The Unusual Aftermath of the Trump Presidency: Where Do We Stand During His First Terms? How Did Biden Look in the House and Senate, and Why Did He Affect the Democratic Party?
For the last month or so, the dominant narrative in American politics has been that President Joe Biden – and Democrats more generally – are on the comeback trail.
Some of the doubts about Biden may be assuaged by Democrats’ surprisingly strong performance in the midterm elections. Democrats still have a slim chance of keeping their House majority, but there is a better chance of keeping their Senate majority.
But it’s not anomalous. Biden’s approval is at 39%, which is the average of the most recent national polls of adults that meet CNN’s standards for reporting. (Biden’s disapproval is at 52%, with more people in those national polls saying they don’t have an opinion of Biden’s job performance than in the Arizona and Nevada polls.)
Where does Biden rank during his presidency? We can use Gallup’s job approval center to see where Biden’s predecessors stood before the election in their first term.
The president ends the year in better political shape than Trump, which seems to have halted his slide. This summer, only 25% of Democrat-aligned voters wanted him to be their nominee. Now that figure is 40%. The advantage that a sitting president usually has against a primary challenger has been further strengthened by those who want someone else.
The unusual aftermath of the Trump presidency is felt throughout our politics. The Jan. 6 investigation is ongoing, and the F.B.I. raided Mar-a-Lago to reclaim classified documents that Trump is alleged to have taken with him inappropriately. (Trump, for his part, recently told Sean Hannity that the president can declassify documents “even by thinking about it,” which, sigh.)
More voters are not open to changing their loyalties no matter how unhappy they are with current conditions because of the sheer intractability of our modern political divisions. Particularly in Senate races, including the contests in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, Republicans have also been hurt by nominating Trump-aligned candidates that many voters view as unqualified, extreme or both.
The Biden Legacy: Why the GOP can’t stop talking about President Joe Biden. The case of the Democratic presidential nominee Dianne Feinstein
Biden tried to stay out of the news, but his counterpart, Trump, tried to stay in it. Biden gives very little interviews and news conferences. He doesn’t go for attention-grabbing stunts or high-engagement tweets. I am not certain if this is strategy or necessity, but I think the Biden team trusts him and knows he can turn one-on-one conversations and news conferences to his advantage. The difference might be that a good strategy is born of an unwanted reality.
Things weren’t easy for Biden once he was in the White House. Covid continued to wreak havoc on the country and the economy. Despite a 50-50 split in the Senate and Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema pitting themselves against the administration at various points, Biden was still able to move a formidable legislative agenda through Congress, overcoming fierce Republican opposition and even winning a few GOP votes along the way. The American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act stand up as a historic trifecta – a legislative track record arguably more significant than any that we have seen since President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. According to the Pew Research Center, more federal judges were appointed by Biden than any previous president at this point in the term. Biden has also used his executive power to make progress on issues like fighting climate change, bolstering the US’ economic competitiveness, and forgiving student debt.
Most voters continue to express strikingly negative views on President Joe Biden’s management of the economy, and for that matter, his handling of crime and the border. Traditionally the president’s party has suffered significant losses in midterm elections when voters hold such negative views about conditions in the country and his response to them.
In the year that the exit polls were taken, Democratic incumbents Bill Nelson in Florida and Joe Donnelly in Indiana had slightly better net favorable ratings than their Republican opponents. And yet both Democrats lost anyway, in states where most voters approved of Trump’s performance. They were not able to overcome majority opinion about the president that was in favor of the other party. That’s an ominous precedent for Democrats such as Cortez Masto, Warnock and even Kelly.
Republican consultant John Brabender says that over the summer voters dismayed about the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade decided “let’s get the pitchforks and get those people for what they’re doing on abortion.” He says that they realized they couldn’t afford the gas to get there. That’s shifted the relative priority on the issue for many voters, he maintains: “Is there some intensity on abortion? Yes. But it’s not what it was weeks ago. It’s putting pressure on some of these Democratic candidates because for a long time all they had to say is ‘I’m with you on abortion.’”
Noble says that Kelly is benefiting from campaign basics: he has spent more on his campaign than his Republican opponent and occupied the center more successfully. But Noble also believes that Kelly is surmounting disenchantment with Biden in part because some voters are already looking past the president as they assess the parties. The president’s job approval is not having an effect. “People have accepted it’s Joe Biden, and pat him on the head, push him along, so you are not seeing that direct connection” to the Senate vote.
