by Frank Holmes, reporter
If you were going to bet on the 2024 presidential election, you’d want to bet on Donald Trump.
That’s the message sent by the latest poll, which shows that Trump still has a strong grasp on the Republican Party a full year after leaving the White House.
Trump blows away all the competition for the Republican presidential nomination—beating his nearest competitor by 45 points!
If the Republican presidential primaries were held today, Trump would wipe the floor with his rivals. He would open up the race with the support of a majority of the GOP—57 percent of respondents picked Trump for 2024 out of an eight candidate field.
The closest competitor was Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who garnered 12 percent support in the Harvard CAPS/Harris poll.
Former Vice President Mike Pence came in a close third, with 11 percent. None of the other five candidates, whom The Hill would not name, broke single digits.
If Trump decides not to run, Gov. DeSantis takes the lead with 30 percent, followed by Pence at 24 percent and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., at 14 percent.
While Trump hasn’t formally announced a run yet, everyone in his orbit has strongly hinted that he will throw his hat in the ring after the midterms. Doing so would probably clear the field, since many candidates have promised they would not run against him.
The demand for political drama has stoked rumors of a falling-out between Trump and DeSantis. However, the former president put these rumors bed during a recent interview on Fox News.
Fox host Sean Hannity said that a friend of his asked DeSantis face-to-face about having bad blood with his state’s most famous resident.
“He said, ‘Absolutely not! It’s total B.S.’ Is he right?” Hannity asked Trump.
“He is right,” Trump said. “It’s totally fake news… I agree with him on that 100 percent. I have a very good relationship with Ron and intend to have it for a very long time.”
Trump went on to say that DeSantis, whom he endorsed during the governor’s race, has “done a really terrific job in Florida.”
Take a look —
Trump just MURDERED the media narrative that there's tension between him and Gov. DeSantis by calling it "TOTALLY FAKE NEWS" pic.twitter.com/XPezBHSkcy
— Danny De Urbina (@dannydeurbina) January 21, 2022
Ironically, the move by Twitter and Facebook to ban the former president from reaching his followers through their social media platforms—allegedly because they think he might incite a riot—may have helped Donald Trump’s political fortunes.
“Trump is also starting out reasonably well positioned for the general but he seems to be benefiting by being out of the limelight,” Mark Penn, a former Clinton pollster who’s now the co-director of the Harvard CAPS/Harris poll, told The Hill.
Penn added there’s “no telling what would happen if he steps back in.”
Even so, Gov. DeSantis may still be tempted to test the waters against the 45th president. DeSantis is the only Republican to have beaten Trump in any kind of poll for the 2024 GOP presidential nod. DeSantis beat Trump in a poll taken last June at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver.
DeSantis, who has a good reputation among conservatives for his solid record in the governor’s mansion, may not have the name recognition of President Trump, who has been famous since at least the 1980s.
Trump not only wins GOP support, but several polls show he’d win a head-to-head rematch with Joe Biden in 2024. Trump leads Biden by 5.4 percentage points, according to an average of multiple polls taken by Real Clear Politics. A new Politico poll also shows Biden losing to a generic, unnamed Republican by nine points.
There’s even more bad news for Biden: Only 32% of Democrats in the Harvard poll say they support Biden, the incumbent president of their own party, in 2024.
No sitting president who faced a serious primary challenger within his own party has ever been re-elected.
If Biden doesn’t run for re-election, Democrats are undecided between Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders.
“Trump is starting out in a fairly strong position with Republicans, while Biden and Harris have surprisingly little support among Democrats for incumbents,” said Penn.
One thing is certain: Biden should be scared of whoever he faces in 2024—in either party.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”