdowns, but they started under Trump.
That’s why I said ‘who is right’ doesn’t matter. Objectively, of course it matters. But to many on the right, they are far past argument. They feel threatened and wronged, and Trump is the guy who ‘fights’. That’s all they care about now. Every time he takes damatge from the left, his support gets stronger.
The problem here is, dementia is a slow process. Barring some kind of major health crisis, I have no doubt that he will continue to decline, but if what he’s doing now hasn’t crossed the “hilariously demented” line for his supporters, I don’t think another 6 or 9 months will put him over that line.
The only non-fatal health problem that would do that would be some kind of stroke, that impairs him enough that, even though he’s alive, he’s just unable to stand up and give speeches. If that happens, he’s out, and his opinion about that won’t matter, because he won’t be physically capable of communicating his opinions.
Anything less than that, and his supporters will convince themselves he’s still the “stable genius” they voted for the last time. Any time he says something completely deranged that no one understands, they’ll convince themselves that the problem is that they are too stupid to understand his cleverness.
General election polls are done by the major news outlets, universities, and a variety of independent pollsters. Fivethirtyeight, now part of ABC News, rates 277 polling firms. So many would seem to be a ridiculous superfluousness, but it gets worse: 362 other firms don’t get a rating, although they do get other scores. 538 is tough: only 23 get the highest, three-star, rating. (The methodology is explained here; the actual methodology is all its technicality is linked to on that page.) A summary of poll results is found on this page. Another summary of polls is found on RealClearPolitics.com - their pollster scorecard is here.
The campaigns and the candidates do their own polling on top these public polls, of course. Why spend the extra money when dozens do it for you? To get to the fine print, tease out which policies work best, which attacks get the most support, what specific groups in specific locations think, and all the other info that help them plan. Campaign polls are rarely released, but who is paying for them is obvious.
And yet people make up their minds about who to vote for very late in campaign; many don’t do so until confronted by a ballot. Given that, it’s remarkable how good polling continues to be overall. Their consensus for South Carolina has Trump leading 2 to 1 and that is what’s going to happen, no artificiality required.
So you just ignored what I said right above this? The GOP cannot win a general election with just MAGA. Yes, Trump is highly supported within MAGA. MAGA is a small percentage of the country that is currently booting out anyone that isn’t 100% loyal to MAGA. That’s why you see Trumps approval going up among Republicans. Anyone at all moderate has been kicked out of the party. Republicans cannot win a primary without Trump and they cannot win a general election with him. The GOP has lost every election since 2016 with him as the focal point (I know they won the House in 2022, barely, but I think that was actually worse for them than had they lost barely). It doesn’t matter how mad 27% of the country is, that is nowhere near enough to win a presidential election. Trump is poison to moderates and independents now. These red flags are all over the early primary results. Essentially an incumbent is barely getting %50 of his own party. That is pathetic. Biden got a higher percentage in NH and he wasn’t even on the ballet.
Currently, his favorable/unfavorable ratio is lower among the general public right now than at any time since Feb 2021. Then, he had 38.8% favorability and 56.9% unfavorable. Today, he’s at 42.9% favorable, and only 51.8% unfavorable. Half the gap he had when he left office, despite the J6 hearings and all the lawsuits. Or maybe because of them.
The J6 hearings were held from June to October 2022. Look at that chart of favorability and see if you can see any change. It looks like his favorability held all through the hearings, but may have started to go down a bit after they were over. They have been going up again all through the period where he’s been hit with all the lawsuits and charges.
That’s not MAGA doing that. He always had the MAGA people. This is other Republicans and some Democrats and independents moving towards Trump.
The other possibility is that Trump is gaining in favorability because the public has soured on Joe Biden, and he’s seen as being the only alternative. Biden’s numbers now look like Trump’s in Feb 21.
I wish Trump were gone. Normalcy will not return until he is no longer a candidate for office. But the numbers are clear: His favorables have been going up and his unfavorables going down, and both numbers are now better than the incumbent’s, so no one is looking to get rid of him.
He’s currently beating Haley 64% to 32% in South Carolina, her home state. She was the last hope. This is all done.
This is the tack I believe that Haley’s most well-heeled backers are taking.
I think Cervaise had it right up in post #83 above – money can’t buy votes but it can buy messaging. And in supporting Haley right now, the message is not necessarily “Vote for Haley as the GOP nominee!” or even “Please! Anyone but Trump!” The message they’re buying, obliquely, by allowing Haley to remain in the race is: “Donald Trump is a decidedly vulnerable candidate in the general election – and we’ll be proven right in the end”.
IMO, Trump WILL win the nomination. He’ll have some headwinds initially, but once he has it more or less locked up, the rest of the GOP will fold like a house of wet cards. They will rally behind him with more or less enthusiasm, backtrack, reinvent history, and do whatever it takes to park any remaining shred of ethics, decency or morals they may have left.
The GOP “leadership” (such as it is) will excuse every moronic blurts coming out of Trump’s mouth. They will do whatever it takes to lie, re-write history, tell us “well, what Trump really meant was…” and excuse Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior.
The election will be closer than anyone would like, but Biden will win. Trump (and the usual sycophants) will rant and blather about “stolen elections” and try to further tear the country apart. You know, the usual. There will be court challenges up the wazoo, all of which will fail because of a complete and utter lack of evidence. This lack of evidence will not stop the crazies from shouting their lies on the usual media outlets, who will be happy to rake in the dollars.
See my post above. It’s not MAGA driving his rise in the polls.
It’s also wrong. Trump currently has 72.5% support among Republicans. Haley has 17.4%. When Haley drops out, it’ll probably go to 90%.
The latest general election polls on that site also show Trump up on Biden anywhere from +1 to +5 in the general. So right now he’s leading the incumbent and has overwhelm8ng support in his party. No one is getting rid of him.
Perhaps … but didn’t the GOP primary polling percentages fail to be realized in both Iowa and New Hampshire? Didn’t Trump come back to the pack more than the polls shows (albeit getting over 50% each time)?
You would have to define the terms for someone to answer that question. Who is Republican Party leadership, if not Trump himself and whoever he says is the leadership? Rona McDaniel? Mitch McConnell? Mike Johnson? Governs of the large red states like Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis? Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito? Out of all of those, I suspect that the only one who in their secret heart of hearts doesn’t support Trump is Mitch McConnell, and I wouldn’t call him Republican Party leadership at this point.
