Everyone in the Republican world got a jolt from the WSJ poll over the weekend showing Trump extending his lead over the other candidates. But how solid is that lead?
We’ve seen polls in Iowa showing Trump leading the pack, but in overall favorability, he ranked third. Does that mean that, when caucus-goers begin reshuffling toward more viable candidates, Trump stands to gain less than his closest rivals, like DeSantis, who outrank him on overall favorability?
My sense throughout the campaign is that the Trump conundrum for other candidates is a really delicate one. Republicans are open to criticisms of Trump, but they don’t want any of those criticisms to aid or comfort their partisan enemies. Some leaked polling suggests that Republicans love it when candidates attack Covid lockdowns, but they blanch when you attack “Trump’s Covid lockdowns.”
It’s possible that this problem is too delicate for any candidate to solve, and that disconnecting Republican primary voters from Trump is like disabling an especially volatile bomb that’s currently underneath the chassis of a car off-roading near the Grand Canyon. You’re just too likely to pull the wrong wire and blow yourself up, or take too long and go over a cliffside.
But at the same time, it’s easy to imagine Iowa or New Hampshire giving someone a chance to square up on Trump, if only to create some drama, or to punish Trump for not campaigning as hard as he did in 2015 and 2016.