-Is the 2024 Republican presidential primary already over? If you just look at the polls, you’d be forgiven for thinking so. Consider the state of the states: Several polls published last week showed former President Donald Trump leading in Iowa (with 42 percent to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s 19 percent and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott’s 9 percent), New Hampshire (at 50 percent versus DeSantis at 11 and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy at 10 percent) and South Carolina (at 48 percent versus 14 percent for both DeSantis and Scott). And in national polls, Trump currently has the support of 50 percent of GOP primary voters1 — a slide of 2 percentage points since last Wednesday’s GOP primary debate, but still a commanding lead over his opponents.
Yet despite these dominant margins, our study of the history of primary polling suggests that it’s still too early to completely write off Trump’s competitors. Here at FiveThirtyEight, we are big believers in the predictive power of early election polling — where it is warranted. While we have found that early national polls tend to predict who will win primaries relatively well, there is a ton of volatility that prevents us from providing the type of clarity analysts want from forecasts. At this point in the 1992 Democratic primary, for example, future President Bill Clinton had not even announced his campaign. And at this point in the 2020 Democratic primary campaign, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg was garnering just 8 percent in polls of Iowa; come February, he won 25 percent of the popular vote in the caucuses.
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On a side note, it's obvious by the plot below that DeSantis' comments about Trump making payments to a porn star on March 20th gravely hurt him in the research polls. It can be assumed, if this is the case, that any candidate that shows disregard for Trump will lose GOP voter support. It will be interesting to see how this hypothesis holds up for Christie and DeSantis in the coming weeks, and how it may further boost Ramaswamy heading into the next debate.
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- GOP Polling Aug23.png (209.27 KiB) Viewed 594 times
-Make no mistake: Trump will be hard for his Republican opponents to beat. He has a broad base of support and a smaller but intensely devoted group of followers who think he can do no wrong. But he is not inevitable.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/tr ... n-primary/
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Personally, I think Trumps roots run too deep for him to lose the nomination barring any disqualification. Furthermore, I believe it would benefit Ramaswamy greatly to accept the role of VP if offered by Trump. This could setup success for Ramaswamy in 2028 and beyond to further achieve his vision and goals. Meanwhile, he might be able to influence Trump into building out or implementing the framework of his vision if Trump is elected in 2024 and find common ground with Ramaswamy (which seems to be a rare Trump attribute).
