2024 Republican Primary

How Donald Trump’s Unusual Presidential Comeback Could Go

History presents three possible paths.

“I am not a candidate.
I will not become a candidate.
I will support the nominee of my party with all the energy I have.”

With this, former President Gerald Ford announced in March 1980 that he would not make a late entrance into the Republican presidential nomination race after long teasing a potential bid. For decades, this marked the nearest any former president had come to seeking a return to the White House in the modern political era — until former President Donald Trump announced his presidential bid in November.

Trump’s comeback campaign is unprecedented since the contemporary nomination system took shape in the 1970s.¹ Yet in the broader history of presidential elections, his comeback effort is unusual — but not unheard of. Former presidents like Martin Van Buren, Ulysses Grant, Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt each mounted serious post-presidency campaigns to return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue between 1844 and 1912. In fact, five former presidents have won at least some delegates at major-party national conventions, as the table below shows.²

The American political system has changed enough, at a structural level, that Trump can’t expect to retread the paths that any of these men took. And why would he want to? Only one of them successfully made it back to the White House. Still, the broad circumstances surrounding a trio of presidential comeback attempts offer three paths for Trump’s 2024 campaign. Like Grant in 1880, Trump could attract ample support for his party’s nomination but ultimately fall short after a majority of Republicans coalesce around an opponent. Alternatively, after seeking his party’s nomination, Trump could abandon the GOP and launch a third-party bid, as Roosevelt did in 1912. Or Trump could win his party’s nomination, as Cleveland did in 1892 — and maybe even reclaim the White House.

Trump’s Best-Case Scenario

Grover Cleveland

If Trump could choose to be in the same shoes as anyone come January 2025, it’d be those of Grover Cleveland, the only person ever elected to two nonconsecutive terms as president. Cleveland won the presidency in 1884, lost reelection in 1888, then won back the White House in 1892. It’s very hard to say how likely Trump is to win the GOP nomination at this early vantage point, but compared with Cleveland, Trump could have much greater trouble coalescing support from across different factions of his party.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/gop-leaders-trump-2024-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-96780505

Cleveland’s comeback developed thanks to a vindication of his views on economic policies. Cleveland, a conservative Democrat, narrowly lost reelection to Republican Benjamin Harrison in 1888 partly because of his support for lower tariff rates, which Republicans criticized. Two years later, though, Democrats won massive majorities in the House after slamming the excesses of the “Billion Dollar Congress” and connecting rising prices to higher tariffs.³ Buoyed by the role his core issues played in the 1890 midterm campaign, Cleveland began a comeback bid. His main rival for the Democratic nomination would be Sen. David Hill, a fellow New Yorker who embraced a more pro-silver, inflationary approach to monetary policy — a key divide within the party — whereas Cleveland opposed weakening gold as the prime guarantor of the dollar’s value.

But Cleveland’s profile as a reformer in an era of graft and machine politics also contrasted sharply with Hill, whose reputation as a machine politician loomed as a potential weakness with general-election voters. By the time of the June national convention, Cleveland had become the front-runner, and on the convention’s first ballot, he won enough to surpass the two-thirds share necessary to win the nomination.⁴ Cleveland went on to defeat Harrison in a rematch of the previous general election, albeit with just 46 percent of the national popular vote, as Harrison led a divided GOP — he’d struggled to win renomination — and third-party efforts by the Populist and Prohibition parties combined to win 11 percent, somewhat scrambling the electoral map.

Cleveland’s successful comeback offers a precedent — and hope — for Trump’s 2024 campaign. One broad similarity between the two is that Trump, like Cleveland, has remained his party’s most high-profile leader after losing a close presidential election. Trump’s reshaping of the GOP may not win him the 2024 Republican nomination — but it’s certainly not to the detriment of his candidacy. Under and since Trump’s presidency, the Republican Party’s congressional membership has changed substantially, and its members are more aligned with Trump’s style of politics. Similarly, more than half of the Republican National Committee’s membership has changed since Trump won the GOP nod in 2016, thanks to an exodus of old-school “establishment” Republicans. Among the broader electorate, a tad less than 40 percent of Republicans have told The Economist/YouGov in most recent surveys that they identify as a “MAGA Republican,” compared with a little more than 45 percent who didn’t. While larger, that latter group may still embrace some of Trump’s anti-establishment and combative approach that other Republicans have used to great effect. 

However, Trump and Cleveland do differ in some critical respects. For one thing, Cleveland’s standing ahead of the 1892 election improved after his party’s showing in the 1890 midterms; by contrast, Trump’s image has taken a hit in the wake of the GOP’s underwhelming performance in the 2022 midterms — highlighted by the defeat of many Trump-endorsed candidates in key Senate races. Additionally, concerns about Hill’s electability in the general election also helped Cleveland build widespread support — even among pro-silver southern and western Democrats — but Trump might suffer because of worries about his general-election chances. Recent polls suggest another Republican, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, might be a stronger general-election contender against President Biden; although the value of such polls this far from November 2024 is highly suspect, donors and party activists are certainly looking at them.

At the same time, Trump has something going for him that Cleveland didn’t: the primary process. Trump doesn’t necessarily need to even win electoral majorities in presidential primaries to win a majority of his party’s delegates. In 2016, the GOP’s preference for primaries and caucuses that were “winner-take-all” — or at least “winner-take-most” — helped Trump win the Republican nomination even though he won only pluralities of the vote in most contests against a crowded field of opponents. We might be headed for a sequel if a sizable number of candidates decide to run in the 2024 Republican contest.

Falling Just Short

Ulysses Grant

It is entirely possible, on the other hand, that a majority — or larger plurality — of Republicans will coalesce around one of Trump’s opponents, an outcome that would broadly parallel Ulysses Grant’s failed bid for the GOP nomination in 1880. Given the two politicians’ factional support and critics’ concerns about electability, it is the Grant comparison that arguably looms largest for Trump among those we’re examining here.

The preeminent hero of the Civil War, Grant left the White House in 1877 after serving two terms. But his image had suffered from his administration’s myriad corruption scandals as well as his association with the turbulent Reconstruction era and a deep economic depression. Grant’s successor, Republican Rutherford Hayes, didn’t seek reelection, and favorable press coverage of Grant’s two-year world tour resuscitated his profile as the 1880 election neared. Grant had support from a faction of the GOP led by a group of political bosses, but he also faced substantial opposition within a party that had lost its once-dominant position following the Civil War. Many Republicans worried that he would struggle to unify the GOP, given his administration’s scandals and the fractures that had developed within the party during his presidency.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/whats-deal-freedom-caucus-fivethirtyeight-96551491

Like Grant, Trump remains relatively popular among those in his party: His favorability among Republicans sits in the low 70s in Civiqs’s tracking poll, while only around 15 percent have an unfavorable view of him. While he’s lost ground in recent national primary polls, Trump still leads DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence — Trump’s most-polled potential opponents — with a plurality across most surveys. And again like Grant, Trump also has received some early backing from Republican officials in Congress and around the country, a departure from Trump’s first run back in 2016.

But one potentially critical difference is that Trump could benefit from his party’s delegate rules — just as he did winning pluralities in the 2016 primaries — whereas Grant ended up losing in part because a pivotal rules decision went against him. At the 1880 Republican National Convention, the anti-Grant faction — which was larger than the pro-Grant group — defeated implementation of the “unit rule,” which would’ve required delegates to vote for the candidate preferred by most of their state’s delegation. Grant’s backers had supported the proposal, which would’ve been analogous to a winner-take-all primary in some delegate-rich states where Grant had the most support, putting him close to the majority necessary for the nomination.

And unlike in modern times, the classic convention setting also gave Grant’s opponents a chance to find an alternative choice — even one who wasn’t actively seeking the presidency. After 35 ballots, as no candidate managed to overtake Grant, some delegates began turning to Ohio Rep. James Garfield, who had earlier made a strong impression when he gave a nominating speech for another candidate. Sensing things were turning toward Garfield and wanting to avoid Grant’s nomination at all costs, Grant’s main opponents called for their delegates to back Garfield on the 36th ballot. As the vote came down, Grant again captured more than 300 votes, but Garfield won 399, a majority that earned him the party’s nomination and blocked Grant’s comeback.

However, as with Grant, many current Republican leaders, donors and voters would like to turn the page on the Trump era in the face of the former president’s struggles in the 2022 midterms, as well as legal proceedings concerning his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, his business interests, his personal life and his alleged mishandling of classified documents. Similarly, a majority of Republicans could rally around a Trump alternative, such as DeSantis, whose strengthening poll numbers, support from party leaders and plaudits from conservative media could make him the most likely preference for Trump opponents.

The Third-Party Option

Theodore Roosevelt

Last and definitely least likely, Trump could leave the Republican primary race and run as a third-party candidate in 2024. Such a move would undoubtedly bring to mind comparisons with another former president who opted to run outside the two-party system after losing his party’s nomination: Teddy Roosevelt, whose unsuccessful run in 1912 remains the strongest performance by a third-party presidential candidate in U.S. history.⁵

Roosevelt became president following the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, and then won four more years in 1904. But having promised not to run again, Roosevelt positioned his handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, to win the Republican nomination and the presidency in 1908. Out of office, however, Roosevelt became frustrated with Taft’s more conservative governing approach, and the Republican Party’s divisions and losses in the 1910 midterms created space for a Taft opponent — one Roosevelt filled when he decided to challenge Taft in the 1912 Republican nomination race.

The ensuing campaign broke new ground as some states (13 in all) would select most of their convention delegates via a presidential primary. Roosevelt had previously expressed skepticism toward primaries, but he embraced the popular movement to create direct primaries and encouraged many states to implement them as it became apparent they were the only way he could gain more delegates than Taft, whose allies controlled the party machinery in states where delegates would be picked by local and state conventions. In an unprecedented, popular campaign for president, Roosevelt ended up dominating at the ballot box: He won the popular vote in nine of the 12 primaries that had results, garnering 52 percent to Taft’s 34 percent overall.⁶ However, heading into the 1912 GOP convention, Roosevelt’s primary success couldn’t win the nomination on its own: Only about 2 in 5 Republican delegates came from the primary states (in 2016, that figure was about 4 in 5). Taft’s allies also controlled the convention committees, including the credentials committee, which backed the Taft-supporting delegates on most of the numerous credentials challenges that had resulted from the contentious campaign. Taft narrowly won the nomination on the first ballot, so Roosevelt’s campaign decided to implement the third-party option.

Third-party bids usually struggle, but Roosevelt’s Progressive Party — often called the Bull Moose Party — had both serious financial support and proof of popular support demonstrated by his showing in the GOP primaries. In November, Roosevelt went on to win 27 percent of the popular vote to Taft’s 23 percent. But because Roosevelt and Taft largely split the Republican vote, Democrat Woodrow Wilson easily won the presidency with just 42 percent.

As with Cleveland and Grant, the political circumstances surrounding Trump and Roosevelt differ on many fronts. For one thing, in the 2024 campaign, Trump won’t face an incumbent from his own party like Roosevelt did. Trump will also have far more access than Roosevelt to winning support through primaries, as those contests determined only a minority of delegates at the 1912 GOP convention. But if Trump were to actually pursue a third-party bid, he’d likely have to make that choice much earlier in 2024 than Roosevelt had to in 1912, thanks to more rigorous and time-sensitive requirements for qualifying for the general-election ballot across the 50 states and Washington, D.C.

But while the idea of a Trump third-party bid is unlikely, we can’t completely laugh it off. After all, he has repeatedly raised the prospect himself, most recently in late December when he shared on his social media platform an article from a pro-Trump website advocating such a move. This is in keeping with a long-running pattern: Following the 2020 election, Trump talked of a new “Patriot Party” or “MAGA Party,” and during the 2016 cycle, Trump complained of being treated unfairly by the GOP hierarchy and suggested he might attempt an independent bid. Although this has perhaps been a bargaining tactic — a split GOP vote would all but guarantee victory for Democrats — it’s also true that a Trump third-party bid could win a significant number of votes. More plainly, Trump has often claimed that political opponents are conspiring against him. Roosevelt may have had more cause for such feelings in the face of Taft’s control of the convention in 1912, but Roosevelt famously summed up his new party’s platform as “thou shalt not steal.”

Today’s presidential primary is night and day from the smoke-filled rooms and convention politics that decided the nominations 100-plus years ago. However, one thing remains true: The rules of the nomination, and how campaigns respond to them, matter. Cleveland won because he managed to unify the party sufficiently — including support from those who disagreed with him on silver — to win the two-thirds majority required by the Democrats. Grant failed in large part because his campaign couldn’t outplay the anti-Grant faction to enact the “unit rule.” And while Roosevelt won smashing victories in the primaries, that wasn’t the main mode of delegate selection yet, and his campaign’s inability to make sufficient inroads in caucus-convention states cost him the nomination. For Trump in 2024, the party’s delegate rules necessitate winning (at least) pluralities in primaries in the early and middle part of the nomination calendar to build up a delegate lead and to push out rivals. He did it once before — it remains to be seen whether the GOP’s anti-Trump forces can outmaneuver him this time around.

Story editing by Maya Sweedler. Copy editing by Andrew Mangan. Photo research by Emily Scherer.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/140-million-americans-live-states-controlled-democrats-fivethirtyeight-95547189

Although much of our elections-related attention is already trained on 2024, there are consequential elections happening this very calendar year. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses the gubernatorial, legislative, mayoral and judicial races to watch in 2023. They also look at how the Democratic Party’s effort to rearrange its presidential primary calendar is going, and ask whether a survey of Republican National Committee members was a good or bad use of polling.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

2024 Election

Is It Fair To Compare Biden's And Trump’s Classified Documents Scandals?

A FiveThirtyEight Chat

Jan. 24, 2023, at 3:19 PM

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, senior elections analyst): President Biden is in hot water over the discovery of classified documents from the Obama administration in his possession. In November, attorneys for the president discovered a handful of documents with classified markings on them at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., and immediately contacted the National Archives, who took back possession of the documents the next day. However, we didn’t learn this until a couple weeks ago, and since then, Biden aides have found more pages of classified material at Biden’s home in Delaware, and Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to look into the matter impartially. And this past week, at Biden’s invitation, the Justice Department searched Biden’s Delaware home and took away six additional items, some with classified markings. 

The story has drawn comparisons to former President Donald Trump’s possession of classified documents, which led to an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago last summer. (Editor’s note: This chat was conducted before Tuesday’s revelation that classified documents were also found at former Vice President Mike Pence’s home.) But given the important differences between the two cases, is that a fair comparison to make? Or is this just a trumped-up (pun intended) story driven by a slow news cycle? 

kaleigh (Kaleigh Rogers, technology and politics reporter): I think it’s a fair comparison. The differences in how each president responded to the revelation are certainly noteworthy, but I feel like they’ve been overemphasized a bit. At the end of the day, they both did the same wrong thing, which is keeping documents that they weren’t supposed to keep. Now, you can argue about whether the current system for determining how documents are classified even makes sense, but that argument doesn’t favor one president’s situation over the other’s.

ameliatd (Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, senior writer): It’s a comparison that people will inevitably make because both of the cases involve special counsels, and both involve classified documents. From a legal perspective, there are a lot of important differences, including — crucially — how the documents were discovered and how Trump and Biden responded. But once the special counsel has been appointed it’s harder for people to understand that nuance.