The men have different stances on the matter. According to exit polls, Trump’s approval rating rose to above 50% in multiple states on the day of the election. Notably, Trump was at 50% or more in all four states where Republican challengers beat Democratic Senate incumbents that year – Florida, Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota.
The latest snapshot of the divergence was offered by the national NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll. Asked what issue they considered most important in 2022, Republicans overwhelmingly chose inflation (52%) and immigration (18%). A comparable share of Democrats picked preserving democracy (32%), abortion (21%) and health care (15%). Independents split exactly in half between the priorities of the two parties: inflation and immigration on the one side, and democracy, abortion and health care on the other. Voters with at least a four-year college degree leaned relatively more toward democracy and abortion; those without degrees (including Latinos) tended to stress inflation. (This survey did not include crime as an option, but it too has usually provoked the most concern from Republicans and non-college educated voters.)
Given these disparities, Democrats everywhere are stressing issues relating to rights and values, particularly abortion, but also warning about the threat to democracy posed by Trump and his movement. Since June, as CNN recently reported, Democratic candidates have spent over $130 million on abortion-themed ads, vastly more than Republicans.
The Case for Changing the Lens: Why Hispanics are Not Necessarily Discontented about the U.S. Economy
In the long run, the most important of these may be the argument that the incentives for domestic production embedded in the trio of central Biden legislative accomplishments – the bills to rebuild infrastructure, promote semiconductor manufacturing and accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy – will produce a boom in US employment, particularly in manufacturing jobs that don’t require a college degree.
This year, only a few Democrats emphasize the possibilities of those plant openings, such as Michigan Gov. Bekman, Arizona Sen. Kelly, and Ohio Senate candidate Tim Ryan.
More commonly, Democrats are stressing legislation the party has passed that offers families some relief on specific costs, especially the provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices. Garin says highlighting specific initiatives can allow candidates to overcome the negative opinion of Biden on the economy. His main concern is that too many Democrats are focusing on abortion when they should be talking about the economy.
Democrats are trying to build a sea wall against the currents of economic discontent because of the coming manufacturing boom and cost-saving provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. The final weeks will tell whether the current reaches a level that violates all of the party’s defenses.
Among likely Hispanic voters, a narrow 48 percent plurality disapproved of Mr. Biden even as 60 percent said they would vote for congressional Democrats this fall — one of a few groups, including younger voters, who appeared to separate their frustration with the White House from their voting plans.
College was a strong dividing line. Democrats had a 13 point advantage over those with a bachelor’s degree. Among those without one, Republicans held a 15-point edge.
In taking over the House in 2018 and winning the Senate and White House in 2020, the winning Democratic coalition during the Trump presidency relied on a significant gender gap and on winning women by a wide margin.
But the poll showed that Republicans had entirely erased what had been an 11-point edge for Democrats among women last month in 2022 congressional races to a statistical tie in October.
Trump has not seen a shift in his favorability rating. Just 31% in the new poll rate him positively, the smallest share to do so since before he was elected president, while 60% hold an unfavorable view. Only 32% of Republican-leaning independents and 45% of Republicans think the former president is mainstream because they see his views and policies as too extreme.
After defeating a huge slate of younger and more exciting candidates in the 2020 Democratic primaries, Biden went on to defeat the incumbent president, Donald Trump. This was more than just a trivial accomplishment. Most presidents have been reelected since World War II. Though Trump increased his votes and support, he was unable to stop Biden, who used science in the response to the Covid-19 epidemic and promised to return government to normal after he was elected.
Today, the mood of the nation is decidedly sour. 64 percent of Likely Voters think the country is going in the wrong direction, compared to 24 percent who think the nation is going in the right direction. The Democratic voters who think the nation is going in the right direction fell by six percentage points since September, though it was still above the summer low.
David Neiheisel, a 48 year old insurance salesman from Indianapolis, said that everyone is hurting right now. I think it’s going to collapse because of inflation, interest rates, the cost of gas, food, and my property taxes.
