The 2024 election has already been unlike any seen before but, if history is to be relied on, Donald Trump already has the primary stitched up, a Washington Post columnist wrote Tuesday.
No candidate has ever held a lead like Donald Trump’s and not won their party’s primary, Aaron Blake reported.
Polls have reliably shown the former president way ahead of his GOP competition – despite him heading into two criminal trials and facing indictment in two more, and despite the fact that Trump lost the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the presidency during his one four-year term. Blake wrote that, in polling averages, he’s at 53.1 percent, with his closest competitor, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, way behind at 15.8 percent.
“No nominee has made up that kind of gap since the 1970s, which is when the two parties moved away from deciding their presidential nominees at conventions and toward relying on the will of primary voters,” said Blake.
There have been comebacks before – Blake referenced Barack Obama who trailed Hillary Clinton by an average of nearly 28 points before turning it around to win. But Trump’s lead is off-the-charts.
“We haven’t seen a turnaround that’s close to comparable,” he said.
“These historical data come with some caveats. One is that even looking back to the 1970s means we’re dealing with a relatively small sample size. There have been just over a dozen presidential campaigns since then. Unprecedented things can happen in situations such as this.
“Another is that the front-runner here isn’t just a front-runner; he is a known-quantity former president, running as something of a de facto incumbent. We just don’t see primary leads this large very often, so it stands to reason that we wouldn’t have seen such a comeback.
“And there’s an argument to be made that things can fluctuate more wildly in such a scenario — particularly if casual voters who aren’t paying much attention are just falling back on saying they’ll vote for Trump, for now."