This is generally the issue presidents run into with special counsel investigations — it’s all well and good to say you want the role to exist, but they’ve nettled most modern presidents regardless of how the investigations actually turned out. In this case, Garland really had no option but to appoint a special counsel to investigate Biden because he had just appointed one to investigate Trump. And the mere act of appointing the special counsel sends the signal that these are equally serious cases.

nrakich: I think of it this way: These are fundamentally the same genre of scandal, but the degree of seriousness is different. As Amelia alluded to, Biden and Trump have responded very differently: Biden contacted the National Archives right away and invited the Justice Department to search his home. For Trump, it was actually the National Archives that contacted him, and a grand jury had to issue a subpoena to get the documents back. And even after Trump’s team said he complied with the subpoena, it turned out he still hadn’t handed over everything, prompting the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago — which Trump very much did not consent to.

kaleigh: But don’t you think Biden’s reaction was, in part, an attempt to create some daylight between him and Trump since, essentially, they both did the same thing? Biden had to kind of be over-the-top with transparency and invite investigators into his home because otherwise it just looks like Biden did the same thing as Trump, which Democrats and left-wing media had just spent months saying was Really Bad. 

nrakich: Yeah, Kaleigh, I think that’s right. But I also think there are questions of intentionality that, unfortunately, we may never get a definitive answer to. There have been allegations that Trump wanted to hold onto these classified documents after he left office, as mementos almost. By contrast, I don’t think there’s much reason to think Biden’s possession of these documents was anything other than carelessness (which, to be clear, is still really bad when you’re talking about state secrets!).

Interestingly, though, Americans may not distinguish much between Biden and Trump on the intentionality point. According to a recent survey from YouGov/The Economist, Americans said that Biden took the classified documents intentionally 39 percent to 28 percent. They said the same thing about Trump 50 percent to 24 percent. Of course, a lot of respondents were (rightfully, IMO) not sure about both questions.

kaleigh: Surely the special counsel investigation will reveal all the answers, Nathaniel!

nrakich: Amelia, you said earlier that Garland’s appointment of special counsels to investigate both Trump and Biden implies that they’re parallel cases even though the legal facts are different. So do you think Garland shouldn’t have appointed a special counsel in Biden’s case?

ameliatd: I don’t mean that he should or shouldn’t have — without knowing the details, it’s hard to say. As Kaleigh said, keeping classified documents in your home (or garage) after leaving the White House is bad. My concern is that the politics of the situation will overshadow the legal outcomes because the mechanism for figuring out what happened is so similar.

kaleigh: My own point is, the parallelism was already there, and that’s why Garland had to appoint the second special counsel. It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

ameliatd: There’s an argument that the role of special counsels is overblown anyway. They’re empowered to investigate with a measure of independence from the Department of Justice. Now, as we saw during Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference into the 2016 election, many of the rules surrounding special counsels are open to interpretation, and the attorney general can end up playing a significant role — as when former Attorney General Bill Barr wrote a misleading summary of Mueller’s report that ended up shaping the initial narrative. 

There’s also a history of special counsels overreaching and having their power curbed. In the 1980s and 1990s, independent counsels were much more independent than they are now (yes, “independent counsels” are different from special counsels — welcome to the word-soup nightmare that I lived in for several years), and Congress ended up clawing back their power. In fact, that’s how we ended up with the much more pared-down role that we have now.

Now, instead of being appointed by a court, special counsels’ credibility with the public is derived from the fact that they’re perceived as being independent from the executive branch, so their findings can be trusted. And my concern is that the more special counsel investigations happen, the less power they’ll have to do the thing they’re actually supposed to do — and the less trust there will be in the outcome — because the process has become so enmeshed with politics.

nrakich: Interesting. If you had to guess, Amelia, how do you think these special counsel investigations will end? It almost sounds like they will just release their reports and nothing will happen, no one’s minds will change — except maybe to think that the special counsel investigations were toothless from the start.

ameliatd: I’m not sure how they’ll end. It’s possible that they’ll result in charges. But from a public opinion perspective, I’m not sure it matters because people generally perceive that the two counsels are dealing with the same types of issues (the mishandling of classified documents), even though, from a legal perspective, how Trump and Biden responded actually matters a lot. 

nrakich: Well, we are a public opinion website, so let’s talk about that public opinion. Do we have any polls yet showing how Americans are thinking about Biden’s classified documents scandal vs. Trump’s?

kaleigh: Yeah, there was a YouGov/Yahoo News survey earlier this month that captured a striking dynamic, in my (non-public) opinion. When asked whether they thought Biden keeping classified documents was more serious than Trump or vice versa, 31 percent of Americans said Biden’s situation was less serious than Trump’s, 21 percent said it was more serious than Trump’s and 32 percent said the situations were equally serious. 

One thing that stood out to me was the fact that Republicans were more likely than Democrats to say Biden’s and Trump’s transgressions were equally serious. Forty-two percent of Republicans said both cases were equally serious, while 41 percent said Biden’s was more serious, but a majority of Democrats (57 percent) said Biden’s incident was less serious than Trump’s and only 24 percent said they were equivalent.

You might expect the results to be more baldly partisan with a majority of Republicans saying Biden’s case is more serious and a majority of Democrats saying Biden’s is less serious. So the fact that a plurality of Republicans said they’re equal, I think, gets to the inescapable reality here, which is that it’s really hard to say what Biden did was awful and then turn around and claim Trump did nothing wrong. 

nrakich: Yeah, the official Republican Party line on this — among elites as well as voters — seems to be, “See, Biden did it too! They are just as bad!” Whereas the Democratic position is, “What Biden did is bad, but what Trump did is worse.”

ameliatd: That’s interesting, Kaleigh. So you think it does matter how it unfolds? And if the outcome is more serious in the Trump investigation, that won’t be seen as a political outcome?

kaleigh: I wouldn’t go that far. I think the reactions to both these cases are still going to break down along partisan lines, but I think they suggest that Republicans didn’t love how Trump handled things here, and Biden’s actions after the documents were discovered were a little more palatable even if, at the root, they both started off doing the same wrong thing.

ameliatd: My cynical view is that special counsel investigations are rarely going to move the needle anyway, but now they really won’t because Biden no longer has the ability to claim the moral high ground.

The lesson: Never criticize a past president’s behavior until you are absolutely sure there are no classified documents in your garage.

nrakich: I might go that far. Maybe this isn’t cynical enough of me, but I feel like the fact that the cases are initially being handled the same way will create more credibility if their findings diverge.

As we’ve already discussed, Garland appointing a special counsel in both cases does create this initial impression that they are equivalent, which is how a plurality of Americans feel, according to both Kaleigh’s YouGov/Yahoo News poll and the YouGov/The Economist poll I cited earlier. (That said, a poll from Ipsos/ABC News found that only 30 percent of Americans viewed the two scandals equivalently, while 43 percent believed Trump’s was worse.) But after counsels finish their work, Americans may feel differently.

ameliatd: But fundamentally they’re both happening under Garland’s watch. And that’s why I think the role is flawed — it’s kind of independent, but still enmeshed enough in the executive branch that it’s pretty easy for people to mistrust or misread. 

nrakich: Yes, true.

ameliatd: And if you make the investigation truly independent, then you run into the situation we had in the 1980s and 1990s, where members of the executive branch (and the president) were constantly being investigated, and one investigation on a completely unrelated topic led to former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment.

kaleigh: I wondered how long it would take us to get to Ken Starr!

ameliatd: To be clear, I don’t think there’s an easy answer here! There are certainly situations where independence from the Department of Justice is valuable and necessary, and maybe this is one of them. But the special counsel-upon-special counsel domino effect doesn’t seem great to me. 

nrakich: We’ve been putting a lot on poor Merrick Garland (hasn’t he been through enough???) and the special counsels, but I want to make sure we acknowledge our own role here — and by “we,” I mean the media. How would you guys grade media coverage of this story for Biden, especially in comparison to media coverage of Trump? How much responsibility does the media bear for many Americans thinking Biden and Trump are equally guilty?

ameliatd: I do think Kaleigh is right that Garland had no choice but to appoint a special counsel in part because of the media coverage. 

It’s hard, though. As journalists, we want to hold powerful figures accountable, and that certainly includes the president. And Biden did spend months talking about how bad it was that Trump kept classified documents — only to have it turn out that he did (sort of) the same thing.

kaleigh: To be honest, and maybe this is indicative of the media I consume, I’ve seen an effort from the media to try to differentiate the two. You can’t listen to an NPR hit or read a New York Times story about it without getting an obligatory mention of how Biden responded differently, alerted the National Archives right away, cooperated with investigators, etc., etc.

nrakich: Yep. CBS News, which broke the original story, had a whole section in its article about that:

The Penn Biden Center case has parallels to the Justice Department’s pursuit of Donald Trump’s presidential records — but the scope and scale are materially different. In August, the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago that yielded hundreds of documents marked classified.

That unprecedented search followed more than a year of tussling between Trump’s representatives, the National Archives, and the Justice Department. The search warrant was sought and executed in August after multiple failed attempts by the federal government to retrieve what it considered to be sensitive documents at the former president’s personal residence that should have been turned over to Archives under law.

And the Associated Press, CNN and Washington Post have all done articles specifically comparing the two cases side by side.

kaleigh: I mean, look. That is part of the story, so this is partly due diligence. It would be negligent to not even mention that aspect. But at some point, it feels like a RIGBY situation, where there’s this obligation to caveat any coverage lest it comes across as equating the two in any way. 

nrakich: When you look at volume, though, cable news at least has been covering Biden’s story more. According to closed-captioning data from the Internet Archive’s Television News Archive, the three major cable news networks (CNN, Fox News and MSNBC) mentioned the word “classified” in an average of 357 15-second clips per day in the two weeks following the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago (Aug. 8-21, 2022). Meanwhile, the networks mentioned the same word in an average of 478 15-second clips per day in the two weeks after Biden’s own classified documents story broke (Jan. 9-22, 2023).

But the coverage gap is due to one channel in particular. CNN has covered the stories the most equally, with an average of 136 mentions per day over the August 2022 time period (Trump) and 154 this month (Biden). MSNBC covered Trump’s case a little more than it has covered Biden’s, with an average 153 mentions of “classified” per day in the August timeframe and 125 in the January one. But Fox News has covered Biden’s scandal way more than it covered Trump’s, mentioning “classified” an average of 199 times per day during the January time period but only 68 times per day during the August one.

kaleigh: Right, and it’s not shocking that MSNBC covered Trump’s documents more than it’s covering Biden’s documents and Fox covered Biden’s documents more than it covered Trump’s documents. What’s interesting to me is that in both cases there was kind of a frenzy right away, but it has tapered off at about the same rate.

ameliatd: I also wonder how much coverage the Biden story would be getting if we weren't in a slow news cycle...

kaleigh: And if Trump hadn’t just done the same thing, basically. The Democrats could wave this off as a nothingburger a lot more easily if they hadn’t just been dragging Trump for doing the same thing.

nrakich: Yeah, I think the slow news cycle is a big part of it. I'll get a little meta here and talk about how we’ve covered these scandals here at FiveThirtyEight: This is the third piece of content we have published about Biden's classified documents, but we only published two about Trump's. But it's not because we think Biden's case is more serious than Trump's; it's because last August was a much busier time for political news. If we had had unlimited resources, I think we would have written more about Trump’s predicament, but that was the thick of midterm-election season, and we had so much else to cover that we just didn't get to it.

Biden’s story has also come out in dribs and drabs — the first documents were found at the Penn Biden Center, and then a few more were found at Biden's home, and then a few more were found there, etc. I think that has given it a little more life than it otherwise would have. But I’m curious to see if it has staying power in the media’s and public’s minds even after new revelations stop coming to light.

kaleigh: That will partly depend on whether anything more newsworthy happens … or if the most exciting debate is still about kitchen appliances.

2024 Presidential Election

DeSantis Is Polling Well Against Trump — As Long As No One Else Runs

By Nathaniel Rakich

Jan. 10, 2023, at 6:00 AM

I’m not happy about it, and you’re not happy about it, but it’s time to talk about polls of the 2024 Republican presidential primary. We’re still (probably) more than a year away from the Iowa caucuses, yet pollsters have already asked about the Republican primary at least 96 times since the 2022 midterm elections. 

Yes, it’s still very early to be looking at these polls, and yes, a lot can change in the next 12 months. But we are now in the period where 2024 polls are at least somewhat interesting. As FiveThirtyEight’s Geoffrey Skelley has written, national polls conducted in the calendar year before the election are fairly predictive of who will eventually win the nomination.

Or they would be … if this cycle’s polls weren’t all over the place. Some, like Morning Consult’s tracking poll, give former President Donald Trump a wide lead. Others, like a December survey from YouGov/The Economist, show Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis far ahead, despite the fact that he has not yet officially launched a campaign. 

But there’s a reason the polls disagree so much: They’re asking about different campaigns. Some surveys are asking about a hypothetical head-to-head race between Trump and DeSantis, while others are asking about a multiway battle royal among several Republicans. In one of these scenarios, DeSantis is the favorite; in the other, it’s Trump. 

When pollsters ask about a two-person race between DeSantis and Trump, DeSantis is usually ahead. A simple average of head-to-head national polls taken since the midterms⁷ puts DeSantis at 48 percent and Trump at 43 percent.

But in polls with more than two candidates in the field, Trump almost always leads. In national polling questions that included DeSantis, Trump and at least one other potential candidate, Trump has an average lead of 41 percent to 31 percent since the midterms.⁸ (No one else comes close.)

Some of the discrepancy could also be due to differences in the polls’ methodologies and turnout models. (For example, are they polling just registered Republicans, or Republican-leaning independents, too?) But this pattern was evident (albeit to a smaller degree) even when the same pollster asked about both a head-to-head and multiway race in the same poll. 

Some of these polls will turn out to be wrong, seeing as we don’t even know who’s running for president yet. But unfortunately for us, we don’t yet know which field is the correct one. Plenty of Republicans other than DeSantis and Trump have hinted they might run for president too, including former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, former Vice President Mike Pence and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. But for now, they’re all polling in the single digits, and even if they do jump into the race, it’s very possible that they will drop out before voters actually start voting early next year — leaving us with a race that boils down to just DeSantis and Trump.

