Good News For Donald Trump and Only Trump

I’m a big believer in following polling trends and polling averages. The individual poll numbers are meaningless, but the trends can tell us much. When polls head in a direction, we may not know the actual measure, but we know the way the wind is blowing. The polling average helps us see the direction.

In 2022, Republican pollsters attempted to game the polling trends and averages. Media polling accurately captured the trend line of a shift to the Democrats. Many of us looked to Trafalgar and other Republican polling to correct what we perceived as a media bias. But those were the misleading polls. The shift to the Democrats in media polling turned out to be correct and those who ignored the GOP polling firms had a better picture of the direction of the 2022 midterm than those (myself included) who took into account the GOP polling.

Well, fast forward to right now. Yes, the election is a good ways away, but it is notable that the Real Clear Politics polling average currently has Donald Trump ahead of Joe Biden. That includes media polling from the Economist and Harris polling. Yes, it is only six-tenths of a point and yes when you take out the online polls and focus on pollster phone calls you can see a clear trend for Biden, but the overall average benefits Trump.

Likewise, the same polling average has Biden beating Ron DeSantis, though only by a point.

This is all good news for Donald Trump and it comes as every primary poll shows Trump still ahead of his primary rivals outside the margin of error.

DeSantis had a stellar fundraising picture. Trump and his Super PAC combined raised $35 million in three months. DeSantis raised $20 million in six weeks and, when added to his Super PAC, he’s around $150 million.

But there is growing sentiment among Republicans that DeSantis is not clicking. His campaign has failed to measurably impact Trump and some party players unaffiliated with any campaign are starting to make Jeb Bush comparisons. I hadn’t wanted to go there, but I’m leaning more and more to DeSantis’s team needing a rethink. DeSantis the Culture Warrior hasn’t moved the needle and he’s so busy selling everyone on what he has done in Florida that he has not really articulated a future looking positive vision for the United States as a whole.

The upside for DeSantis is that there is still time and he has lots of money. The downside is that the longer it takes, the more outsiders are going to start looking askance at other candidates. A real frustration is starting to simmer among some of his core supporters. It hasn’t spilled out much publicly, but that could be coming.

I don’t mean to pick on DeSantis, but he’s the only other candidate with double digit polling and a massive war chest. Concurrently, none of the other candidates have shaken up the race either. Everyone seems to be unable to figure out a way to pull Trump supporters from Trump or get anyone to give them a fresh look. They all seem to want external events to take out Trump and that isn’t happening.

Yes, there is time, but the sand is flowing out of the hourglass. What should cause Republicans discomfort, despite the polling average, is a number that keeps cropping up across polls. Roughly 13% of Republicans say they will not, under any circumstance, vote for Donald Trump.

If that number sounds familiar, it’s because 13% of the GOP really did vote Democrat in 2022, according to the exit polling, not the opinion polling. Despite President Trump’s showing right now, if 13% of the GOP will never vote for him, that puts him at a disadvantage in close swing states like Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona, among others.