What do the American politicians think about the next election? A telephone survey of how voters voted on Biden and Maslin’s nomination
The survey of 793 likely voters was conducted by telephone over the course of 10 days. The margin is calculated as the difference between the sample error and the average. There are both cross-tabs and methodology here.
Control of the US Senate will be decided next week in a number of states where voters disapprove of the performance of President Joe Biden while also expressing an unfavorable opinion of the Republican nominee.
“The real question comes down to that group of independents in the middle, and who votes at the end,” says Paul Maslin, a long-time Democratic pollster. I wonder if it is people who hate inflation and are sorry but Herschel Walker is a clown and Mehmet Oz is a clown, or if it is people that say that crime is ruining the big city they live in. They returned to the Democrats because of the joke they had with Blake Masters. I have no idea. I honestly don’t know.”
Democratic hopes over the summer that Biden’s approval rating would steadily rise through Election Day, lifting their candidates in the process, have been dashed largely because of the persistence of the highest inflation in 40 years.
A political scientist at an Atlanta university says that the big problem for the Democrats is that things have not improved in people’s eyes despite what the Democrats have done. “If inflation had come down from where it has been, they would be in better shape. But you can’t convince people that things are going better when their own experience tells them that it’s not.”
“Over the past twenty or thirty years, what we’ve seen is a growing nationalization of these congressional races where there is a closer connection between opinions about national issues and national political leaders and how people vote in these House and Senate elections,” says Abramowitz. It used to be easy for an incumbent to run far ahead of a president from their own party’s approval rating, based on a number of factors including their reputation in the state and district, and name recognition. Over time that value has gone down.
Democrats did extremely well in states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania. The candidates that were running for secretaries of state or governors lost. In states where Democrats were defeated, such as New York, there were some positives, including the victory of Gov. Kathy Hochul over Lee Zeldin.
J.B. Poersch, president of Senate Majority PAC, the leading Democratic super PAC, argues that personal contrasts largely explain that unusually high Democratic support among voters dissatisfied with Biden. According to Poersch, candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome in Senate races. Both the Democratic and Republican candidates have strong records of delivering for their states, and they are both offering up a roster of extremists who are totally out of step.
The CNN polls showed that Cortez Masto and Barnes were still in the race, even though they were losing a lot of votes to Biden. The final electorate will tilt more towards Republican voters who are displeased with Biden than polls currently think, according to Gene Ulm. The reason, he argues, is that in the end, disenchantment with current conditions and Biden’s performance will turbocharge more turnout from Republicans, and depress turnout more from Democrats, than most models now anticipate. “The composition of the electorate … is going to crush everything,” he says flatly.
In the US, exceptions have become rare. In order for Democrats to hold the Senate, they need a lot more of them.
Donald J. Trump: Why did he run? How did the US political system get involved in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign?
The professor of history and public affairs at the University is a CNN political analyst named Julian Zelizer. He is the author and editor of 24 books, including “The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment.” Follow him on Twitter @julianzelizer. His views are expressed in this commentary. CNN has opinions on it.
It looks like Donald Trump will run for president again. On Thursday, Trump told his followers to “get ready” for his return to the presidential campaign trail – and top aides have been eyeing November 14 as a potential launch date, sources familiar with the matter told CNN. It is believed that Trump is hoping to be the first person since Cleveland to win two non-consecutive elections.
While Trump has been hinting at another run for months, the news would certainly send shockwaves through the political world. Trump is arguably one of the most controversial and destabilizing political leader in contemporary US history. And as we have seen with recent Supreme Court decisions like Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization – as well as the toxic rhetoric and support for conspiracy theories within the GOP – his presidency was enormously consequential.
Republican politics may, or may not, be at a moment of transition. How things shake out in the next few months will be critical to Trump’s prospects. The Republicans are moving on because of the failure of some of the ex-president’s hand-picked candidates.
Members of the party will be confident if the Republicans win control of the Senate and House next week. There are a number of election-denying candidates in the polls, and a strong showing will likely help unify the GOP behind Trump. Although there has been copious speculation about the rise of other Trump-like Republicans like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, it’s likely they will look “liddle” once the former President formally reenters the political arena – as his formidable opponents learned in the 2016 Republican primaries.
Finally, it’s worth noting that a midterm win would energize Republican voters like little else. The out-party is often more prepared for political battles than the party of the incumbent due to the realities of governance.