But these polls do give us one valuable piece of information, one that’s right under our nose: Trump seems to have a better chance at recapturing the nomination in a multiway race. This makes intuitive sense, too. So far, the 2024 Republican primary seems to be shaping up as a battle between Trump and the not-Trumps; notice how, in our polling averages, Trump’s support was very similar in both head-to-head (43 percent) and multiway (41 percent) matchups, but DeSantis lost a lot more support to other candidates (going from 48 percent to 31 percent). As those numbers suggest, if anti-Trump voters coalesce behind one alternative, it seems there are enough of them to defeat him. But if opposition to Trump is divided among multiple candidates, he could easily finish in first place with a simple plurality. And, because most states allocate all or most of their Republican National Convention delegates to the winner of their primary or caucus rather than splitting them up proportionally, that’s a recipe for Trump to lock up the nomination.

This is essentially what happened in 2016, when Trump was still a deeply controversial figure within the Republican primary; opponents like Sen. Ted Cruz, former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Sen. Marco Rubio and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush all fought on thinking they could beat him, with the result that no one did. The same thing could happen in 2024; what remains to be seen is whether Republican elites will let it.

2024 Election

When Might Other Republicans Challenge Trump For The 2024 Nomination?

By Geoffrey Skelley

Dec. 23, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Last month, former President Donald Trump announced his campaign to return to the White House, more than a year before the start of the 2024 presidential primary process. So far, Trump is the only major Republican candidate who’s launched a bid.⁹ While his entry may deter some opponents from running, it’s unlikely Trump will have the GOP primary entirely to himself. 

But just how long will we have to wait until someone decides to take on Trump? We took a look at open presidential primaries between 1980 and 2020 (meaning they didn’t feature an incumbent) and noted when every candidate either filed with the Federal Election Commission or announced their candidacy, whichever came first.¹⁰  (Trump did both on Nov. 15.) Using this data, we compared how far in advance of the Iowa caucuses — the long-running first electoral stop — these candidates formally began their campaigns. 

About 3 in 4 primary candidates in this period launched their bids between 210 and 420 days before Iowa, with about 2 in 5 starting between 300 and 390 days (roughly 10 to 13 months) before voting began. To put that in context, Republicans plan for Iowa to lead off their 2024 nomination calendar — unlike Democrats — and as the caucuses have traditionally taken place between early January and mid-February, we are now roughly 375 to 425 days away from them. Based on the 210- to 420-day range, then, we might expect most of Trump’s eventual opponents to enter the race sometime between just after New Year’s and June 2023.

While we’ve tried to comprehensively examine when candidates most commonly launch presidential bids, it’s worth pointing out that registering the exact date a campaign begins is far murkier than the date of an FEC filing or a formal announcement. In reality, prospective candidates take steps toward running well before making anything official, such as gathering a stable of potential donors, identifying campaign staff and engaging in public activities that can signal a run, such as visiting early-voting states like Iowa, publishing a book about themselves or campaigning on behalf of candidates in other elections. Presidential aspirants sometimes form an “exploratory committee” to test the waters before taking more official steps. But candidates don’t have to register or report this activity to the FEC until they formally become a candidate, so sometimes we initially learn of an exploratory committee’s formation only because the candidate reveals it, a move that can garner a splash of media attention before the candidate later makes an official announcement. And more recently, some candidates like Jeb Bush have had allied super PACs raise gobs of money months before the candidate officially enters the race, blurring the lines of what even counts as “exploratory.”

Among the 15 primary candidates who eventually won the open-nomination races between 1980 and 2020, all but one began their formal campaigns at some point in that 210- to 420-day range. In 2016, for instance, Trump rode down the Trump Tower escalator 230 days prior to Iowa’s caucuses.¹¹ In 2012, Mitt Romney announced 215 days beforehand, while in 2008 John McCain filed with the FEC 413 days ahead of caucus voting. Only Bill Clinton entered a primary less than 210 days out: He filed for the 1992 contest just 178 days before Iowa, emblematic of that cycle’s late-developing campaign due to the expectation that the then-popular President George H.W. Bush would be difficult to defeat. 

But the Clinton example shows how each cycle’s individual conditions can influence candidates’ decisions to launch. For instance, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick entered the 2020 Democratic contest less than 90 days before the Iowa caucuses, seeking to capitalize on concerns about front-runner Biden’s strength as a candidate.

Alternatively, an especially early entry is usually the mark of a relatively unknown contender looking to maximize their time to raise money and attract attention. Former Maryland Rep. John Delaney declared for the 2020 Democratic race 920 days before Iowa — the record for the years we looked at — but he and most others who entered more than 420 days before voting began wound up winning very little support. That’s not always the case for early announcers — former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean (598 days) was once a leading contender in the 2004 Democratic race.

To this point, we can see how the 2024 cycle’s circumstances likely encouraged Trump to announce on the earlier side. His launch date will likely be more than 400 days ahead of Iowa’s vote, depending on the caucuses’ actual date. On the one hand, Trump’s situation is unprecedented in modern times: Since the current presidential primary system took shape in the 1970s, no former president has run again.¹² But by getting in early, Trump not only made real an unofficial campaign that arguably dated back to his departure from the White House, but he also reportedly did so to deter possible primary opponents and gain support from Republican leaders, who’ve fallen in line behind him in the past. (Trump may have also wanted to become an active candidate before state or federal officials potentially filed criminal charges against him in cases regarding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, improperly retaining classified documents and interfering in Georgia’s 2020 electoral process.)

Whether this approach will successfully discourage primary challengers remains to be seen. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has dismissed questions about his presidential aspirations, but between his upcoming autobiography, his continued fundraising and the post-midterm primary polling that’s found him running ahead of Trump, it’d be surprising if he didn’t end up running. Still, DeSantis may postpone his entry until after Florida’s legislative session ends in early May, which would be roughly 240 to 290 days before Iowa. By waiting, DeSantis can open his campaign by trumpeting his conservative policy achievements, including any additional ones passed by the GOP-controlled state Legislature in the upcoming session. But more fundamentally, DeSantis may want the Legislature to act before he runs to make it less costly for him to seek the presidency: Under Florida’s “resign to run” law, state officeholders must resign their office if they run for federal office, but Republican legislative leaders are considering changes to ease DeSantis’s potential presidential bid. 

Regardless of DeSantis’s motivations for waiting, it wouldn’t be weird for a sitting governor to wait for the end of a state’s legislative session, at least before holding a public announcement. For instance, in 1999, George W. Bush didn’t formally declare his candidacy until June, following the end of Texas’s state-legislative session, although he did file with the FEC in March 1999 (reflected in the chart). In 2015, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal also waited for the state-legislative session to conclude, officially launching his campaign for the 2016 Republican primary about two weeks after the state Legislature adjourned (he filed with the FEC two days after announcing).

As for other potential Trump opponents, the former president’s long shadow might push some aspirants to embrace a wait-and-see attitude. Former Vice President Mike Pence and former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan have been positioning themselves for possible runs, but assuming Hogan doesn’t announce a bid before he leaves office on Jan. 18, neither of them will have official duties that might influence their timing. Former U.N. Ambassador and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz tried to cozy up to Trump after opposing him in 2016, so they may be wary of challenging him, although Haley recently walked back a pledge to support Trump in the 2024 primary. Others who may be looking to run, such as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, could be influenced by the timing of their state-legislative sessions.

Still, from the data we’ve examined here, we can see that the timing of Trump’s entry into the 2024 presidential race was fairly early compared with past presidential cycles, though by no means an obvious outlier. And once the new year rolls around, we should be on guard for further candidate announcements at any time. We have reason to suspect that DeSantis, Trump’s clearest potential rival, may wait until the late spring to announce, but that doesn’t mean some other possible contenders won’t enter in the meantime.

As the House Select Committee for Jan. 6 publishes its final report, the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast crew considers what the committee’s impact has been on American politics and former President Donald Trump’s standing with voters. They also look ahead to how the Department of Justice will navigate the complexities of deciding whether to bring charges against Trump and how a Republican majority in the House could respond.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

2024 Election

A Very Merry 2024 Republican Presidential Primary Draft

A FiveThirtyEight Chat

Dec. 20, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, senior elections analyst): I don’t want to alarm anyone, but the first nominating contest of the 2024 Republican presidential primary is likely just about a year away, and one candidate — you may have heard of him — has already announced his campaign. 

So it’s no longer way too early for us to hold a fantasy-baseball-style draft of who we think the GOP will nominate! Everyone got their draft boards ready to go?

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, senior elections analyst): Yeah, I just hope I’m not picking third or fourth. Kind of a clear top-two here, don’t you think?

alex (Alex Samuels, politics reporter): Nobody better steal my picks!

santul.nerkar (Santul Nerkar, editor): It’s a two-player draft!

alex: Hahaha

santul.nerkar: But I am very curious to see how things shake out after picks No. 1 and 2.

alex: Best of luck to whoever gets pick No. 3!

nrakich: OK, here are the rules. We are drafting the candidates we think are most likely to win the GOP nomination — regardless of their chances in the general election. As usual, we will do a draft, where the person with the final selection in one round picks first in the next round. Now let me completely randomly choose the order for the first round …

1. Santul
2. Alex
3. Nathaniel
4. Geoffrey

OK, Santul, looks like you have the first pick! And, for the first time in forever, you actually have an interesting choice here!

santul.nerkar: [Cues up NBA draft music in my head]

To make things potentially in the early going here, I’m going to go with someone other than former President Donald Trump, the face of the GOP for the last six-plus years. My pick is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

nrakich: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

santul.nerkar: My reasoning is fairly simple: Unlike in 2016, the last time the GOP primary had more than one viable candidate, it does appear that the GOP rank and file has coalesced around DeSantis as a non-Trump alternative. Poll after poll in the early going has found that, while Republicans aren’t exactly abandoning the former president and Trumpism, they do seem enthused by the idea of a candidate who stands for many of the things Trump does — without being Trump.

alex: I think this is a super smart pick, Santul! But I wonder if DeSantis flops, in part because he’s not really known for his personal appeal in the same way that Trump is?

Hmm … I guess now that I think about it, I’m not sure if that’ll help or hurt him.

geoffrey.skelley: Let’s see what happens when DeSantis and Trump get on the debate stage together, but DeSantis is clearly the main alternative to Trump at this very early point. He’s attracted an unusually high level support in early polls for a governor who has never run nationally before. You don’t often see someone like that hitting 30 percent in national polls this early.

santul.nerkar: Yeah, that’s kind of where I’m at. He already enjoys high favorability ratings among GOP voters, despite never having run a national campaign.

nrakich: So this is obviously a very voguish pick right now, with DeSantis leading several early primary polls, but I personally think Trump is still the more likely nominee. Take a closer look at the polls that show DeSantis ahead: They’re almost all head-to-head polls between him and Trump. But I’m skeptical that the GOP primaries will actually be head-to-head races. Plenty of other candidates have shown interest in running, and it’s kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy: If Trump looks weak enough to beat, that will encourage more candidates to jump into the race, which in turn increases the odds that Trump wins. Because when you look at polls between Trump, DeSantis, and a handful of other Republicans, Trump is usually ahead.

As Geoffrey alluded to, I also don’t think DeSantis is fully vetted yet. I think he’s become a bit of an avatar for folks who want to move beyond Trump, but what if he’s not a good debater, or has skeletons in the closet?

Finally, although I’m like 90 percent sure that DeSantis will run, he’s not actually in the race yet. Trump is. That counts for something.

alex: If only you had the No. 2 pick, Nathaniel!

geoffrey.skelley: Nathaniel, I do think that’s right, in the sense that people don’t think about the actual rules of the GOP primary. Most primaries and caucuses on the Republican side are “winner-take-all” — or at least “winner-take-most” — meaning that all a candidate has to do is finish first in a state in order to win all or most of its delegates. Trump won in 2016 in part because he won pluralities in those races against a crowded field and captured most of the delegates. 

nrakich: Exactly. We could see a repeat of 2016 where a divided field allows Trump to rack up delegates with like 40 percent of the vote in each state.

We know a solid chunk of the Republican electorate is loyal to him. And they don’t have to constitute a majority of the party for him to win.

What’s more, I’m not sure DeSantis’s lead in head-to-head polls will last. I feel like we’re in a particular moment where Republicans are unhappy with Trump because candidates aligned with him did so poorly in the midterms. But there have been past moments where it seemed like the GOP could be poised to abandon Trump — e.g., a lot of Republican politicians criticized him after the Jan. 6 riot — but then they closed ranks around him again. What do you guys think?

alex: I personally don’t think this will last. Trump isn’t really in the public eye right now, and we’re still a ways away from 2024. I think there’s plenty of time for current members of the party who aren’t over the moon about his presidential announcement to warm to him. Plus, as Nathaniel said before, DeSantis could struggle and Trump could become the GOP’s only viable option. Or, DeSantis could sit this one out because Trump already threw his hat in the ring.

geoffrey.skelley: Eh, I think DeSantis running is all but certain. He’s just likely going to wait until the end of Florida’s legislative session in the spring before officially launching his campaign.

alex: I personally disagree, but that’s what chats are for!

santul.nerkar: Man, I’m already feeling buyer’s remorse for my pick!

nrakich: Alex, it sounds like you have a name in mind for pick No. 2, then??

alex: I do, Nathaniel! I’d be a fool if I didn’t pick Trump No. 2! In short, the GOP currently is still largely the party of Trump. Yes, there were a few grumbles from fellow Republicans about his 2024 run, but most prominent leaders in the party have been largely silent over some of his most recent controversies. This all suggests to me that Republican lawmakers continue to feel uneasy challenging the former president because they know they still need his base to win elections.

Moreover, even though our average of Trump’s favorability rating among all Americans is at an all-time low, another poll from Quinnipiac University, which was released in November, found that when offered a choice between Trump, DeSantis or “someone else,” Republican voters were evenly split over who they prefer win the GOP presidential nomination (44 percent preferred DeSantis; 44 percent backed Trump; 11 percent didn’t offer an opinion). And, as we’ve discussed before, there are plenty of examples of Republicans appearing to break with Trump — only to fall back in line later. 

nrakich: Yeah, I think you got good value with Trump at No. 2, Alex (obviously, considering my DeSantis skepticism).

geoffrey.skelley: Trump could still definitely win the nomination. It’s been easy to say “DeSantis this, DeSantis that,” but he’s untested. A lot of Republicans still falsely believe Trump lost illegitimately in 2020, and his favorability among Republicans remains high, although it has gone down a little since the 2022 elections. But there’s no question the opportunity is there for Trump to win a comeback campaign.

nrakich: One thing that Trump has this cycle that he didn’t have in 2016 is a lot of elite support. Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville has endorsed him, along with several House members. There’s been a lot of talk about how many Republican members of Congress haven’t endorsed him yet (probably because they are worried he’s electoral poison), but not as much about all the support that he does have. And elite support can matter.

santul.nerkar: To play devil’s advocate to my own DeSantis pick, it’s also still very early. Around this time eight years ago — during the cycle Trump would eventually run in and win — none other than Jeb! Bush was leading in GOP polls. So while the field appears to be more clearly defined this time around, at this point in the cycle, the fact that DeSantis leads Trump in some early polls isn’t a guarantee of anything.

alex: As I alluded to earlier, I do think Trump’s candidacy will clear the field of all other serious candidates (other than, perhaps, an anti-Trump candidate or two). But it seems pretty clear to me that Republicans are scared to go up against Trump lest his loyal followers turn on them.

