By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, August 22, 2023
If it “got late early” in the majestic old Yankee
Stadium, with its long shadows, as the famous Yogi Berra quote had it, it’s
gotten late before about the fourth inning in the Republican presidential race.
In 2016, Donald Trump loved to pump out the results of
unreliable online polls that showed him trouncing his competitors by ridiculous
margins.
Now he doesn’t need to bother with the shoddy polls; he
can do the same thing with blue-chip media polls. The new national CBS poll has
him leading second-place Ron DeSantis by 46 points, 62–16. The latest Fox News
poll had a more modest 37-point Trump lead. (Vivek Ramaswamy is third in both
surveys, at 7 and 11 percent respectively.)
It’s sometimes said that Trump is the de facto incumbent
in the race, and indeed these are the kind of numbers you’d expect of a sitting
president who is sweeping marginal opponents to the side as he secures his
party’s renomination.
The top-line results aren’t that different from those in
the primacy race — such as it is — on the Democratic side. The Fox poll has Joe
Biden beating Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 64 to 17, with Marianne Williamson at 9.
Is there a mercy rule in presidential politics?
Trump could be forgiven for looking at his opponents and
seeing a highly touted governor whose campaign has steadily sunk in national
polls as he has shed staff and fired a campaign manager; a young,
smooth-talking entrepreneur who isn’t a threat to him but who is helpfully
soaking up some share of the non-Trump vote; a sunny senator who has made some
gains but certainly hasn’t broken out; a former vice president who is hated by
MAGA (for all the wrong reasons); a former governor who is a gifted political pugilist
but is unpopular in the party; and a bunch of others whose names he doesn’t
necessarily need to know.
What’s not to like?
Even if one of the candidates surges and sweeps up all
the current non-Trump vote, there’s simply not enough of it to get to 50 right
now. No wonder Trump is talking as if the race is over, the Trump super PAC is
running spots hitting Biden, and Trump says there’s no need for him to show up
at the Republican-primary debates.
The cockiness could well be justified, but a sense of
inevitability can be a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it disheartens the
opposition and communicates strength; on the other, it can fade into a
high-handed sense of taking the voters for granted.
And Trump still has to win Iowa, where his support is a
little softer. After all the talk of having the election stolen from him in
2020 and the chest-beating about his dominance now, a defeat there — in a clean
process overseen by fellow Republicans — would be a stinging setback that might
change the dynamic everywhere else.
The new NBC News/Des Moines Register poll has
Trump at 42 percent, with DeSantis at 19 percent and South Carolina’s Senator
Tim Scott at 9 percent. That’s a substantial lead, but both DeSantis and Scott
have large portions of the electorate saying they are their second choice or
that they are actively considering them. Both also have high favorability
ratings comparable to Trump’s.
In the portion of the survey conducted prior to the
Georgia indictment, his lead was 38–20 over DeSantis — again, sizable, but not
nearly enough to say he has this thing put away, not in the middle of August.
Iowa can break late. Former Pennsylvania senator Rick
Santorum, who won Iowa in 2012, didn’t really start moving until late December.
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who won four years earlier, started his
upward march around November. If someone is going to replicate this kind of
climb, the big upward move may still be months away.
So it looks late out there, no doubt, and has for some
time, but it’s not over.
No comments:
Post a Comment