Trump’s Theoretical Attack on the White House and the 2020 U.S. Presidential Campaign: The Case Against a Special Counsel
The department of justice is weighing the possibility of appointing a special counsel to look into Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election and his alleged mishandling of national security documents. But that’s unlikely to stop Trump; we’ve seen his relentless attacks on former special counsel Robert Mueller, who oversaw the Russia investigation. It’s harder to prosecute Trump once he’s a candidate. Trump is known to play the victim and claim that the investigation is a witch hunt that is intended to take him out of the running.
If Trump avoids prosecution, he’d surely unleash a fierce assault on the President, who could very well still be struggling with a shaky economy and divisions within his own party. If election deniers enter positions of power after the mid-terms, it is likely that Trump will take advantage of his supporters who have penetrated state and local election offices to make sure that victory is his. Trump will also come to the race having been to this rodeo before, which will mean he can perfect the technique and rhetoric that put him into office in 2016. Trump could be returned to the media conversation now that he is no longer a member of TWo. (Trump, who founded Truth Social, where he has been active since he was banned from Twitter, has not publicly indicated that he will return).
Biden will be the center of attention when it comes to the 2024 election. While Biden’s legislative record includes the Inflation Reduction Act, he will be saddled with baggage that will plague him for the rest of his life. The problems that he has been dealing with, including inflation and the aftermath of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, will be in the same way that they were four years ago. If he runs, Biden will no longer be campaigning to be the new boss – he is the boss.
The Last Three Days of the Midterm Campaign: Barack Obama, Mehmet Oz and the Speakers of the House. The Newtown Senate lays the blame on the sitting president
Three presidents – one sitting and two former – descend on Pennsylvania Saturday for a final-stretch midterm push that underscores the stakes of one of the nation’s most closely watched Senate races.
For the Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor, who is running for Congress, the joint appearance by the president and former president in Philadelphia will be a political stress test.
A win by Mehmet Oz could prove Donald Trump’s viability in a state where he lost by a razor-thin margin in 2020.
The event is a historic one. After they left the Oval Office, former presidents usually avoided direct criticism of the men occupying the office, but they have waded into daily politics. Not since Grover Cleveland in 1892 has a defeated one-term president returned to win the White House again.
The presidents in Pennsylvania, all warning of dire consequences, reflect the changed norms that Trump established when he took office nearly six years ago.
Still, his events haven’t generated the same electricity as Obama’s. During the past few weeks, the former president has used stinging humor and an air of bemusement to ridicule the Republicans during his string of rallies across the country.
Obama has criticized the candidates backed by Trump for denying the 2020 election results, and some of them have modeled themselves after the 45th president.
“It doesn’t just work out just because somebody’s been on TV. In Arizona last week, the Republican Governor candidate Lake was told by Barack Obama that being president or governor is more than just lines and lighting.
In the last days of the campaign, Biden has traveled to blue states he won, but where the Democrats are running closer-than- expected races. He is campaigning with Kathy Hochul in New York on Sunday after he stopped in five states. He’ll spend Election Eve in Maryland.
That’s a 180-degree turn from midterm cycles during Obama’s presidency, when it was Biden venturing to more states – including conservative-leaning districts – where the sitting president was considered a drag on Democratic candidates.
Their appearance Saturday will highlight their different styles and political abilities, and some Democrats say it favors Obama.
Barack Obama and the media coverage of the election: How does he get his first elected term? A few days before he went to the White House
I think we have good crowds, but you do not think so. They’re fairly enthusiastic. You don’t write it that way, but they are,” Biden said as he was departing California on Friday.
He grew frustrated with the coverage that implied he was political albatross, and argued that his policies were popular with voters.
Biden has said that he decided to run for president because he wanted to save US democracy. Even if he loses control of Congress, he can take solace in the fact that he has made significant progress in achieving that goal. These elections were a victory for democracy.
Obama and Biden saw each other in September when Obama’s portrait was unveiled in the White House East Room. The event had been put off while Trump was in office, partly because neither the Obamas nor the Trumps were interested in putting on a show of friendship.
Sources familiar with the matter say that if Republicans do well in the elections, the third week of November is a good place to begin the campaign for president.