Just ask the 10 House Republicans who voted in favor of his impeachment! Only two will be returning to Congress next year.

geoffrey.skelley: It is true, however, that DeSantis gives Republicans who don’t want Trump a better opportunity to coordinate and rally to one candidate. Anti-Trump Republicans faced a coordination problem in 2016, as there were a bunch of GOP alternatives, no one was sure how seriously to take Trump at first, and they couldn’t coalesce around one candidate when it became abundantly clear Trump was the front-runner for the nomination. Once the voting got going, the alternatives eventually became Sen. Ted Cruz or Ohio Gov. John Kasich, which also worked out well for Trump because there were parts of each candidate’s constituency who might’ve backed Trump before the other non-Trump candidate. 

santul.nerkar: Republicans have also either lost ground or underperformed in three consecutive election cycles, and Trump’s favorability seems to be slipping relative to DeSantis’s. So I think voters could view DeSantis as a fresher, more “electable” face than they view Trump.

nrakich: Yeah, there was a Suffolk University/USA Today poll the other day that asked about two hypothetical general elections: In one, President Biden beat Trump 47 percent to 40 percent among all voters, but in the other, DeSantis beat Biden 47 percent to 43 percent. Of course, it’s way too early to put much stock in general-election polls, but polls like that may nevertheless create a narrative.

geoffrey.skelley: Yeah, DeSantis would be wise to push the electability argument along with his Trump-ish approach on issues. “Look, I just won the swing state of Florida by almost 20 points, I’m polling better than Trump against Biden and I’m pushing the issues you care about, GOP primary voters.” That’s a pretty lethal combination — potentially anyway.

nrakich: I’m just not convinced that Republicans care as much about electability, though. Poll after poll in the 2020 presidential primaries showed that Democrats really prioritized it when picking their nominee, but if recent GOP primaries are any indication, Republicans care more about ideological purity.

geoffrey.skelley: Sure, Nathaniel, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that DeSantis seems to be doing better in polls that have narrower sample populations — his margins versus Trump are superior in surveys of registered voters compared with ones of adults, or among likely voters compared with registered voters. This suggests that more engaged voters, who tend to also be more ideological, are more likely to prefer him. That could be due to both electability (“Trump might lose, let’s find someone else”) and ideology.

alex: I must ask … What is the difference between a DeSantis voter and a Trump voter? I don’t think they’d push vastly different policies if elected, so what’s really differentiating the two besides maybe personality? I also don’t get the vibe that anti-Trump Republicans would suddenly be gung-ho about returning to the party with DeSantis at the helm.

santul.nerkar: It’s interesting you mention that, Alex. I’ll emphasize again that we should take  these early polls with a gigantic helping of salt, but the Suffolk University/USA Today poll Nathaniel mentioned found that DeSantis actually leads Trump among voters who identified as “conservative” or “very conservative.” It’s pretty remarkable that DeSantis has emerged as the most viable potential Trump challenger, not by positioning himself as a never-Trumper, but rather by leaning into a lot of the rhetoric and policy positions that made Trump who he is.

geoffrey.skelley: Alex, that they would attract many of the same voters seems like a feature, not a bug, for DeSantis. As Santul said, he’s a fresh face who can bring much of the same approach but in a more electorally appealing form. I’m not sure it’s so much about electability on its own, but DeSantis can offer a combination of electoral success with policy successes as Florida’s governor that conservatives find appealing.

alex: I guess, since they’re very similar, it’s possible that Republican elites end up unhappy with both candidates.

But if Trump is truly a weakened candidate — so much so that DeSantis decides to challenge him — then I don’t think the Florida governor will be the only Republican taking on the former president.

nrakich: Speaking of other potential candidates … With the third pick of the draft, I’m going to choose Ted Cruz. This is a bit of a bank shot: In those polls of Trump, DeSantis, and several other Republicans, Cruz isn’t polling in third; he usually clocks only 2-3 percent nationally. But in a world where DeSantis doesn’t run for some reason, I think Cruz is the most natural not-Trump Trumpist candidate. He’s well known in the party thanks to his 2016 presidential campaign, in which he finished second — and, historically, Republicans like to nominate the “next candidate in line.” Think John McCain in 2008 after he finished second to George W. Bush in 2000.

geoffrey.skelley: Whoa, hello.

santul.nerkar: Wowwww.

alex: Nathaniel, you REALLY want a Cruz 2024 run, don’t you? 

Readers, this is not the first time Nathaniel has selected Cruz as his first-round pick!

nrakich: I’m nothing if not consistent!

geoffrey.skelley: This pick is certainly reasonable to me if the goal is to pick someone who is most likely to be the GOP nominee. Cruz wants the job and essentially finished second in 2016, which to Nathaniel’s point has historically been a pathway to future success in Republican nomination contests. Besides McCain, there are Ronald Reagan (ran in 1976, won in 1980), George H.W. Bush (ran in 1980, won in 1988) and Bob Dole (ran in 1988, won in 1996).

But after initially pushing back against Trump — remember his 2016 convention speech? — Cruz caught a lot of flak and then became strongly supportive of Trump. So I think Cruz is less likely to run if Trump remains in the field.

nrakich: Yeah, he’s in a tricky spot. He was kind of outflanked by DeSantis in the “position yourself to run against Trump but don’t be anti-Trump” invisible primary. Now his best bet might be rooting for Trump in this primary, then running himself in 2028.

alex: Nathaniel, I’ll ask you now what I asked you back in March 2021: How can Cruz win considering how disliked he is in GOP circles? 

nrakich: Haha, Alex, I’ll tell you what I told you then too: Among GOP voters, Cruz isn’t disliked! According to a recent Morning Consult poll, 61 percent of potential Republican primary voters had a favorable opinion of him, while only 20 percent had an unfavorable opinion.

alex: But he barely won his own Senate race in 2018 against former Rep. Beto O’Rourke! In fact, his approval rating is still underwater in his home state. 

santul.nerkar: I’m surprised by this pick because — like you said, Nathaniel — Cruz probably isn’t entering a race that Trump is already in, he’s not a more moderate alternative to Trump, and there’s already a strong conservative challenger to Trump right now in DeSantis. So Cruz doesn’t check the box of a never-Trumper, nor is he the most obvious right-wing alternative to the former president.

nrakich: I mean, look. Like we said at the beginning, I’m not sure anyone other than Trump or DeSantis has more than, like, a 10 percent chance of winning the nomination. But I think Cruz is more likely than a certain former vice president.

Speaking of which … Geoffrey, your turn.

geoffrey.skelley: I get not one but two picks here back to back. So with the first one, I’m going to take the straightforward pick of former Vice President Mike Pence. No, I don’t think it’s especially likely that he wins the nomination, but he’s a former vice president, and that’s been a pretty surefire way to get yourself close to winning in past primaries. He maintains at least some support among the donor class and has been making moves that portend a presidential bid.

nrakich: Yes, he is the candidate I alluded to earlier who’s consistently polling in third place.

Albeit usually around 7-8 percent of the vote.

alex: Hm, I wonder if he’s consistently polling third due largely to name recognition?

nrakich: Yeah, I think that’s part of it, Alex. And as Geoffrey wrote back in 2019, having high name recognition but low polling numbers is not a good place to be.

santul.nerkar: Mike Pence is the De’Andre Hunter of this two-player draft.

But yeah, I think that’s decent value for a No. 4 pick. In the unlikely scenario that Trump drops out — perhaps because of the host of legal troubles he’s facing right now — I think Pence’s chances go up significantly, especially next to a comparatively untested figure like DeSantis.

geoffrey.skelley: Hey, the Virginia grad here says respect De’Andre. But comparisons aside, that’s my attitude, too, Santul. Pence is there, he’s going to be able to put together a credible campaign, and who knows how DeSantis and Trump work out.

Anyway, to kick off the second round with my next pick, I’m going to go with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

santul.nerkar: Strong Texan representation here!

alex: … Do you and Nathaniel know something about Texas that I don’t?

nrakich: It’s a great factory for Republican politicians! It has produced two recent(ish) GOP presidents, and it’s obviously the largest red state. In other words, there’s a deep bench of Republican candidates there, and the ones who rise to the top are inevitably talented politicians.

alex: I do think this poll — in which Republican voters in the Lone Star State said they preferred DeSantis over Trump by more than 10 percentage points — is telling, though. And, perhaps most notably, the survey didn’t ask about either Cruz or Abbott. 

geoffrey.skelley: I don’t know that Abbott will run (in fact, Cruz is probably more likely to run than Abbott). But what I do know is that the man can raise a ton of money and that he has a conservative track record that would surely appeal in a primary. If we’re talking about people who could actually win a long primary campaign, Abbott has much more potential than many of the other names on my list. 

Simply put, a lot of names out there are VP material. And Abbott is not one of them.

nrakich: Wait, he’s not VP material? Why?

geoffrey.skelley: I don’t think he’d take it. Dude is the governor of Texas. President or bust.

What I’m saying is that some other potential candidates we could name are people who would happily take the VP job and would be running for president with an eye on that in the first place.

nrakich: OK, I’m up next, and I’m going with South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott. He’s a rising star within the party (he had a prime speaking slot at the 2020 Republican National Convention), and he’s managed the extremely impressive feat of staying on the good side of both the Trumpist and non-Trumpist wings of the party. That might be difficult to maintain if he, uh, runs for president against Trump, but I think he might be a better politician than DeSantis and could fill that “fresh face” role nicely if DeSantis stumbles. 

alex: Smart pick! I was semi-surprised his win on Election Day wasn’t more of a conversation-starter. It seemed like all eyes were on DeSantis’s performance, but Scott racked up an even more decisive win — defeating his opponent by 26 points. Yes, I know South Carolina is redder than Florida and Democrats never seriously targeted it, but still!

geoffrey.skelley: Yeah, I seriously considered picking Scott earlier. He had a very strong midterm performance, got rave reviews for his 2020 convention speech and may be considering a run.  

alex: For all the chatter about Republicans wanting a more diverse voting base, I wonder if Scott offers a broader appeal as a Black man?

nrakich: Yeah, Alex, I think nominating a Black man would be appealing to a lot of Republican voters who want to defuse Democratic attacks that the party is racist.

OK, we’re starting to run out of time, so we’re going to have to make this the last round! Alex, who’s your second and final pick?

alex: I appreciate you all for not stealing my No. 7 pick: Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin!

In his 2021 campaign, Youngkin ran with the image of an inoffensive suburban dad and businessman. He kept Trump out of the state and didn’t appear with him at the tele-town hall event Trump hosted right before the election — but Youngkin was smart in that he also played into some of the same issues Trump voters care about. (He even falsely claimed that the Department of Justice was trying to “silence parents.”) So Youngkin did everything he could to walk that line — not to look or sound like Trump, while also not offending his base and still accepting Trump’s endorsement. 

And, at least so far, tying Youngkin to Trump hasn’t been a death knell for his candidacy and political aspirations. According to a Washington Post-Schar School poll that came out a few days before the election, a majority of voters (roughly 7 in 10) thought Youngkin’s ideas and policies were similar to Trump. He won anyway. 

geoffrey.skelley: Youngkin might want to do what former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie didn’t do in 2012 and start running for president roughly a year and a half into his gubernatorial term. When the iron is hot, you gotta strike. If you wait, you might find yourself suddenly more unpopular or facing a scandal or something that weakens your chances in a presidential primary, as happened with Christie.

nrakich: Yeah, Alex, he could make an electability argument too: He won the governorship of Virginia by 2 points just one year after Biden carried the state by 10.

santul.nerkar: Youngkin also made key inroads with groups like Latino voters in that 2021 gubernatorial election, suggesting he could put together a relatively more diverse coalition than other contenders.

nrakich: At the same time, though, I feel like Youngkin could be too boring/establishment for GOP primary voters. They want a fighter, not sweater vests.

alex: I, personally, want to see more politicians in sweater vests, Nathaniel.

nrakich: Haha.

All right, Santul, bring us home with the last pick!

santul.nerkar:

geoffrey.skelley: Mike Pompeo is asking for your vote.

santul.nerkar: And he shall not get it!

nrakich: No one has picked the only Republican (other than Trump) who is actually running for president so far: former Montana Secretary of State Corey Stapleton.

santul.nerkar: I think Chris Stapleton might have better odds than Corey.

For my second and final pick, I’m going with another South Carolinian: former Gov. and Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver made the point when we did our last GOP primary draft, all the way back in 2021, that Republicans might very well be tempted to back a “safer” candidate like Haley if the party suffered a worse-than-expected 2022 midterm performance because Trumpy candidates lost winnable races.

Well, that scenario has now come to pass, and Republicans might find themselves having to make such a decision. If voters are too turned off by Trump’s baggage and DeSantis has a bad debate or two in the early going, I could see the GOP rank and file potentially coalescing around a different candidate. And Haley has the conservative bona fides, name recognition and favorability among her own party to give her a fighting chance in such an environment. (Also, how many times is she going to be named as a potential candidate before actually running?)

nrakich: Haley did recently backtrack on her previous promise not to run if Trump did. She’s reportedly going to take the holidays to consider. 

geoffrey.skelley: Everything Haley has done points toward a run. After criticizing Trump in 2016, she joined his administration as U.N. Ambassador to amp up her foreign affairs profile on top of her governing experience. So she certainly has the resume.

alex: Interesting choice! Haley campaigned with Trump-backed U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker in Georgia ahead of the December runoff election, so I’m wondering if that says anything about her being team Trump?

nrakich: I actually think she is the opposite of Scott in that she has managed to get on the bad side of both the Trumpist and non-Trumpist wings of the party. As you said, Alex, she has mostly aligned herself with Trump since joining his administration, but she was one of the Republicans who criticized him after Jan. 6 only to walk it back later. But I’m not sure voters — or Trump — have forgotten.

I also think sexism will hold her back. Research shows that female Republican candidates are perceived as more moderate, and moderate historically hasn’t been what GOP primary voters are looking for.

santul.nerkar: That perception has played out in really ugly ways, too, Nathaniel. Haley faced backlash from her own party in 2015 for signing a bill to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House after a white supremacist murdered nine people at a Black church in Charleston, and she’s since walked that back, saying that the perpetrator “hijacked” the Confederate flag.

alex: Interesting that Haley was the only woman we selected in this draft. I think our draft back in 2021 was slightly more diverse (though that one also went to four rounds). 

nrakich: Yeah, I’m sorry we didn’t have time for more rounds, readers! We didn’t give Asa Hutchinson, Chris Sununu, Larry Hogan, Kristi Noem or John Bolton their moment in the sun. 

