It’s Later Than It Seems in the Republican Primary

A new national poll of the GOP presidential primary released by Monmouth on Wednesday indicates that the only thing really standing between Donald Trump and the 2024 nomination is Ron DeSantis.

In a four-way ballot test, Monmouth shows Donald Trump at 44 percent, Ron DeSantis at 36 percent, Mike Pence at 7 percent, and Nikki Haley at 6 percent.

In a three-way race without Pence, it’s more competitive: Trump 45 percent, DeSantis 40 percent, and Haley 9 percent.

But in a three-way race without DeSantis, it’s an absolute blowout: Trump 67 percent, Haley 15 percent, Pence 11 percent. In other words, two out of three DeSantis voters prefer Trump to Haley or Pence, while one out of three DeSantis voters prefers Haley or Pence to Trump.

Yes, it’s early in the 2024 GOP presidential primary. We are five months away from the first debate and ten months away from votes being cast. At this point in the 2016 cycle, Donald Trump was three months away from descending that escalator and announcing his candidacy.

But it’s also a lot later than it might seem to those pointing to 2008, 2012, and 2016 as cautionary tales about how the race ended up looking nothing like the early polls.

The 2008, 2012, and 2016 GOP races kicked off with candidates who were not very well known to Republican voters nationwide. They were genuinely wide-open races. The 2024 primary is fundamentally unlike any of those races — it is fundamentally unlike any race of the modern era of presidential primaries — because it features the recently defeated former president as the front-runner.

Is there anyone in America who doesn’t have a firm opinion about Donald Trump, the singular personality who has dominated American politics for eight consecutive years? If 67 percent of GOP primary voters are telling pollsters in March 2023 that they prefer Trump to Pence or Haley, is there good reason to think that a large portion of that 67 percent would change their minds if they got to know the former vice president or former U.N. ambassador better?

It’s not just one poll that suggests we’re farther along in the 2024 GOP contest than it might seem. As Nate Cohn wrote in February:

The leader in polls conducted in the first quarter of the year before the primaries has won the nomination more often than not in the modern primary era, dating to the 1970s. Even when front-runners lose, they usually succumb to another candidate with significant support in the early polls.

Put it together, and there’s a decent relationship between the early polling and the outcome of the presidential primaries — a relationship that bodes well for Mr. DeSantis. (Higher-quality surveys have tended to show less support for Donald Trump.)

It’s easy to see all the different ways in which DeSantis could flame out. We won’t really know how he holds up in the spotlight until he steps onto a debate stage. DeSantis’s coalition of MAGA and non-MAGA Republicans could be hard to manage, as demonstrated by his recent maneuverings on the issue of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Trump probably has a rock-solid floor of about 30 percent of the Republican Party, and DeSantis will probably need an early win in at least one of the first three major contests (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina). If DeSantis simply tries to ape Trump in the primary, that could result in too many voters casting ballots for Haley, Pence, or others in those early states. But he also can’t afford to hemorrhage his current supporters to Trump.

The Trump–DeSantis race has barely just begun, and it’s easy to see how DeSantis could lose. But it is very difficult to see how DeSantis’s fading results in the 2024 GOP presidential nomination going to anyone other than Trump.