By Chris Suellentrop Politics Opinion Editor

November 6, 2023

Did anyone think, when Donald Trump left office as president, that he would be a coin flip from the presidency in November 2023, one year from Election Day 2024?

That’s where we are. Trump has received nearly 60 percent support as the next Republican presidential nominee in national polls of GOP voters. Early-primary polls haven’t been much different: The former president garnered 43 percent of the vote in the most recent Iowa Poll, long considered the best measurement of caucus-goer sentiment. In New Hampshire, he’s approaching, and sometimes reaching, 50 percent in polls. The same is true in South Carolina. And if you look ahead to the general election, Trump is running even — or better — with President Biden in public opinion surveys, including in swing states.

How did we get here? What have Trump’s prospective rivals, in both parties, done wrong so far? What should they do differently if they want to stop him? I asked eight Post Opinions columnists to discuss, over email, why the 2024 presidential campaign has gone this way so far, and whether anything can be done to alter Trump’s political trajectory.

Perry Bacon: On the Republican side, I don’t think anyone has really done anything wrong. Trump is an extremely formidable candidate in a Republican primary. Nearly all the voters cast ballots for him at least twice (the 2016 and 2020 general elections). Many voted for him in the 2016 primaries as well. DeSantis seemed strong to many in the press, myself included, and GOP donors/elected officials/pundits.

But I don’t think Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence or the other Republican candidates have failed in a real way. Trump is just really popular with Republicans. If Barack Obama could have run in the 2020 Democratic primaries, he would have won easily, too.

On the Democratic side, I wonder if the wrong choice was made. In late 2022 and early 2023, poll after poll showed a clear majority of voters, including many Democrats, were wary of Biden’s age. That left the Democratic Party — its donors, elected officials, powerful groups, ex-officials — with three choices: 1. Stick with Biden; 2. Push Biden not to run for a second term and have an open primary that Kamala D. Harris would have been the narrow favorite to win; 3. Push for Biden not to run for a second term but have lots of top figures in the party (Obama, Pelosi, the Clintons) endorse, say, a Whitmer/Warnock or Klobuchar/Booker ticket to try to guarantee Harris didn’t win.

No. 3 would have been hard to pull off. I think No. 2 could have resulted in either Harris demonstrating strong electoral skills in winning the primary, or another person winning, and either would have been a good outcome.

But Biden wanted to run again and there wasn’t a real effort to discourage that. So we are at No. 1.

I think the assumption from Democratic Party officials (one shared by me) in 2021-2022 was that Biden’s unpopularity was largely about high inflation. But inflation has plunged over the past year, and Biden’s numbers haven’t increased at all. Biden’s big problem seems to be age and a related lack of enthusiasm around young voters in particular.

I don’t want to overread these polls, though. Lots of political experts, including some Democratic operatives and pollsters, were predicting a huge red wave in 2022. Didn’t happen. If we are in September 2024 and Trump is saying radical, undemocratic things each day, I suspect a lot of voters will still prefer Biden (and a potential Harris presidency) to Trump. So I don’t know if the polls right now are predictive of the environment this time next year. I would bet on Biden in a Biden vs. Trump campaign.

But as someone very afraid of a Trump second term, I wish the polls were not this close.

Jason Willick: I don’t know what, if anything, could have stopped Trump’s political recovery. But here are a few things that haven’t helped:

• The Manhattan district attorney’s decision to bring criminal charges against Trump for payments to an alleged mistress. Many experts doubt the reasoning behind those charges, which the past DA declined to bring.
• Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision — under political pressure and after two-and-a-half years of hesitation — to indict Trump for 2020 election interference at a time when his trial will dominate the Republican primary season.
• The trial now underway in Colorado to kick Trump off the state ballot.

DeSantis has been a weaker candidate than I expected, but he would have had to be very, very strong to beat the former president under conditions of election-season liberal lawfare of this magnitude and intensity, which we know tends to dominate news coverage and bind Republican voters to Trump. If Trump is the nominee, court proceedings like these will have given him an assist.

Democrats have no responsibility to behave in a way that bails out non-Trump Republican hopefuls, of course. But Democrats also had no responsibility to bail out Kevin McCarthy as House speaker, and the result of their decision to let moderate Republicans stew in their own juices is the more-partisan Speaker Mike Johnson. So, this is political reality.

Jim Geraghty: Since the beginning of all this, roughly half the Republicans nationally — or at least the ones who answer a phone and talk to pollsters — indicated they wanted to renominate Trump, come hell, high water, or four separate criminal indictments. Beating Trump would have required a personality who could unite and excite every anti-Trump, Trump-skeptical, or Trump-exhausted voter within the GOP.

I think it’s now clear that DeSantis, who entered this primary with a slew of advantages, pursued an erroneous theory of the race. DeSantis surveyed the landscape and decided to run as a semi-Trump — populist and pugnacious in style and echoing Trump about Russia and Ukraine being just a “territorial dispute,” but also a new face who emphasized he believed in getting things done. A bit like the now-departed candidacy of former vice president Pence, DeSantis’s attempt at a middle path is leaving him with the worst of both worlds — he’s not Trumpy enough for the Trump fans, but he’s too Trumpy for Republicans who are tired of the Trump style, who are starting to gravitate to Nikki Haley.

Winning the GOP presidential nomination against Trump requires telling and showing Republican primary voters how and why he is bad for them — how his promises rarely pan out, how his accomplishments were exaggerated, how his flaws are real and consequential, and how his claim to be “a fighter” mostly means generating angry rants on Truth Social rife with misspellings and random capitalization. The message had to be, “Despite all his big talk, Trump can’t get you where you want to go.”

There are an enormous number of grass-roots Republicans who choose to believe that the pre-Trump GOP were a bunch of losers — but in early 2015, the year Trump showed up, the party held 54 Senate seats, 247 House of Representatives seats, 31 governor’s mansions and the highest number of majorities in the state legislatures in the party’s history since 1928. These same voters believe that only Trump is a “winner” who knows how to beat Democrats, never mind that he and his like-minded freak-show candidates led the party to defeats in 2018, 2020 and 2022. A non-Trump GOP presidential candidate needed to convince primary voters that the point of a president is to alter policy and run the executive branch, not to say and do things on television and social media that entertain them.

Right now, it appears, as the television show “True Detective” posited, “time is a flat circle; everything we’ve ever done, or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again.” Trump is a heavy favorite for the GOP nomination and those opposed to him are unable or unwilling to unite behind one alterative. DeSantis and Haley appear perfectly happy to play the roles of Ted Cruz and John Kasich this time around.

Ramesh Ponnuru: In late February, Trump led DeSantis, then as now his nearest Republican rival in national polling, but that lead was not intimidating and he was below 50 percent. Polls then and now have also shown that a sizable fraction of his supporters are open to other candidates rather than being dead-set on him. Because I would much rather Trump not win the nomination, I am clinging to the hope that the Republican voters who weren’t for him back then might go back to favoring someone else, and bring along other Republicans who look favorably on him but have not made support for him part of their identity. That hope is increasingly wan, but it is not extinguished.

The Republicans I’m talking about — the ones who look favorably on Trump but aren’t part of his core support — dislike any number of Trump traits, but they put a lot of credits on his ledger. They think he had many accomplishments as president, that he delivered on issues important to them, and that he has been unfairly treated by his enemies. You can agree or disagree with these views, or think them exaggerated, but they have rational bases. (Speaking of the excesses of his enemies: I think it’s no accident that Trump had a steep ascent when Bragg announced his dubious prosecution; and I think its weakness affected the reception of subsequent prosecutions.)

Many of these voters also think that Trump was cheated out of a second term in 2020. His core contentions from November 2020 through January 2021 — about hacked voting machines and the like — have always been lurid fantasies unconstrained by actual evidence. But he succeeded in creating a climate of opinion in the Republican Party in which bringing up the fact that he lost the vote and then tried to stay in office is somehow in poor taste.

The former president’s Republican opponents, whatever else they did, needed to chip away at those Trump assets. That doesn’t mean they needed to call him names. They needed to say: “Yes, there were accomplishments, but there could have been more with a Republican president who had impulse control. Yes, his enemies have often acted badly, but he has often been his own worst enemy. And his weaknesses cost him the 2020 election. Because he cannot fix his broken character, he instead denies he lost.”

The downside of a message such as this is that it would require challenging some widely held views among Republican primary voters. But if those views are left unchallenged — if Trump was a successful president who might well have won reelection — then why not give him the nomination again?

It isn’t crazy to renominate Joe Biden

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Jim Geraghty: On the other side, it’s not entirely irrational for Democrats to look at 2024 and conclude that renominating Biden is their best bet to preventing a Trump restoration. After all, Biden beat Trump last time, and that was before Trump added Jan. 6 to his résumé of ignobility. The problem is that the Biden of late 2023 looks, sounds and acts a lot older and slower than the Biden of just a year or two ago, and he’s going to look, sound and act even older in autumn 2024.

The problem is not merely that most Americans don’t think Biden will be a good president at the end of his second term, when he will be 86 years old. No, the problem is that just 34 percent think Biden will actually finish his second term. Many Americans perceive Biden as having one foot in the grave already.