Biden may take a little longer to make a decision. When asked about his timeline, he pointed to family discussions around the holidays. Members of his political team have made early preparations for a campaign infrastructure, operating under the assumption he will decide to run again.
The Real Reason Why the GOP Cannot Win: How Americans View Trump’s Votes in the Twenty Two Years After the U.S. Election
Editor’s Note: Frida Ghitis, (@fridaghitis) a former CNN producer and correspondent, is a world affairs columnist. She is currently a columnist for The Washington Post, a weekly opinion contributor to CNN, and a columnist for World Politics Review. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.
The results of the 2022 midterm election have not been fully tallied and the crucial question – who will control Congress? – has not been answered. But on this day after, we can draw some initial conclusions.
First, there was no red wave, much less a red tsunami. Predictions of a huge Republican victory at the polls did not materialize. The election was disappointing for the GOP. Donald Trump had been hoping for a Republican landslide that would place him on a glide path to the presidency, but it was a bad day.
The movement spearheaded by Trump and his election supporters performed worse than expected. Even some of the most dramatic Republican victories looked like a rebuke of Trump and his band of anti-democratic activists.
A big reason for this is that Trump’s poll numbers look weak. I’m not just talking about his polling against other Republicans. I’m talking about how Republican voters see him.
On election night, Trump told an interviewer, “I think if [Republicans] win, I should get all the credit. I should not be blamed if they lose. But the evidence strongly suggests he deserves much of the blame.
What if Kevin McCarthy wins? When Donald Trump beat Herschel Walker, John Fetterman, and J. DeSantis in February 2016
They might well do it. Kevin McCarthy may replace Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the house but the Democrats are an amazing performance even if there is a Republicans win. Biden presided over the best performance by the party in power since George W. Bush in 2002, the first election after 9/11.
In Pennsylvania, Attorney General Josh Shapiro trounced Doug Mastriano, who played an active role in trying to overturn the 2020 election and ran a campaign rife with antisemitic innuendo against his Jewish opponent. Trump’s far-right election-denying allies lost in Michigan, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maryland, and many other contests.
In December Herschel Walker could win the election. But anyone who heard him campaign or learned about his past knows he should never have been on the ballot. fame did the trick when Trump did it. So, he also backed TV star Mehmet Oz for the Pennsylvania seat. John Fetterman, who had suffered a stroke, struggled to regain his verbal prowess and lost to Oz.
If Trump was the big loser of the night, the biggest winner was his top rival for the nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who won in a landslide, and was greeted by supporters at his victory party with chants of “Two more years!” His eyes, like Trump’s, will be on the White House in 2024.
Rondales has impressed conservative voters by seizing on hot button culture war issues like immigration, but he has not yet come face to face with Trump. The Florida governor, who won an easy reelection race last month, has not said whether he will run against Trump, who set him up in his first gubernatorial race with an endorsement. In a string of primary debate confrontations with Trump, his ability to take a blow would be tested and his willingness to counter-attack a former president would be put to the test.
Trump persuaded the former senator to run against Kemp in the primary. That primary vote ended in humiliation for Perdue and for Trump.
Despite his awful showing, Trump plans to declare his candidacy soon. Most Democrats find the prospect hard to stomach, but most Republicans would also like him to just focus on his golf game. As the midterms showed, he is a threat to the party.
Biden: The End of the Red Wave? What Can We Learn from the Failure of the 2016 Republican Presidential Campaign in Loss of an Enough Democracy?
Soon, Americans will probably have to begin enduring another season of presidential campaigning by the most disruptive candidate in living memory, a man who has shown only disdain for democracy. Facing that prospect, it’s good to know the country took a step toward sanity this week, and that democracy fared rather well.
Yet the red wave so many anticipated didn’t happen. Even if Republicans gain control of one or both chambers, they will only have a small majority. It is certain that the Democrats will not face the kind of negative attention that they received in 2010.
But Biden also deserves credit. As Nate Cohn explained on the New York Times podcast “The Daily,” Democratic success came in regions of the country where concerns over the health of the democracy and reproductive rights helped drive turnout. Biden went to great lengths to emphasize these issues in the closing days of the campaign even though pollsters said inflation would be the main concern.
Trump’s numbers against other Republicans are far weaker and, again, heading in the wrong direction. When you put Trump against DeSantis and other named candidates, Trump’s onetime 40-point advantage has been slimmed to low double-digits over DeSantis.