Then again, GOP primary voters might not either.

On Tuesday night, former President Donald Trump announced his plans to run for president in 2024. And while he has kept a tight grip on the GOP since 2016, his support is no longer unanimous, especially among party elites.

In this emergency installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Nate Silver and Galen Druke discuss how Trump’s campaign will impact the upcoming Republican primary for president.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

2024 Republican Primary

Why DeSantis Is A Major Threat To Trump’s Reelection

By Nate Silver

Nov. 16, 2022, at 6:00 AM

The case for Donald Trump as the front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination is incredibly obvious. As my colleague Nathaniel Rakich pointed out after the former president announced his reelection bid, Trump has extremely strong favorability ratings among Republican voters. He’s remade the GOP in his image. And predictions of his demise have a notoriously poor track record: I was one of those people who was far too skeptical of his chances for the 2016 Republican nomination for far too long.

And yet, since the midterm elections, something seems to have shifted. People putting money on the line have moved away from Trump in the last week. He now has only a 35 percent chance of winning the 2024 nomination according to prediction markets, down from what it was before Election Day, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is up to 40 percent (though DeSantis has slightly fallen and Trump has risen immediately after Trump’s announcement to run for president).

If I were allowed to bet on politics, I might buy some Trump stock at that price: These prediction markets aren’t always so wise (they did comparatively poorly in the midterms, for instance), and it’s hard to imagine that, given all the influence he still has over Republicans, Trump’s chances are less than 1 in 3.

But I think there’s a pretty solid case to be made for Trump and DeSantis as co-favorites.

It’s not so obvious who’s leading in the polls

As Rakich points out, Trump has led in the vast majority of polls of Republican voters since the 2020 election. Believe it or not, these early polls do have some predictive power. 

However, polls since last week’s midterm show a shift in the race. For example, a YouGov poll released last week found DeSantis leading Trump among Republicans, with 42 percent to Trump’s 35 percent. And a poll by the Canadian firm Leger had DeSantis ahead 45-43 among Republicans, although it had a tiny sample size.

By contrast, a Morning Consult poll from this week found Trump still ahead among potential Republican primary voters, 47-33, although that reflects a gain for DeSantis; two preelection Morning Consult polls found Trump ahead 48-26 and 49-24.

A series of post-midterm polls sponsored by Republican-aligned groups have found DeSantis ahead in early primary states. I am a wee bit skeptical of these partisan polls because people who prefer DeSantis may be trying to spin a “DeSantis has momentum!” narrative. But as I said, DeSantis has also looked pretty good in nonpartisan polls since the midterms. Perhaps it’s a short-term bounce, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the midterms are an inflection point or a wake-up call for Republican voters given all the incorrect predictions of a “red wave.” 

And here’s something else: The study of early primary polls that I referred to earlier found that the polls have more predictive power if you adjust them for name recognition. DeSantis’s name recognition is high, but not universal like Trump’s. For example, a Quinnipiac University poll from July found that 35 percent of voters hadn’t heard enough about DeSantis to form an opinion about him.

So I don’t know how much longer “just trust the polls” will be an argument in Trump’s favor. They may go through some wild swings in response to the midterms and Trump’s 2024 announcement. But given Trump’s much wider name recognition, having DeSantis polling fairly close to Trump — or even ahead in some surveys — does not strike me as particularly good news for Trump.

Influential Republicans could help DeSantis

I’ll probably publish about a million stories between now and the first primaries about how much the views of Republican “party elites” matter. By that phrase, which is borrowed from the book “The Party Decides,” I refer to influential Republicans and conservatives ranging from elected officials to talk-show hosts. It’s important to clarify that by “party elite,” I’m not necessarily referring to some fuddy-duddy senator who was first elected to office 40 years ago, but rather the broader universe of Republicans and conservatives that GOP primary voters might find trustworthy. Some media figures who were pro-Trump and anti-establishment in 2016 have begun to express reservations about Trump.

In 2016, of course, Trump famously bucked the wishes of the Republican “establishment” and undermined “The Party Decides” view of the race on his way to the nomination. But I think people should be a bit careful about overgeneralizing from that election. In 2016, the party never coalesced around an alternative to Trump; this year, they potentially have one in DeSantis. And every nomination contest has its own dynamic. As bad as “The Party Decides” looked in both the Republican and Democratic primaries in 2016 (given Sen. Bernie Sanders’s vigorous challenge to Hillary Clinton despite virtually zero party elite support) it did great in 2020, when Jim Clyburn and other party elites flocked to Joe Biden right around the South Carolina primary, and Biden rapidly won the nomination after having lost the first three contests. This time, Trump will not have the element of surprise that he and Sanders did in 2016.

We don’t know who GOP voters will see as the most “electable” candidate

From the standpoint of demonstrating the ability to win elections, the midterms couldn’t have gone any better for DeSantis. He won Florida by 19 points; the state has swung so far right during DeSantis’s time in office that it can no longer really be considered a swing state. By contrast, Trump-endorsed candidates like Mehmet Oz, Don Bolduc, Blake Masters lost key Senate races, while Herschel Walker has his work cut out for him in the Georgia runoff. The gap in candidate quality was plausibly responsible for costing Republicans control of the Senate.

The rebuttal I usually hear to this is that Republican voters must not care about electability since they nominated Trump in 2016. But polls of Republican voters throughout 2015 and 2016 consistently found they did see Trump as electable; in fact, they thought of him as the most electable candidate.

What’s going through the head of a typical Republican voter these days is hard to say. In the modern primary era,¹³ no previous general election loser has sought a party nomination.¹⁴ A party generally wants to move on from its losing candidates; it’s not like there were a ton of Democrats clamoring for Hillary Clinton to run again in 2020, for instance. But of course, GOP voters may not think of Trump as a loser given that a majority of Republicans believe Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. This all starts to get pretty weird: If you’re a Republican who does think the election was stolen, you still have to wrestle with the fact that Biden is president while DeSantis is beginning his second term in the Florida Governor’s Mansion.

We could go into more detail — it certainly won’t hurt DeSantis that Florida has a winner-take-all primary, for instance — but there will be plenty of time for that later. For now, both DeSantis and Trump look like extremely plausible nominees, and anyone else is a distant third.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/nate-silver-thinks-hypothetical-trump-desantis-race-fivethirtyeight-93378952

2024 Election

Why Trump Is Favored To Win The 2024 Republican Presidential Primary

The polls, and history, are on his side.

By Nathaniel Rakich

Nov. 15, 2022, at 9:33 PM

We don’t even know every result of 2022 yet, but the 2024 election has already begun. On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump announced that he would seek a second nonconsecutive term as president. While it’s too early to predict Trump’s chances of going all the way, the former president is the current favorite to win the Republican primary again. But nothing is assured.

First, Trump remains popular and influential among Republican voters. According to Civiqs, 80 percent of registered Republican voters have a favorable view of the former president, and only 11 percent have an unfavorable view. Admittedly, he is a little less popular than on Election Day 2020 when 91 percent viewed him favorably. But the decline has been gradual.

Republican voters also demonstrated their loyalty to Trump — or at least his vision for the party — when they nominated 82 percent of the nonincumbents he endorsed in contested Republican primaries for Senate, House and governor. 

Granted, that isn’t as impressive as it seems. Several times, Trump endorsed candidates who were already well on their way to winning. And Trump’s endorsees did fail to win certain highly watched contests, like the primary for Georgia governor. But just as often, Trump’s endorsement seemed to give a meaningful polling boost to its recipient. For example, Ohio Senate candidate and author J.D. Vance went from trailing in the polls before Trump’s endorsement to leading in almost every survey afterward. 

Trump also leads early polling of the Republican primary by a substantial margin. In most national surveys, he registers in the high 40s or low 50s, 20-30 points ahead of his closest competitor, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. (Though DeSantis is polling higher than he did earlier in the year.)

Finally, Trump leads in polls of early primary states, albeit generally by smaller margins. A poll of Iowa conducted by a pro-DeSantis group over the summer showed Trump leading DeSantis 38 percent to 17 percent. In August, a poll of New Hampshire conducted by Saint Anselm College put Trump up 50 percent to 29 percent. And most recently, Susquehanna Polling & Research found Trump at 41 percent and DeSantis at 34 percent in Nevada in late October.¹⁵

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/nate-silver-thinks-hypothetical-trump-desantis-race-fivethirtyeight-93378952

Obviously, we’re still more than a year away from anyone casting their votes, so those numbers could change. But an analysis by my colleague Geoffrey Skelley in 2019 found that national primary polls in the first half of the year before the election are pretty predictive of who will win the nomination. Historically, from 1972 to 2016, candidates with high name recognition who polled in the 40s and 50s nationally won the nomination more than 75 percent of the time.

But of course, 75 percent isn’t 100 percent, and we’re dealing with a small sample size here. In past presidential primaries, four candidates have polled, on average, between 40 and 60 percent in national polls in the first half of the year before the election. And three of them won their party’s nomination: then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole in 1996, then-Vice President Al Gore in 2000 and then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush in 2000. All three had feisty challengers — Dole and Bush each lost a handful of states — but they won easily in the end. It’s not too hard to imagine Trump following that same path in 2024.

On the other hand, then-Sen. Ted Kennedy lost the 1980 Democratic primary despite polling at an average of 47 percent in the first half of 1979. But he was also in a unique situation: He was primarying a sitting president, Jimmy Carter, who wasn’t that far behind him at 32 percent. Carter, of course, recovered to win the nomination that year. Still, Kennedy shows that Trump’s nomination isn’t inevitable. 

One crucial factor will be how many candidates run against Trump. Too many could divide the anti-Trump vote, making it easier for him to win. For example, in an October poll from YouGov/the Claremont McKenna College Rose Institute of State and Local Government, Trump led DeSantis 55 percent to 45 percent when the two were matched up head to head. But when other candidates (e.g., former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott) were included as options, Trump led DeSantis 55 percent to 33 percent.

Several potential 2024 contenders, including former Vice President Mike Pence and Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, have indicated that they may run regardless of what Trump does. So this scenario may come to pass. But even if they do run, they may not make it to the primaries, so the race may narrow to a head-to-head between Trump and DeSantis (or another candidate) regardless. This is one of the more significant sources of uncertainty for the 2024 GOP primary — will DeSantis (or another candidate) emerge from 2023’s “invisible primary” as the dominant non-Trump candidate, or will the field still be muddled?

Another source of uncertainty is the many ongoing investigations against Trump. True, Republicans so far have shown little concern over them, but if he is indicted, all bets are off the table, considering that that situation would be unprecedented. It’s plausible that an indictment could affect Republican voters’ perceptions of Trump’s electability in a general election.

When Trump announced his first presidential bid in 2015, we hadn’t seen a candidate quite like him, and his candidacy was difficult to handicap. Even though he began that campaign very unpopular among Republican voters and bitterly opposed by the GOP establishment, predictions of his political demise proved very wrong. Seven years later, Trump is still a unique political figure: A former president hasn’t sought a nonconsecutive second term or faced criminal investigation in generations, and Trump is doing both. This time, he starts the campaign as the front-runner, not the underdog. Still, the lesson is the same: Don’t be overconfident in your predictions. With Donald Trump, anything can happen.

Geoffrey Skelley contributed research.

Presidential hopefuls are already fundraising, traveling the country and crafting their messages for the 2024 election. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew hosts its first-ever Republican primary draft for 2024. (Stay tuned for a 2024 Democratic primary draft next week.)

They also consider whether airline passengers’ apparent eagerness to quit wearing a mask is proof that the polls showing a majority of Americans support airplane mask mandates are actually inaccurate.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

The conventional wisdom is that if former President Donald Trump wants the GOP presidential nomination in 2024, it’s his. But some Republicans are still jockeying for position to be the next leader of the party, the most prominent of which may be Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. He is considered to be in the political mold of Trump, just more disciplined. And this week DeSantis closed out a state legislative session full of conservative culture-war priorities that may well be geared toward a national audience. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke speaks with Florida reporters Ana Ceballos and Matt Dixon about where DeSantis falls ideologically, how he’s shaped state politics and how he could shape the Republican Party.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

sarah (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): We at FiveThirtyEight in no way mean to undermine the very real and lasting influence that former President Donald Trump has within the GOP, but we do want to probe whether his power might be overstated. 

From Republican senators calling for the cancellation of Trump’s event on the first anniversary of Jan. 6 to their defense of South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds when he said on ABC News that President Biden had won the 2020 presidential election — not Trump, as many Republicans have falsely claimed — there appear to be cracks emerging in Trump’s control of the party. Even Trump acolyte Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has criticized Trump’s COVID-19 restrictions, while the former president’s supporters have also booed him at rallies for encouraging people to get vaccinated.

Is it possible that Trump is losing his sway within the GOP? To tackle this question, let’s break it into three parts:

1. First, what evidence do we have that Republican elites — politicians, media personalities, etc. — might not be as firmly under Trump’s thumb?
2. Second, what evidence, if any, do we have that Republican voters might be souring on Trump?
3. Finally, what does this all mean for Trump’s status within the party? Is he losing his grip on the GOP?

Let’s start with Republican elites. What’s the case for — and the case against — them breaking more with Trump?

alex (Alex Samuels, politics reporter): To me, one case against breaking up with Trump is that there’s no obvious person who is ready to succeed him. And, as Nathaniel wrote in October, there’s still some appetite among the base for Trump to be involved in GOP politics. Moreover, and probably most importantly, there’s not a long list of GOP politicians who have disavowed Trump and been successful — in the short term at least.

On the flip side, there’s a case to be made for breaking up with him, too. As Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the Virginia governor’s race proved, Republicans in competitive — or even bluish — states can win if they attack identity politics without embracing Trump’s extremism. That could be a winning message for the party, especially if they’re looking to make inroads with voting blocs that Trump repelled, like women, voters of color and suburbanites.

kaleigh (Kaleigh Rogers, tech and politics reporter): Right, Alex, I think it is pretty apparent why DeSantis — who has been on a short list of presidential candidates for the GOP for a while now — might want to differentiate himself from Trump. Even if he is true to his word that he doesn’t plan to run in 2024, setting up a path to distinguish himself from the Trump era, wherever it may go, makes a lot of political sense.

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, senior elections analyst): Well, I’m the elections guy, so of course I’m going to go to an electoral example. 

