With less than a year to go into the primary campaign, Donald Trump is managing to maintain his tight control of the Republican Party and, as he did in his first candidacy, he manages to keep competitors at bay, even those who are just a few weeks they had more integers to rise as an alternative. Although his relatives and acolytes received a dispassionate reception at a conservative conference that took place in Washington this weekend, the president received all kinds of cheers and, above all, he obtained the majority support of the participants in a traditional non-binding vote between the assistants.
According to the speeches at this conference, not only by Trump, but also by his internal rivals, confirmed and supposed, the party is dealing with an increasingly evident and for some, uncomfortable reality: Trump prevails because the other competitors enter all within the Trump camp itself, while the most centrist Republicans, or with different ideas, are falling over the obvious that the conservative base continues to sympathize overwhelmingly with the former president. He has lost the popular vote in the last two elections and the electoral college in the most recent against Joe Biden.
For example, in traditional Conservative Political Action Conference voting, Trump garnered 62% of the vote among those in attendance, a slight increase from last year. The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, considered one of the main alternatives to Trump, obtained 20%, followed by the one who was Trump’s ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, with 3%. At the moment, only Trump and Haley have announced that they are running in the primaries, but both former diplomatic chief Mike Pompeo and former Vice President Mike Pence, who has distanced himself, are considered candidates, due to the publication of their memoirs or a succession of rallies. of Trump since the looting of the Capitol in 2021.
Backlash to Trump’s critical wing
The Republican wing critical of Trumpism suffered a major setback Sunday when Larry Hogan announced that he was not running in the primary. Hogan was a popular governor of Maryland between 2015 and 2023, and rose as one of the Republicans most critical of the former president, especially after the looting of the Capitol by a mob that refused to recognize the result of the 2020 elections. Hogan’s message in his resignation was clear: it would be ideal to find an alternative consensus candidate to Trump: “The stakes are too high to risk being part of another multiple fight that could end up helping Trump regain the nomination.”
Few are those who dare to raise their voices, and those who do have little to lose. One of them is John Bolton, who was George W. Bush’s ambassador to the UN and then Trump’s National Security Adviser for a few months. He says: “I think the priority now has to be removing Trump from the nomination process as soon as possible and I think it’s very clear that the mistake the candidates made in 2016 was going against each other instead of going against Trump.” ».
Aside from the conservative congressional vote, the polls with more scientific methods all portend more or less the same thing: Trump victory in the primaries, likely defeat in the general election, especially if it is against Joe Biden again.
A Fox News poll released last week maintains that Trump would beat out 15 other potential candidates with the 43% of the votes. a, again, follows in second place with 28%. No one else touches even 10%. Another Quinnipiac University poll, published last week, shows that Trump beats 13 other rivals with 42% of the vote, while DeSantis improves to 36% support. Haley and Pence received 5 and 4 percent support, respectively, ranking a distant third and fourth.
Trump himself delved into the party divide in his speech at the conservative conference, saying Saturday: “We used to have a Republican Party run by ‘geeks,’ neoconservatives, globalists, fanatics of open borders and foolsBut we’re never going back to that game. People are tired of those who only have name Republicans and globalists.
It’s not all good news
It’s not all good news for Trump. This edition of the conservative conference registered less attendance than previous years. His son, Donald Junior, and his partner, Kimberly Guilfoyle, gave aperitif speeches to nearly empty rooms to a chilly reception.
And if independents who usually vote Republican are added to the polls in the primaries, the support of the former president is diluted. A national poll by the Marist Poll released last month found his favorability rating among Republicans and conservative-leaning independents combined fell to the lowest recorded by that poll since September 2016: 68%.
The same poll reveals that 54% of them believe that the party has a much better chance of retaking the White House in 2024 with someone other than Trump. Furthermore, there are very few surveys showing Trump with more than 50% support of his primary party base, even if he does not need an absolute majority to prevail.
The Democratic field does not have so many problems. Although there are many internal critics of President Biden, he has no strong competitors in his party’s primaries. For now, the White House maintains that the president will run again despite his advanced age and the fact that he would be 82 at the start of a possible second term.
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism