Faced with a historically unpopular president overseeing a weak economy and promoting left-
And the only thing that should matter for Republicans is actually winning it. While there is a sense that Donald Trump has become a frontrunner in the Republican primaries, there is just as much of a sense that he can’t win a general election—not anymore.
Here's the hard truth: If Trump secures the Republican nomination, Joe Biden will be re-elected. But, if Ron DeSantis becomes the nominee, then the Democrats have little to no chance.
How can I be so sure? After all, hot air about 2024 is everywhere, fueled by traditional polling that misinterprets public opinion and misleads people. You can take practically any two polls and find they reach entirely different conclusions.
Why? Because traditional polling is essentially garbage. It asks the wrong, tiny subset of people the wrong questions, receiving answers only from those who desperately want to share—and self-justify—their own outsider opinions. Pollsters then apply “magical math” to make the results not look quite as wrong. Yet polling has been wrong in every election for the last eight years.
All polling has an agenda, which is to promote a particular narrative favored by a news outlet or political campaign—finding the preferred truth in the “data.”
The answer to garbage polling is to stop asking questions to push a narrative, and start actually listening. All that matters in 2024 is actual public sentiment, measured by people’s actual opinions, especially when they actually tell us about it all day, every day.
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You don’t need to ask people’s opinion. Thanks to the pervasiveness of social media, everyone already tells you everything you need to know, if you just listen and—through cutting-edge “anti-polling”—measure what people say on their own, when they aren’t being asked.
After analyzing tens of thousands of social media posts—actual public opinion, freely expressed, unlike polling—across the political spectrum, it becomes clear Trump’s support is limited to a very small group of very loud supporters, and it is shrinking. In fact, outside of that base, Trump’s support is increasingly minimal to the point of irrelevance. Worse, he has completely and irrevocably lost swing voters who flat out chose to “vote Left” instead of “voting Trump.” The evidence from 2020 and 2022 is right in front of us.
Trump’s Achilles heel is the millions upon millions of swing voters, and more than enough of them in battleground states, who are simply done with Trump. They’re fed up with his shtick, and they’re not coming back. According to Impact Social’s year-long, continued analysis of more than 40,000 swing voters (updated earlier this month), Trump generated by far the most negative commentary among swing voters, with only 15 percent expressing positive statements and 55 percent sharing negative ones—a deficit of minus 40 percentage points. Unsurprisingly, Biden is the second most unpopular candidate among swing voters, but still far ahead of Trump.
Ron DeSantis is the most popular of the three. That means everything, given that presidential elections are largely determined by people in the middle—center-left or center-right—who tend to reject what they perceive as the most extreme of the two options before them. Based on recent data, those people would most likely back DeSantis, with Biden a distant second, and Trump an afterthought.
I voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. America would be far better off today had he won—but he didn’t. If Trump were to win the Republican nomination, I would vote for him in the general election (unlike the protestations of MAGA fanatics if DeSantis were to win), but I know electoral defeat would be inevitable.
Opposing Trump in a primary is not about dividing the party. It has nothing to do with “purity” tests or settling some score or whether you’re a neo-con, MAGA, Tea Party, or anything else. It is only about winning. The 2024 election is a bottom-line business, and Republicans have to support the candidate with the best—in this case, the only—chance of emerging victorious. Nothing else matters but winning.
Unfortunately for Republicans, many cannot see beyond the growing noise from Trump’s narrowing base. The Trump zealots do not understand that DeSantis can secure the American cross-over vote—like Ronald Reagan did in 1984—while Trump constantly drives cross-over (and even many Republican) voters away.
Actual public sentiment— properly measured through an anti-polling approach—is clear: In a general election, DeSantis has a strong chance, Biden has a weak one, and Trump has none. Those are the facts, and they won’t change come primary season. What could possibly be more important than winning?
Dan Backer is a veteran campaign counsel, having served more than 100 candidates and PACs, including Ready to Win. He practices law as a Member of Chalmers, Adams, Backer & Kaufman LLC.
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