In two special elections last year — for Texas’s 6th District and Ohio’s 15th District — Republican elites weren’t afraid to support candidates other than the ones endorsed by Trump. For instance, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry explained his support for the non-Trump-endorsed candidate in the state’s 6th Congressional District by saying Trump wasn’t fully informed about the differences between the candidates (kind of a slap in the face if you think about it!).

But I think it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees. Most Republicans are still following Trump’s lead by, for example, falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen and opposing efforts to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

meredithconroy (Meredith Conroy, political science professor at California State University, San Bernardino, and FiveThirtyEight contributor): Another place to look for hints of Trump’s weakness is GOP media. There’s little question that conservative media is, as historian Nicole Hemmer put it, “a coequal branch of party politics” among Republicans. But which conservative media currently wields the most influence is less obvious right now. For decades, conservative talk radio was influential behind the scenes, and then later Fox News was the most trusted source among Republicans. But after Trump lost and was critical of Fox News reporting on election night, it seemed like Fox News might be ready to break off from Trump. But the rise of newer media organizations like Newsmax and One America News Network (OANN) seem to be keeping Fox News on a Trump leash as they compete to keep their viewers. So, all this probably signals he has a strong hold.

kaleigh: Right, Meredith, and increasingly media is decentralized, so you have folks like Steve Bannon, who says his “War Room” podcasts and videos are streamed millions of times, and Alex Jones, whose audience is large enough to earn him millions of dollars in sales. Bannon is obviously a Trump loyalist, and Jones is a conspiracy theorist whose messaging promotes a lot of Trump’s claims, like the Big Lie. 

These are influential personalities who aren’t tacking away from Trump anytime soon. So even if Fox News starts to take a more critical stance on Trump — which I’m not convinced they have — that doesn’t necessarily mean Trump is less popular with the base. Nor is it indicative of an overall shift.

Basically, I’m saying Fox News is not the be-all and end-all of conservative media.

meredithconroy: That’s fair. And the fact that I wanted to call OANN and Newsmax Trumpian news sites shows just how strong Trump’s influence has continued to be.

kaleigh: Don’t forget Breitbart.

meredithconroy: But can Trumpian politics still be strong if Trump himself is weak? I think Alex’s comments point to yes.

kaleigh: We can cherry-pick a few examples, but I think that’s evidence that politicians are testing out different strategies rather than evidence that Trump himself is weaker.

alex: I was pretty shocked, though, that Trump’s criticism of Rounds didn’t really go anywhere. In fact, the South Dakota senator has doubled down and is encouraging other members of his party to reject the myth that the 2020 election was unfair.

I also think there’s evidence of a weakened Trump outside of conservative media and his relationships (or lack thereof) with various members of Congress.

nrakich: Well, Rounds is a major political figure in South Dakota, and he seems to be calculating that he isn’t vulnerable in a primary, which I’d be inclined to agree with. He’s also not up for reelection until 2026, so there’s plenty of time for his comments to fade into the mists of time. 

But, ultimately, I think all that the Rounds episode underscores is that other Republican elites have influence too — which was always true, IMO; they just haven’t flexed it very often.

kaleigh: There are good explanations for each of the examples other than “Republicans see Trump as weak and are starting to cut ties.” Nathaniel did a good job explaining what’s unique about Rounds’s case, and as I mentioned, DeSantis is also a unique case. 

If we started to see Trump loyalists vocally breaking ties, or Republican members of Congress who are facing primary challengers starting to pivot away from the former president, that would make me sit up in my chair. But we haven’t seen that.

meredithconroy: Regarding Trump’s criticism of Rounds, this is why I am glad that FiveThirtyEight is tracking Trump-endorsed primary candidates again this year. If candidates like Rounds do well, that’s a knock against Trump. I know Rounds isn’t up for reelection this cycle, but if Trump’s primary picks flail in 2022, I think that gives GOP leaders an out (insofar as they’re looking for an out).

On that point, maybe they don’t want an out. Former FiveThirtyEight senior writer Perry Bacon Jr. put it well: “The riot on Jan. 6 provided an opportunity for the Republican Party and therefore the country to begin to take an off-ramp from Trump himself and Trumpism. But Trump’s acquittal suggests that Republicans did not want to take that off-ramp — and that means the nation couldn’t either.”

kaleigh: Instead, Meredith, we saw the GOP (mostly) refuse to vote to impeach Trump for his role in Jan. 6 and to oppose the independent commission to investigate exactly what happened. It’s been clear over the past year that Republicans have no intention of using Jan. 6 as an off-ramp from Trump, as Perry put it.

But they would love to have Jan. 6 in the rearview mirror (if we want to just extend this driving metaphor for miles).

sarah: Kaleigh and Meredith bring up a good point here, and maybe we are cherry-picking a little. We haven’t, for instance, seen a watershed moment with Republican politicians breaking with Trump en masse (despite ample opportunity to do so), so maybe talking about Trump being weaker is all semantics without this type of reaction?

I’m not sure this is the right comparison to be making in the context of this chat, but The Bulwark recently published an article arguing that the GOP is experimenting with a dual-track strategy for winning elections. That is, in the primary, many Republicans run as far to the right as they can, talking up their connections to Trump, but then in the general election try to present themselves as more moderate, downplaying their connections to Trump. The case of Youngkin in Virginia is an example of this, as Alex mentioned earlier, but I’m curious to what extent we think Republicans might be using Trump versus kowtowing to him.

kaleigh: It’s really going to depend on the politician and the election. Someone like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose entire — winning — platform in 2020 was basically “I love Trump,” is unlikely to try to thread the needle. But in other districts, it will make sense for candidates to be choosy about when they embrace Trump and when they employ convenient amnesia. Youngkin did this pretty skillfully (and, clearly, successfully). He was endorsed by Trump and trotted that out for the right crowds while ignoring that fact and refusing to engage in some Trumpian rhetoric the rest of the time.

Just a small anecdote from my story on Greene’s campaign: She rented a Trump bus and carried around a cardboard cutout of him on her campaign stops. This is the opposite of the “parallel” strategy noted in the Bulwark article.

alex: But what it takes to win Greene’s district is different from what it takes for, say, Youngkin to win a bluish state like Virginia.

In other words, their opposing strategies make total sense for those very specific races. I completely agree with what Kaleigh is saying here.

meredithconroy: So, I think I am failing at this because I interpret every instance where Trump is held back (e.g., canceling his Jan. 6 event, not stumping for Youngkin) as an indicator of his weakness, but maybe that’s wrong!

alex: No, Meredith, I’m on your team!  

meredithconroy: As you all are saying, just because Trump’s politics don’t work in Virginia doesn’t mean he is weak.

kaleigh: There’s no right or wrong interpretation, Meredith! But, yes, you are wrong and I am right.

alex: LOL

kaleigh:

meredithconroy: Hahaha. Yes, I know, Alex! We must defeat Kaleigh.  

alex: I’ll try to articulate my case for “Trump is weaker than some want to believe.” For starters, there are factors working against him now: He’s hampered by the fact that he has no social-media presence, and as I pointed out in March, you have rising stars like DeSantis making a name for themselves and pushing for Trumpian policies without having some of the same baggage that the former president does. 

It’s also pretty telling that Trump himself doesn’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that he’s the GOP presidential nominee in 2024. According to The New York Times, he was annoyed that DeSantis didn’t state publicly that he wouldn’t run for president if Trump did. To me, that’s a sign that Trump mainly wants to clear the field of potential opposition. I by no means think Trump is dead, but do I think his grip on the GOP is loosening since he left office? Absolutely.

sarah: OK, we’ve talked a lot about how Trump’s grasp has maybe weakened among GOP elites, but what about rank-and-file voters? Trump has long been popular among Republican voters. Has that changed?

nrakich: According to Civiqs, which has tracked Trump’s favorability ratings for years, his popularity among Republicans has ticked down since he left office. But to be clear, Republicans still love him: 85 percent have a favorable opinion of him, while just 8 percent have an unfavorable rating.

Notably, too, that unfavorable rating hasn’t really increased; instead, Republicans are switching from “favorable” to “unsure.” That’s hardly turning their back on Trump.

In addition, as Alex mentioned earlier, I wrote in October about how Republicans overwhelmingly want him to run for president again.

To quote from that article: “By a 67 percent to 29 percent margin, Republican registered voters told Morning Consult/Politico that Trump should run again, including 51 percent who said he should ‘definitely’ run. A HarrisX/The Hill poll from Oct. 13-14 similarly found that Republican registered voters supported a third consecutive Trump candidacy 77 percent to 23 percent, including 52 percent who ‘strongly’ supported it. And Quinnipiac found that 78 percent of Republicans would like to see Trump run again, and only 16 percent would not.”

So, again, I really think it’s missing the forest for the trees to say that Trump is getting weaker within the GOP. Maybe slightly, but he is still ridiculously strong.

alex: One semi-recent data point that I found pretty striking, from a September Pew Research Center poll, said just 44 percent of Republicans wanted Trump to run for president again — and 32 percent said they wanted him out of the national political sphere for years to come! 

Something else that stuck with me is this January NBC News poll (h/t Nathaniel) of Republicans who were asked whether they’re more a supporter of Trump or more a supporter of the Republican Party: 56 percent said the GOP, and 36 percent said Trump, which is the lowest number for him ever recorded in this poll.

But according to a CNN/SSRS poll in August and September, Republicans appeared split on a Trump run in 2024: 51 percent said the GOP had a better shot at reclaiming the White House with Trump as their presidential nominee, while 49 percent thought someone else would give the party a better chance. And, as CNN wrote in its write-up of the poll, these numbers still vary drastically from the ones recorded in 2019, when over three-quarters of Republicans said they had the best shot of winning in 2020 with Trump at the top of the ticket.

meredithconroy: Nathaniel, are there any more recent polls for this question? It is fascinating to me to see a presidential candidate who lost still have so much appeal and influence on his party, although we know that not everyone believes he lost.

kaleigh: Meredith, an Economist/YouGov poll from Jan. 15-18 found that 78 percent of Republicans had a favorable view of Trump.

meredithconroy: Ah, yes, that is high.

kaleigh: And of those Republicans, 58 percent said they had a “very” favorable view of Trump.

nrakich: A Morning Consult/Politico poll from last month also found that 70 percent of Republicans “definitely” or “probably” want Trump to run for president again in 2024. Forty-nine percent said “definitely.”

sarah: Perhaps, what’s most challenging about this is there isn’t currently a strong alternative to Trump looking ahead to 2024 polls. And at least as far as the past two presidential elections go, the nominee hasn’t been a surprise (on both the GOP and Democratic sides), which is perhaps one reason why Trump still feels like such a serious heavyweight?

meredithconroy: Definitely, Sarah. And it is fair to assume that the reason there isn’t a strong challenger is that Trump is still the default leader of the party, right?

kaleigh: Polling certainly shows Republicans continue to prefer Trump as the 2024 candidate. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll from the end of last year, 54 percent of Republicans picked Trump as their preferred candidate from a list of choices that included DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence and former U.N ambassador Nikki Haley. No other candidate named broke more than 11 percent.

alex: There’s arguably no obvious successor in the GOP if Trump is out. But 2022 is a referendum on Trump just as much as on Biden, and voters’ verdicts on Trump will come in competitive races like the ones in Georgia and Alabama. As Nathaniel and former FiveThirtyEight politics intern Mackenzie Wilkes wrote last month, Trump had already endorsed nearly 50 candidates in Republican primaries, and I believe his record in these races will serve as a decent barometer of whether he has lasting strength in the GOP or whether he’ll ultimately fade out.

kaleigh: The GOP knows who their voters like. After the Jan. 6 attack, we did see a tiny glimmer suggesting Republicans might start to break with Trump. But it’s my view that as soon as polling showed voters hadn’t wavered in their support, any inkling of that was quickly extinguished.

meredithconroy: I agree with Alex, though, that 2022 could loosen Trump’s grip on the party.

nrakich: I don’t know about that, Alex. I think Trump’s “win rate” in Republican primaries will almost certainly decrease this year, and a lot of pundits will probably use that to try to claim that Trump’s hold on the party is weakening. But, really, I think it will be more reflective of the fact that Trump’s endorsement strategy has changed. He is endorsing a lot more candidates who are longer shots to win, whereas before he mostly just endorsed incumbents and other candidates who were sure to win, likely in an attempt to pad his own statistics.

In other words, I think Trump’s hold on the party was never as strong as his 98 percent win rate in past primaries implied. But, to be clear, it’s still strong.

alex: Hmm, I guess what I’m trying to say is that if Trump fails in 2022, that could give other Republicans an opening to replace him in 2024 (not a given, but a possibility).

sarah: I also think whether Trump changed his endorsement strategy is a little beside the point if his track record this year is abysmal … that still says something!

nrakich: Sure, Sarah, if his endorsement win rate is 20 percent, that will be telling. But I think it will be closer to, say, 80 percent.

sarah: OK, time for everyone’s final verdict. Has Trump’s grip on the GOP loosened?

kaleigh: Honestly, if I’m answering that question, Sarah, I’ll say yes. I don’t think I can argue that Trump’s influence in the GOP is exactly the same as it was when he was in the White House, or still on Twitter, or at various other points in his history as the party leader. 

But do I think Trump is weak? No. There’s very little evidence that the handful of politicians mildly butting heads with Trump is indicative of a wider shift, and when you consider just how beloved Trump remains among Republican voters, it’s hard to imagine the party turning its back on its base.

nrakich: I guess relatively speaking, yes, cracks in his Teflon (ewww, mixed metaphor) are starting to show, mostly because elites are starting to probe around the edges of what Trump criticism they can get away with. But I don’t think anything has fundamentally changed. I think Republican elites always had more power than they thought they did (if they cared to use it), and I still think Trump is an extremely powerful figure within the Republican Party who still has the power to end careers and waltz to the 2024 nomination — if he wants to do those things.

alex: Eh, I stand by my original statement that Trump is weaker than some would like to admit. That said, I could easily change my mind given what happens in certain primaries over the next few months.

I truly think the full extent of Trump’s power will be measured by whether he can persuade voters to reject these three incumbents: Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp.

kaleigh: Alex, you maybe won in the end, lol.

meredithconroy: Here is where I come down on this: If someone like DeSantis or Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw or Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley said they were running and decided they didn’t want to wait for Trump, do we think that candidate would break through? 

I think the response to that is a good indicator of whether Trump is strong or whether he is just a guy who was in the right place (2016 election against an unpopular woman) at the right time (weak GOP party). My view is that if someone credible stepped up, Trump would be displaced, but the fact that no one is willing to do that is telling, too.

Pollsters are already turning their attention to the 2024 election, and they want to know whether Americans want a rematch between President Biden and former President Donald Trump. Polls show that solid majorities of U.S. adults — in the range of about 60 to 70 percent — don’t want either to run next time. But, of course, presidential nominations are party affairs, and Republicans and Democrats will have to decide that for themselves.