In theory, what Democrats want is the Biden policies and worldview in a younger, healthier body — but that’s a good description of Dean Phillips, Minnesota Congressman and last-minute presidential candidate, and so far Phillipsmania has yet to sweep the country. In practice, if you wanted to wrest the 2024 Democratic nomination from Biden, you needed to be much better known than Phillips, have started months ago and be willing to be blunt. Lots of Democrats are afraid that Biden is too old to effectively serve for another four years, but very few Democratic officials will come out and say it.

The Democratic message in 2024 is likely to be, “Yeah, our guy is really old, but you can’t take your chances on another four years of that maniac, right, America?” And the Republican message is going to be “Yeah, our guy is a maniac, but you loved the pre-covid economy and you can’t take your chances on that geriatric fossil, right?”

Ruth Marcus: I have to confess to a massive failure of imagination — or perhaps a willful need to believe otherwise — but I never thought, when Trump left office, that we would be back in the position in which we find ourselves now: that he is poised to become the GOP nominee and has a more than decent shot at being elected president. Blame to go around here, but we can reach back to the original sin — thank you (not!) Sen. Mitch McConnell — of Republicans refusing to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial on the grounds that he was no longer president, and that the criminal justice system could handle the rest.

That makes it a little hard to stomach Jason’s pointing to the pending prosecutions as a contributing factor, although I do agree with Jason about the weakness of the Bragg case in New York. For what it’s worth, I don’t think the indictments and civil case have significantly helped Trump — his voters were already supporting him, and I don’t see significant numbers who have flocked to him because he is beleaguered by supposedly partisan prosecutors. But they certainly haven’t dislodged any support, and it’s hard to believe at this point that they will, even in the event of a conviction.

This is a piece of a larger, long-standing failure on the part of Republicans — including the current crop of contenders, Chris Christie excepted — to stand up to Trump. I take Perry’s point that Trump is massively popular with voters and would be a formidable primary candidate no matter what. But if more Republican candidates during the primary campaign had taken on Trump directly, if they hadn’t simply hoped others would do the deed for them, would things have been different? Probably not, but where are we — where are those candidates — now?

As to Democrats, I also think the die was cast long ago, even before the 2016 election. Biden is a flawed candidate, and we’ll never know what would have transpired had he decided not to run again, but he made the rational (if also self-interested) calculation that the alternative was internecine warfare and a Democratic loss. I don’t think that was wrong then, and there is certainly not much that can be done now. I think Jim’s formulation of the race is pretty spot on — and not comforting for Democrats. If anything, the intraparty tensions over Israel-Palestine are only exacerbating preexisting problems.

That’s enough gloom for now.

Perry Bacon: In the GOP primary, I think Trump has pretty broad support in the party and will win no matter what, barring some major development legally. But if all of the other candidates dropped out this week and endorsed Haley, who has emerged as the strongest of the alternatives, that would be interesting. If Haley had the party’s non-Trumpers clearly behind her and spending months boosting her, that would be different than what happened during the 2015-2016 campaign or now.

I think the Democrats have to make the campaign less about voting for Biden and more about voting against Trump/Mike Johnson/MAGA/abortion bans. And they have to make a President Harris seem a reasonable prospect for voters who are convinced that Biden is too old for the job. In other words, they should be thinking about how to make this election less about the two candidates and more about the two parties.

Karen Tumulty: This is going to be a critical 10 weeks. Maybe the final flicker of hope that the Republican nomination will go to anyone but Trump.

Everything is riding on Iowa, to a degree I can’t recall seeing before. If Trump cannot be stopped there, it is hard to imagine it happening anywhere else. Christie had thought New Hampshire, where independents can vote in the GOP primary, would be the place where his anti-Trump message could resonate, but he’s running fourth there. Haley’s home state of South Carolina probably won’t move into her camp, unless she can make believers out of them by doing well elsewhere. (There, we see a somewhat similar situation to Obama in 2008. Voters, notably Black voters in South Carolina, did not swing his direction until he showed he could beat Hillary Clinton in Iowa.) DeSantis has acknowledged he’s putting all his marbles there, because — well, because it’s the only shot he and his super PAC have left.

Megan McArdle: Unfortunately, I fear that the answer to “What now?” lies somewhere between chaos and despair.

Start with the despair: Both parties are virtually locked into bad choices by virtue of their own bad past decisions. The Democrats nominated an old man who looked his years, even in 2020. Now his polls are in the basement while his party is splitting over the war in Gaza. Worse still, he is facing strong economic headwinds from a Federal Reserve determined to clamp down on inflation — which Biden himself helped create by passing a huge and unnecessary stimulus package at the very moment when vaccines were ending the emergency stage of the pandemic.