Do we really need a young man to run again? The problem of convincing voters that Donald J. Biden is 82 years old, and why he shouldn’t run again
It is going to take more than “watch me” alone to convince voters of Biden’s age. After all, after spending nearly two years watching Biden in office, two-thirds of voters don’t think he should run again. So there’s that.
Biden will turn 80 in nine days’ time and will be 82 years old shortly after the 2024 election. A second term would make him 86 years old. Ronald Reagan left office at the age of 77.
Doubts about Biden and his ability to serve a second term are a persistent problem, not a one-off from the exit polling. And one that Biden and his team need to figure out how to address – beyond just telling voters to watch him.
According to a new CNN Poll, there is little appetite for a 2020 presidential election repeat, as most registered voters would rather see someone new nominated.
Among those who want someone other than Trump to be the nominee, 47% have a specific alternate candidate in mind, including 38% who singled out Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The only other nominee that was named was by less than 1%. Republicans and Republican-leaning independent voters have a more favorable attitude towards the former president than the rest of the country does, with almost all of them viewing him favorably and unfavorably.
The most significant drops in support for a Trump bid came from older Republican-aligned voters, from 45% of Republicans and Republican-leaners 65 or older to 37% in support of one now, as well as White voters with college degrees.
The Counting Cards of Joe Biden and the Donald Trump Rerun: An Analysis of a National Sample of People in the Decay Track
This CNN Poll was conducted by SSRS on December 1 through 7 among a random national sample of 1,208 adults drawn from a probability-based panel. The surveys were done online or on the phone. Results among the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.6 points; it is larger for subgroups.
Even as President Joe Biden and ex-President Donald Trump move toward a rerun of the most turbulent White House race in modern history, many voters are pining for a break from the past – and the present.
Whether voters want it or not, the race is on. Early perceptions of the contenders’ strengths are important since they shape the decisions of potential rivals and donors in the early money chase. Biden is giving a lot of signs he is running, indicating that he will let the country know early in the new year, even though he is already a declared candidate.
The arguments against Trump that his general election viability is ruined beyond repair are being strengthened by his dinner with extremists with a record of antisemitism. Trump’s so-far lackluster campaign, which looks like it was declared to make it easier for him to portray criminal probes into his conduct as persecution, isn’t convincing anyone so far.
And yet, the former president’s allies, like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Jim Jordan of Ohio, will be hugely influential in the new GOP House majority. The failure of Republicans to perform better in November means that extremists will be able to gain control of the Capitol in a way that will damage Biden and help Trump in the future.
Still, any president is deeply vulnerable to unexpected outside events that could splinter his approval ratings and chances of reelection. Every day, the oldest President in US history will have to face the age issue. Republicans will seize on any slackening of the campaign trail pace, or even a cold, as proof he’s unfit for a second term. Biden is healthy and the chances of an adverse event increasing for people in their 80s.
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu makes one thing clear: His vision for the future of the Republican Party does not include former President Donald Trump.
Taking it a step further, Sununu – who just won a fourth two-year term in the Granite State by 15 percentage points – said it’s “un-American” to “be a country where the best opportunity for our future leadership is the leadership of yesterday.”
Are Republicans Really Getting More Attention Than Trump? A CNN Study of DeSantis’ Predictions for the 2016 Midterm Election and Other Political Issues
According to a new CNN poll, DeSantis’ favorability among Republicans and Republican-leaning independent voters overall outpaces Trump: 74% view DeSantis favorably while 63% have a favorable view of Trump.
Trump announced his latest presidential bid just a week after the midterms last month. But DeSantis has taken a different approach: saying nothing about 2024 and letting speculation swirl. Several consultants in Florida have said DeSantis likely won’t jump into the race until after state lawmakers meet for their annual legislative session, which points to a May or June announcement next year.
The opposite has happened. Major potential foes such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom have said explicitly that they will not run against Biden. The power players in the Democratic Party said they will back Biden if he runs again.
The same can’t be said for Trump. Even after he declared his run for the presidency last month, just one senator has endorsed his bid for another term. Potential GOP challengers are not going to leave the primary.
This indicates that Trump’s biggest strength at this point among Republicans is name recognition – something other Republicans will get a lot more of as the primary season heats up.