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew debates whether 2024 primary polling can tell us anything this far out from any primary race. And they review the results of our informal, unscientific poll asking readers when they think each season begins.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/time-pay-attention-2024-polls-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-81457313

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/parties-thankful-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-81343950

However, the nightmarish hellscape that was the Iowa caucuses in the 2020 Democratic primary — the Iowa Democratic Party released barely any results the night of the caucuses because of technical problems — heightened calls for ending Iowa’s reign as the first state to vote in the primary calendar.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/bipartisan-democrats-infrastructure-plan-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-76891337

But in some ways, the push to bump Iowa and New Hampshire from the start of the primary process has long been picking up steam among Democrats. Iowa and New Hampshire are two very white states — 85 to 90 percent of each state’s population is non-Hispanic white — and in 2020 neither state did much to influence the nomination race for a party that is now about 40 percent nonwhite. Now-President Biden won the Democratic primary despite finishing fourth in the Iowa caucuses and fifth in New Hampshire’s primary.

Yet the mounting opposition to Iowa and New Hampshire voting first might not be enough to actually depose them. Ultimately, state parties and/or governments decide the timing of their caucuses or primaries. And while the national party can encourage these decision-makers to schedule their contests on certain dates, it cannot unilaterally impose its will on the primary calendar. Moreover, because Republicans seem intent on keeping the two states in prime position for the 2024 campaign, it might be even more difficult for Democrats to make any changes.

It’s true, though, that Iowa and New Hampshire are not representative of the Democratic electorate. Back in 2019, we used data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study,¹⁶ a survey of more than 50,000 people conducted by YouGov in conjunction with Harvard University, to reorder Democrats’ primary calendar based on the similarity of each state’s Democratic electorate to the party’s nationwide voter base. We found that Iowa and New Hampshire ranked in the bottom half of states in terms of how representative they were of the Democratic Party’s voters, and thus would vote near the end of the primary season.¹⁷ (This analysis uses data from the 2016 presidential election, but considering how highly correlated the 2016 and 2020 presidential contests were, it’s hard to imagine the order would change that much if we had final 2020 data, which we don’t.)¹⁸

Instead of the current order, a state like Illinois or New Jersey should go first by our calculations. That might be a hard sell, of course, considering a state like New Jersey has often voted at the end of the primary process, and underdog candidates would prefer not to run ads in the expensive media markets of Chicago, New York and Philadelphia. 

As another option, Democrats have floated moving up Nevada, which ranked fifth in our similarity calculation and has been an early-voting state since 2008. Nevada Democrats, who have full control of state government, are even considering legislation to establish a state-run primary to try and jump ahead of New Hampshire, but it’s unclear whether such legislation, which has failed before in Nevada, will pass. (South Carolina is another leading alternative among Democrats, given it’s also an early-voting state and is one of the few states in the Democratic primary with a majority-Black primary electorate. It also proved vital to Biden’s nomination in 2020.) Some Democrats even like the idea of promoting Pennsylvania, a pivotal swing state that ranked just behind Nevada in our analysis. However, in previous years Pennsylvania leaders have been reluctant to schedule an earlier date for the state’s consolidated primary, where it holds primaries for president and other offices on the same day.

And Pennsylvania’s logistical concerns underscore one of the fundamental challenges to supplanting Iowa and New Hampshire: Doing so will require cooperation among the national parties, state parties and — in the case of state-run primaries — state governments, which is no easy task because these actors often have conflicting goals.

Although the Democratic National Committee can try to encourage states to schedule their contests in certain calendar windows with various carrots and sticks — like handing out delegate bonuses or penalties — they can’t force states to cooperate. And Iowa and New Hampshire have no interest in giving up their valuable calendar real estate, which, beyond its outsized political influence, is also worth millions of dollars to each state’s local economy.

Take New Hampshire, where state law gives Secretary of State Bill Gardner unilateral power to move the primary date as necessary to protect the state’s distinction of hosting the cycle’s first presidential primary. This has arguably been Gardner’s raison d’être during his four-plus decades in office, as he’s gone pretty far to keep New Hampshire first. Ahead of the 2012 GOP presidential primary, for instance, multiple states moved their primary dates up, which prompted Gardner to threaten that he’d schedule New Hampshire’s contest in December 2011 if he had to. And in an age where there’s little bipartisanship on most issues, maintaining New Hampshire’s privileged place unites Democratic and Republican leaders in the Granite State, so if Nevada does switch to a primary and tries to schedule it before New Hampshire’s primary, Gardner will just pick an even earlier date.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/elections-watch-2021-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-76825753

Democratic efforts to shake up the primary calendar would probably be more feasible if Republicans were on board, but there’s little sign they are. Republican Party chairs from Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada are banding together to protect their “carve-out” spots at the front of the line, and potential 2024 Republican presidential contenders aren’t anticipating radical shifts, as they’re already visiting Iowa and New Hampshire. 

One reason for the GOP’s apparent lack of interest in changing the schedule may be that it has fewer concerns than Democrats about these two states being representative: Using 2016 CCES data, we found Iowa ranked as the sixth-most representative state for Republicans, based on educational attainment and “born-again” religious identification — although New Hampshire also ranked in the bottom half of all states.

Democrats may still try to relegate Iowa’s caucuses after the messy 2020 event, and some Iowa Democrats have acknowledged they will have to fight to hold onto their spot. But because the GOP isn’t moving to supplant Iowa, attempts at the wholesale changes many Democrats want may be a bridge too far.

Now, moving Iowa’s caucuses wouldn’t be as involved as moving the primary in New Hampshire because they are a party-run event and don’t involve the state government. But even if the DNC heavily penalizes Iowa and New Hampshire for going first by reducing or even eliminating their delegates, it risks a situation where Republicans are still competing first in those states. This could prompt Democrats in those states to still hold their contests at the same time as Republicans, hoping the inevitably intense media coverage of the races preserves their influence over the overall nomination race.

At this early vantage point, we can’t say what the primary schedule will look like in 2024, or if Democrats will even have a competitive race. (Biden has said he plans to seek reelection, but he’ll be 81 years old in 2024.) But what we can say at this point is that making major alterations to the nomination calendar has never been easy — if it were, things would’ve changed already. And attempts to remove the two states that have long had a stranglehold on the top rung might prove to be especially messy.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/voting-restrictions-states-76759234

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/reason-gop-make-harder-people-vote-silver-76734563

sarah (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): We’re still more than three years away from November 2024, which means we have no idea who is actually running in 2024 — although we are already busy watching what potential candidates do — but it’s not too early for us to make some terrible (and not so terrible) picks as to who will win the 2024 GOP nomination in our first waaaayyy too early 2024 draft.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/senate-democrats-voted-raising-minimum-wage-76340709

It’s been a while, so the rules are as follows: Four rounds, so between the five of us, 20 potential 2024 Republican nominees, and we’ll be doing a snake-style draft. And remember, the goal is to pick the actual nominee.

The order is:

1. Geoffrey
2. Nathaniel
3. Alex
4. Nate
5. Sarah

And I used random.org to determine the order (so it’s clearly not rigged).

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): I get the boring pick.

sarah: It’s so funny to me that everyone thinks there is already an obvious choice for 2024.

alex (Alex Samuels, politics reporter): Don’t steal my pick, Nathaniel!

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): I’m stealing it, Alex!

sarah: Alright, Geoffrey. You’re up!! What is this obvious pick of yours? 

alex:

geoffrey.skelley: The Republican Party is currently the party of one Donald J. Trump. So while we’re still a couple years away from presidential campaign announcements, I think I have to pick the former president. 

It’s too early to go crazy about polls, but Morning Consult found in February that 59 percent of Republicans want Trump to have a major role in the party, and a majority also said they’d support him in a primary against many of the leading GOP alternatives. 

The last time a defeated president ran as a party’s nominee four years later was in 1892, when Democrat Grover Cleveland ran again after losing reelection in 1888. Perhaps we’re due for another comeback. Trump himself is teasing a run, so I’m going to take the idea seriously.

sarah: I should have known this was coming as a Round 1 pick, but I guess I just don’t buy that taking a page out of Cleveland’s playbook is a good electoral move. That said, Trump certainly has surprised me before.

nrakich: Yeah, to me, the biggest question is whether Trump runs again. If he does, I think he would clear the field of all other serious candidates (other than perhaps an anti-Trump protest candidate, like Bill Weld in 2020). If we’ve learned anything from the last four years, it’s that other Republicans are scared to go up against Trump lest his loyal followers turn on them.

sarah: I’m not so sure about that. I think there still would be a melee. It isn’t a scientific poll, but I thought it was telling that far more CPAC attendees (95 percent) wanted Trump’s policies/agenda to survive than for him to run again (68 percent). And yes, 68 percent is a lot, but considering CPAC had a gold statue of Trump… support could have been much higher.

But OK, you’re up, Nathaniel!

geoffrey.skelley: Now things will get interesting.

nrakich: With the second pick of the draft, I choose Sen. Ted Cruz. 

President Biden’s victory in the 2020 Democratic primary made me think a lot about the value of name recognition and starting off with a known brand. 

And right now, other than Trump, there are only a handful of Republicans who have near-universal national name recognition (as measured by polls asking whether people have an opinion of them): Cruz, Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell … and McConnell is obviously not running for president. So between Cruz and Pence, I think Cruz is a much more dynamic campaigner and more willing to emulate Trump’s bomb-throwing style. So he gets the edge for me.

alex: You didn’t take my pick, but I’m surprised you put him as No. 2 considering how disliked he is in GOP circles.  

nrakich: But that’s the thing: He’s not! According to an article I wrote in early February, he has a 69 percent favorable rating among Republicans and only a 17 percent unfavorable rating. 

alex: His approval among Republicans took a nosedive post-Cancún, right? Plus, I thought the close O’Rourke-Cruz race said a lot about Cruz’s likability here in Texas. That said, I do think he would be a formidable challenger for his party’s nomination.

nrakich: It actually didn’t decrease that much, Alex. It’s now at 60 percent favorable, 25 percent unfavorable, per YouGov/The Economist. And I bet that will rebound as the Cancún “scandal” fades from memory.  

sarah: Yeah, I think part of what we forget here (I do, anyway) is that Republican voters have long liked Cruz much more than his fellow Republican lawmakers.

geoffrey.skelley: The GOP also has a history of nominating former runner-ups in primaries, so Cruz would fit into this pattern after his 2016 bid. See Mitt Romney in 2012 after his run in 2008 and John McCain in 2008 after coming up short in 2000.  

sarah: OK, Alex, you’re up!

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/cpac-broader-republican-party-agree-trumps-party-now-76190882

alex: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. We know he’s a rising star in GOP circles and I think the CPAC straw poll (though flawed) pointed out his popularity among the Trump wing of the Republican Party. Another poll, too, revealed that DeSantis topped the list of potential contenders in 2024 after Trump. (With Trump removed as an option, DeSantis garnered 22 percent support, while Cruz came in at 19 percent.)

Plus, being from Florida gives him an edge in a competitive state. To me, it appears that at this point, people like DeSantis because his policy priorities are similar to Trump’s, but he lacks the former president’s ego and baggage. 

sarah: Stole my first round pick!!  

geoffrey.skelley: DeSantis isn’t terribly well known, but I suspect we’ll see him try to correct for that in the coming months. He may be coy for a while about his plans, though, because he needs to win reelection in 2022, and we know that would-be candidates want to take care of the home front first.

nrakich: Yeah, I think DeSantis is a smart pick. He’s doing all the right things — picking fights with Democrats, going on Fox News a lot …

sarah: Could not agree more. There is no autopsy report yet of the 2020 election from the GOP side (and I doubt we’ll ever get one), but one thing that stands out to me is something Echelon Insights pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson wrote for the Washington Examiner in February, “Trump’s legacy in the party isn’t policy, and it isn’t a person. It’s a posture — a fighting posture in a moment where Republicans think the fight is what matters most.” 

I bring that up because something Anderson and her organization have found is that many GOP voters want someone who will fight for them.

And I think you saw DeSantis really lean into that “I’ll fight for you” mode at CPAC. He distanced himself from the GOP establishment, saying he’ll never allow the return of “the failed Republican establishment of yesteryear.” And he signaled his readiness for a fight when he said, “When the left comes after you, will you stay strong? Or will you fall?”

But OK, you’re up, Nate.

natesilver: I’ll take former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley.

nrakich: LOL

alex: Ooooof Nate …

nrakich: I’m pretty sure Nate is trolling?

natesilver: No!

sarah: Damn it! That was my other first-round pick.

geoffrey.skelley: I think that’s a reasonable pick.

nrakich: OMG

alex: I’m #TeamNathaniel here.

natesilver: Why would I be trolling?

nrakich: She was literally last on my board.

geoffrey.skelley: Nah, that’s Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, aka Jon Huntsman Jr. 2.0 — a moderate media favorite with really no chance of winning the GOP nomination.

nrakich: (Larry Hogan wasn’t even on my board.)

natesilver: She’s third on PredictIt.

nrakich: That right there is reason not to pick Haley, Nate!

natesilver: LOL

sarah: But OK, OK. Why Haley?

natesilver: I think you folks are too confident that a Trumpist is going to win.

I mean yeah, probably … but three years is a long time, and she’s probably the most compelling non-Trumpist, especially if the GOP sees itself as making continued gains with nonwhite voters.

geoffrey.skelley: Haley also has the potential to win over the “somewhat conservative” bloc that often decides GOP nominations. While the party has grown more conservative, those were still the voters who helped push Trump into first in 2016.

sarah: And excluding Pence, Haley is about as qualified as they come. She has an impressive resume. She also managed to be loyal to Trump without always agreeing with him, which is also pretty impressive.

alex: Haley criticized Trump at some points, though, so I don’t think she’d get far in a primary (assuming a Trumpy candidate wins).

nrakich: Haley is also the exact kind of candidate who appeals to media elites but not actual primary voters. I don’t think voters are looking for a kinder, gentler tone like the one Haley offers.

natesilver: But what happens if the GOP has a bad 2022? Say, sort of a replay of some of the Senate races from the Tea Party era where they nominate a bunch of wacky Trumpist candidates and lose races they should have won?

At that point, “electability” becomes kind of a thing.

sarah: Speaking of electability … I’m up ….

geoffrey.skelley: Sarah, you get two picks, in fact.

alex:

geoffrey.skelley:

sarah: Oh, even better. I’m going to lay out two different directions for the party. Nate already stole my thunder a little here — not to mention, both Alex and Nate swooped in on my picks — but in continuing with the idea that we’re all still a little drunk off CPAC when it comes to divining the future of the GOP, I think there’s a real possibility that the GOP takes a page out of the Democrats’ playbook and nominates a more middle-of-the-road candidate in 2024. And who is more middle of the road than Mike Pence?