Normally, the Democrats’ best hope would be to shove this guy aside in favor of someone more compelling — but unfortunately, the most likely replacement is Harris, who was chosen for coalitional box-checking rather than her sparse political talents. She is generally regarded as an even weaker candidate than Biden. As far as I can tell, the only person who thinks Kamala D. Harris could beat Donald Trump is … Kamala D. Harris.

And on the Republican side, there is, of course, Trump, who is, for many reasons, unfit to be president. For many of the same reasons, he is quite unpopular with voters outside the Republican base. Virtually every politician in his own party loathes and despises him — yes, Republicans, even the ones who court your votes with public homages to him. For both electoral and moral reasons, the rest of the party should have banded together and gotten rid of him long ago, but instead they humored his barbarities, his incompetence, his attacks on our civic infrastructure. They thought they could manage him, or else hoped that someone else would come along to do the job for them, sparing them the electoral blowback.

Thanks to their craven waffling, it looks like he will be their nominee, again, despite having lost the last election. Oh, sure, I hold out wistful hopes of a successful Haley insurrection. But I put these in roughly the same category as my hopes of winning the lottery, or writing a best-selling novel.

And so we are trapped in a familiar electoral paradox: It’s hard to imagine any of these badly wounded candidates winning, but it also seems like one of them must.

Now, let’s toss in some chaos: If you look at the Social Security actuarial tables, they suggest about an 11 percent chance that one of these two guys dies in the next year. The real odds are lower than that, since, of course, both are healthy enough to be running for president, which is not true of all men their age. On the other hand, not to be too morbid about it, there’s also a nonzero chance of a debilitating health event that isn’t deadly.

And if you want to get really far out, imagine both of them sidelined by health issues, and the B-team duking it out on the finishing line. (What kind of person will Trump select for vice president, this time around? What kind of person would accept, given how Trump treated the senior members of his first administration?) That scenario is unlikely, to be sure — but not as unlikely as it should be.

I’d like better choices. I’ll settle for voting for Biden. But I fear we might be in for something much wilder, and worse.

Jason Willick: I don’t have much faith in the Haley boomlet that has some hearts aflutter. She can be the candidate for Republicans who don’t like their party’s populist direction. But that’s probably not a majority. As Byron York noted, a large chunk of DeSantis’s supporters, if he dropped out, would go not to Haley but to Trump. I agree with Karen that everything is riding on Iowa — and I think DeSantis has to win it. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds’s planned endorsement just made that possibility slightly less remote.

As for the general election, I think Biden is the narrow favorite, but Trump’s polling is better than it was the last time around, so all indications are that the race will be competitive. Also, the mooted third-party candidacies of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West could have unpredictable effects on the electoral balance — which swing states would they draw the most votes in? As our colleague Chuck Lane has written, a Trump victory might send the United States into a period of sustained protest and unrest, not unlike what was happening in Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before the current war.

Speaking of Israel, this war has clearly created vulnerabilities for Biden because the Israel-Palestine conflict divides the Democratic Party. But a major piece of good news for him came Friday when the leader of Hezbollah suggested he wouldn’t join the war against Israel. If Biden can keep deterring Iran and Hezbollah for a year, he can avoid the United States getting drawn into a Mideast war that would probably divide his party further.

Catherine Rampell: In comic book lore, there are some villains who are able to replicate or steal the superpowers of those they battle.

But is there any supervillain who grows inexorably stronger with any attempt to attack them … or really any turn of events whatsoever?

Asking for a group of pundits attempting to explain the trajectory of a certain politician.

When Trump doesn’t get held accountable for his transgressions, his critics point out, he only gets stronger. But even when political and jurisprudential forces do attempt to hold him accountable — via impeachment, indictment, yet more indictments, even an occasional jury verdict or other judicial ruling against him — he grows stronger, too.

Like Sebastian Shaw, of the Marvel universe, Trump absorbs kinetic energy, such that any punch that appears to land upon him only enhances his power. But unlike Sebastian Shaw, or Superman’s Doomsday or other fictional foes, neither fighting nor ignoring him can weaken him.

Commentators and strategists have struggled to account for this political superpower. This complicates any attempted plan to keep him from another presidential nomination, because seemingly every approach backfires.

So I’m not sure what comes next, except to assume that any one-off attempt to curb his influence or reduce his profile will probably fail. At one time I might have said that some sort of broad coalition of bipartisan institutionalists might be able to defeat him if they joined forces.

But it turns out in real life, unlike in the comics, people are relatively unwilling to set aside their differences or personal ambitions to defeat a common threat. The best we can hope for is for fickle voters to show up a year from now and exercise what modest powers they have.

source https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/06/trump-winning-2024-polls-reasons/