I know he upset some Trump diehards by refusing to block the certification of the election results on Jan. 6, but he survived all four years in the Trump administration — no easy feat — by being Trump’s right-hand man and more “respectable” counterpart. He lent an air of legitimacy to every Trump tweet, so while the pieces that he’ll be a weak candidate are already coming, I’m not so sure that’s true.

He certainly doesn’t have the charisma of Trump, but he might be able to unite the party in a way so that Republicans can win. And he certainly is thinking about running. He’s speaking in South Carolina next month. He’s also the second after Trump by a large margin in a Morning Consult poll that asks who people would vote for if the Republican primary was held today.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/confidence-interval-republicans-win-back-congress-2022-fivethirtyeight-76005297

natesilver: Good pick.

nrakich: Yeah, Pence has led almost every 2024 poll so far that hasn’t included Trump. It goes back to what I said earlier about name recognition — a lot of the time, the early front-runner wins and you don’t have to overthink it.  

geoffrey.skelley: Pence was my No. 2 pick for these reasons. Plus, vice presidents who run for the presidency have a pretty good history of winning nominations! Think of Joe Biden, Al Gore, George H.W. Bush, Walter Mondale. As Nathaniel wrote back in 2019, it’s often been a successful stepping stone to the presidency.

alex: Not bad, Sarah! But to play devil’s advocate: If Trump doesn’t run, but the GOP is still the party of Trump in 2022 or 2024, would someone who didn’t overturn the election go far?

sarah: Excellent point, Alex, which brings me to my second pick. Pence isn’t the most charismatic, and as has been pointed out, the idea that the GOP moves in a more moderate direction might not be the direction the party is interested in heading in. And while I know some like Geoffrey are convinced that Trump is gonna pull a Cleveland and run again — as I said up top, I don’t buy it — I think Republicans are going to be OK with someone else at the top of the ticket as long as they stick to Trump’s agenda. And if I’m right, who better than Trump’s eldest son, the heir apparent?

If “cancel culture” is going to be a huge flash point moving forward — and the GOP certainly wants it to be, even if many Americans don’t know what it is — he has the bona fides. From long taunting liberals as fragile snowflakes, he just wrote “Triggered” in 2019 and “Liberal Privilege” in 2020, both of which are diatribes about how the Democratic Party is radical and seeks to silence conservative voices. 

It’s grievance politics 2.0 that maybe has the potential to win back Republicans in the suburbs.

geoffrey.skelley: Oh man. DJTJ?

alex: AHHHH, Sarah, you stole my pick!

natesilver: Do Americans like political dynasties?

nrakich: My main doubt about Don Jr. is that I’m just not sure he will run. But yes, if he does run, he would obviously have his father’s support and that would go a long way.

alex: Wow, Nathaniel and I really are on the same team so far! I don’t think Don Jr. is going to run either.

nrakich: Except for Cruz

alex: Well, you were WRONG there, clearly!!!!

geoffrey.skelley: Back to Nate.

natesilver: Gov. Kristi Noem is my second-round pick. Consider she came in second behind DeSantis in that non-Trump CPAC poll.

sarah: Good pick. Maybe even a better pick than Haley?

nrakich: A nonscientific, totally unpredictive poll!

But yeah, not a bad pick. Noem is also from South Dakota, which is right across the river from … Iowa! (And the most Republican part of Iowa, too.)

We also know Trump likes her: He has called on her to primary Sen. John Thune in 2022. (She says she’s not interested.)  

geoffrey.skelley: Yeah, she’s certainly becoming a favorite among the Trump crowd, and during the 2020 election she even popped up in Iowa, among other states.

natesilver: Well, I also think that there are some complicated dynamics where GOP voters feel as though they’re better insulated from charges of racism and sexism if the party doesn’t nominate a white man.

So it’s not a total coincidence that my first two picks are women.

But yes, she’s also become a sort of “star” for the right-wing crowd during the pandemic. The issue for both her and DeSantis is that the pandemic could fade as an issue by 2024.

nrakich: I agree with you on the racism point, Nate. But Republican women have a really hard time getting elected, in part because they are perceived as more moderate than men.

sarah: OK, Alex, you’re up!

alex: Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley. He says he’s not running, but as Geoffrey mentioned earlier this week, that really doesn’t matter this early on. And he’s clearly laying the groundwork for a 2024 run. Hawley could be the new anti-establishment guy and he’s already attempting to make a play for Trump’s base: He voted against certifying the Electoral College results and he’s trying to appeal to working-class voters, which could help bolster the GOP’s recent pivot to the party of the working class. 

(Please don’t roast me.)

geoffrey.skelley: Every move Hawley makes screams “I’m running,” even if he’s not saying it out loud. He’s voted against more Biden Cabinet nominees than any other senator, for instance.

natesilver: My critique is mainly aesthetic, which is that I think Hawley comes across as phony.

sarah: Hawley is Paul Ryan 2.0 in the sense that he’s the wunderkind conservative (he made Time’s 100 in 2019, with Cruz writing that he is “a force to be reckoned with”). And as Bill Scher wrote for Politico in early January, Hawley’s whole gambit is that he can take Trump’s populist vision and turn it into a governing vision, but as Scher also pointed out, being the chosen conservative intellectual elite doesn’t necessarily translate into primary votes.

And so yeah, that’s why Hawley’s biggest liability can be pretty much boiled down to what Nate said: Hawley won’t be able to move outside of the wonk territory, and will be perceived as a phony by many primary voters.

alex: I personally think Hawley (if he runs) could do better than Cruz.

nrakich: His name recognition and favorability are kinda meh, too. Only 51 percent of Republicans have an opinion of him: 35 percent favorable, 16 percent unfavorable.

geoffrey.skelley: Plenty of time to change that, though. How well known he is in, say, the middle of 2023 will be important.

sarah: Nathaniel, you’re up!

nrakich: I’ll go with South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott. To me, this is the “smart” Haley pick — as Nate said, I think a lot of Republicans will like the idea of nominating a person of color because it can be used to shield them against accusations of racism. But unlike Haley, Scott has not explicitly broken with Trump (and he can still probably appeal to moderate Republicans).  

sarah: His speech at the RNC last year was just so powerful: “Our family went from cotton to Congress in one lifetime,” he said, recounting how his grandfather had been forced out of third grade to pick cotton, but Scott (his grandson) ended up in Congress — representing South Carolina, a notoriously hard state for a Black politician to win statewide in.

That would, indeed, be a powerful message for the GOP to channel in 2024. The only thing that gives me pause is I kind of believe Scott when he says that his 2022 reelection bid will be his last. That’s probably naive, but I’ve gotten the sense in interviews he’s done with all the politics and being the lone Black Republican. 

natesilver: Good pick, although I think he’ll be seen as part of the establishment.

Again, though, I’m not as convinced as the rest of you that the establishment is dead for 2024.

sarah: Hey, I picked Pence!

It’s too soon to say the establishment is — or isn’t — dead, but I do think a super-crowded field where the candidates hash this out is unavoidable.

geoffrey.skelley: My next two picks share a taste of both the unexpected and the traditional presidential fare. 

With the last pick of the second round, I’m taking Tucker Carlson, Fox News host extraordinaire. Carlson isn’t Trump, but his stature in the media business echoes some of Trump’s appeal circa 2016 as a big-time star. 

Carlson has the highest-rated primetime cable news show in TV history and over the years, his politics have shifted from a more libertarian-conservative ethos to a thoroughly Trumpy worldview. He’s denied interest, but we know that doesn’t mean much at this point.  

alex: F*@$ YOU STOLE MY PICK. 

geoffrey.skelley: I couldn’t resist. Carlson is such a huge media star on the right now that if he decided to go for it, he’d have a natural base of support — assuming, of course, Trump isn’t running.

sarah: What’s your next pick, Geoffrey?

geoffrey.skelley: On the flip side, I’m going to take former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. He spent much of his time in Trump’s Cabinet visiting far-off destinations like … Iowa. So you know he wants to run. And interestingly, the most recent poll I could find on his favorability from December 2019 put him as both well-known and well-liked among Republicans, with 60 percent favorable and 12 percent unfavorable. Pompeo was especially engaged with issues related to Israel, which would appeal to evangelical Christian voters, too.

Not to mention, he’s also very connected to Trump and tried to maintain the farce that Trump might get a second term despite having lost.

alex: That was also my next pick … 

nrakich: Interesting. I didn’t realize he was so well known.

sarah: He certainly seems to already be signaling his own ambitions. This is a countdown to Election Day 2024 he tweeted out the day after Inauguration Day 2021:

But alright, Nathaniel, you’re up again? Is that how this works? ( drafts are too long.) 

nrakich: I pick Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Popular governor of a delegate-rich state.

alex: I hate to burst your bubble there … but Abbott is not … my top pick.

nrakich: Oooh. Given your experience covering Texas politics, that actually does make me think twice …

natesilver: I mean, to us non-Texans, Texas feels like it’s sort of a success story.

alex: Texans are probably more in favor of a DeSantis/Noem type, I’d think, especially during the pandemic. Anyways: I’ll go with Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton. This is a controversial take, I know. But he’s firmly in the Trump wing of the party (save for refusing to join some Republicans in the Electoral College challenge), which could be good in a GOP primary. And what’s working in his favor, besides the obvious Trumpism, is he’s an Army vet and checks off conservative boxes on almost all the major issues. 

BUT I get he’s controversial because of the New York Times op-ed he wrote in June.

geoffrey.skelley: That op-ed, though, which argued that Trump should use the military to subdue protests following the police killing of George Floyd, is probably the kind of position that’ll win some votes in a GOP primary.

nrakich: Yeah, I don’t think Cotton is a bad pick, but he’s … not very charismatic, to put it kindly.

sarah: I was going to say, we’ve been debating a little here about the value of “establishment” picks vs. more Trumpy picks, and I’d argue nobody straddles this better than Cotton: He courts news media like The New York Times for his op-eds but still has a very conservative, Trump-aligned track record overall.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/republicans-voted-convict-trump-fivethirtyeight-75935525

natesilver: I think he’s got as much charisma as a dead fish.

nrakich:

alex: Rude! But I do think Cotton has some likability issues too, like Cruz.

sarah: OK, Nate, you’re up.

natesilver: I mean, we’ve really worked though most of the good picks here, I think.

sarah: Lowering our expectations?

nrakich: There are 2-3 good ones left, IMO.

natesilver: I guess I’ll go with IVANKA.

nrakich: That was not one of them.

sarah: Damn it!

natesilver: I’m not proud of the pick, but it was my duty.

geoffrey.skelley: I think we should make sure to take all of Trump’s children here with the final picks, just to be safe come 2024.

alex: Have 3/4 of your picks been women, Nate?

sarah: It’s true that Ivanka and Jared are now essentially social pariahs among the Manhattan elite, but I think it’s a smart pick. There’s still an opportunity for her in the party, especially if Don Jr. sits it out. 

This is an old piece from Anne Helen Peterson, but I think she captured the essence of the Ivanka voter so well, and that we shouldn’t count her out as a way for the GOP to win back the suburbs … 

alex: Yeah, Ivanka could help win over the suburban women that her dad lost.

geoffrey.skelley: Plus, Ivanka Trump isn’t running against Marco Rubio in the 2022 Florida Senate primary, so maybe she’s set her sights on something higher …

sarah: Alright, I’m up twice now — but LIGHTNING ROUND, TIME

natesilver: Oh no, there’s ANOTHER round?

geoffrey.skelley: Got to get an even number of picks for everyone. Someone has to take Hogan for the eye-rolls (I’m not actually taking Hogan).  

sarah: OK, it’s telling that he’s only coming up now in the draft, but Rubio is definitely testing the waters for another run (that tweet won’t make sense if you somehow mercifully missed “Neanderthal”-gate, so read up on that there). And given the GOP gains among Hispanic voters in 2020, especially in Florida and Texas, it might be good for the party to lean into this part of its base.

I’m just not so sure that Rubio (or Cruz) has proven that they have any special ability when it comes to winning Hispanic voters.

geoffrey.skelley: Rubio is a good value pick this late in the draft. He’s definitely pondering another run — it’s rare for a former candidate to lose the presidential bug — and may still have some of the appeal that made us think he was a strong option in the 2016 primary before he stumbled there.

natesilver: I burned up all my faith in Rubio’s electoral prospects in 2016.

sarah: OK, last pick — phew — I’m channeling some Eric Swalwell energy over here in that I think Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene might throw her name into the ring. 

As we know, the House isn’t a natural stepping stone to the presidency, but she has already worked to position herself as a staunch Trump loyalist in the House.

Plus, she echoes that same fighter rhetoric we were talking about earlier. Take the debate about whether she should be stripped of her House committee assignments. She said in response to McConnell’s criticism that her “loony lies were a cancer” that the real enemy in her view was “weak Republicans who only know how to lose gracefully.” She would fight, and GOP voters want a fighter.

geoffrey.skelley: I was thinking about picking Greene. She would have some serious appeal among some in the GOP, as Kaleigh Rogers and I pointed out in our recent look at her rise.

alex: That would be fun to cover.

sarah: Fun is one word for it, but OK, Nate, you’re up! Bring that last pick energy!!!

natesilver: I literally am googling “list of GOP governors.”

nrakich: Nate forfeits.

geoffrey.skelley: LOL

natesilver: Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey.

geoffrey.skelley: That’s a fun one. Swing state governor and term-limited ahead of the 2022 midterms, so he could look ahead to a presidential run, maybe. He’s also personally wealthy. But he does have some issues with his right flank because he defended Arizona’s election results in 2020 and restrictions put in place because of the pandemic.

nrakich: Good pick.

Alex?

alex: Rep. Elise Stefanik. She became a national star during the House impeachment inquiry, and could help the base win back the suburban women that Trump lost. I think that since Trump lost reelection, Republican women will likely provide the leadership for rebuilding the party. (We already saw this in both 2018 and 2019.)

Full transparency: I actually think she’d be a serious contender for VP if she doesn’t run herself.

natesilver: That’s a good last-round sleeper.

nrakich: Agreed. As a representative from New York, she has no obvious higher office to run for other than president.

My last pick is Florida Sen. Rick Scott. He has won three elections (2010, 2014 and 2018) that I didn’t think he’d win, so I have learned not to underestimate him. And he’s personally very wealthy, which could put him at an advantage.

geoffrey.skelley: And with my last pick, I’ll stick with the conservative media lane and give Candace Owens a go. She has a massive following in right-leaning circles — 2.6 million Twitter followers! — and will turn 35 in 2024 (the constitutional age requirement to become president). She’s even hinted at the idea. So she’s worth a flyer here.

nrakich: You are all sleeping on Ben Carson.

natesilver: I remember 2016!

sarah: Below are everyone’s picks. Readers, let us know who you think has the best one.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/senators-voting-convict-trump-signed-electoral-death-warrant-76030419

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/democrats-convince-republican-senators-convict-trump-75853560