“I don’t think so, because I think that there’s just too many votes built in against him,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is polling second to Trump, told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt last week. “You could have Jack Kennedy come back and show up, and he wouldn’t energize the Democrats as much as Trump does.”
Nikki Haley, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie have also questioned Trump’s viability in a general election. Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, a 38-year-old upstart who has tied himself closer to the former president, has suggested he is more likely to win in a “landslide” than Trump, though he has not said Trump cannot win.
It’s a good bet one or more of the candidates will reiterate the point when they meet for an NBC News-hosted debate — without Trump — here in Miami on Wednesday night.
But the case is a tricky one to prove, given that Trump is beating them all soundly in Republican primary polls and has opened up leads over Biden in a New York Times/Siena survey of crucial battleground states. But having failed to gain much traction by contrasting with Trump on policy and personality, electability may be the last arrow left in these candidates’ quivers. In the case of Haley, she led Biden in that same poll by a larger margin than Trump, and outside the margin of error.
“So, naturally, desperate politicians will ignore facts and repeat baseless attack lines,” Chris LaCivita, a co-manager of Trump’s campaign, told NBC News. “The fact is, Democrats know they can’t beat Trump as evidenced by their use of the two-tier justice system to knock him off the ballot or worse. The swamp is coalescing around attacks on President Trump, all funded by a sophisticated network of big-dollar donors who hold the GOP voting base in contempt.”
As the candidates try to gain or keep momentum in their campaigns, they are also saying what donors want to hear about Trump, according to Brad Todd, a Republican strategist who is not working for any of the presidential campaigns.
“Major donors have all had that consensus for three years, and that’s being parroted now back from the candidates,” he said. “Because that was the premise on which they all ran.”
Christie has not only been delivering that message for months, but he has also connected it to the four criminal trials Trump is facing — an aspect that several other candidates have avoided for fear of backlash among the base voters they need to win the primary.
“We simply cannot expect that someone who is facing this number of criminal trials and, quite frankly, the conduct that underlies those charges can be a viable fall election candidate against Joe Biden,” Christie said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” in August.
Also in August, Haley on Fox News said that Trump was “the most disliked politician in all of America — that’s reality.” And she warned that when it came to a general election, Biden would emerge the victor, which would be the equivalent, she argued, of Vice President Kamala Harris taking the reins.
“I was proud to serve in his administration. I agree with most of his policies. But we have to be honest — he’s gonna spend more time in a courtroom than he’s gonna spend on the campaign trail,” Haley said of Trump. “We cannot allow a President Kamala Harris. We have to win that general election.”
After the second Republican debate in September, Haley said Trump skipping the debates could be a death knell for his campaign.
“You can’t win if you’re absent,” she said on Fox News. “There’s a lot of issues that I think Americans are going to want answers to and the more that these debates play out, and the more that he’s not there, they’re going to have a problem with that.”
Late last month, Scott came out with his strongest denunciation of Trump yet, telling a voter in Iowa: “I don’t think he can win.”
“You have to be able to win in Georgia,” Scott said. “I don’t think he can win in Georgia. I think you’ll have to be able to win in Pennsylvania.”
And former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who has trailed the field and did not qualify for the second debate, has made Trump’s lack of electability central to his pitch.
A new New York Times/Siena poll shows Trump up 10 percentage points on Biden in Nevada; 6 points in Georgia; 5 points apiece in Arizona and Michigan; and 4 points in Pennsylvania. Biden led in just one of the states tested — Wisconsin, by 2 points — and would almost certainly lose to Trump if those numbers played out in November 2024.
“The sheer notion that an individual with 91 current indictments across four jurisdictions, the self-admitted ringleader of Jan. 6 and has the moral compass of an ax murderer might not win a general election is not far-fetched to believe,” said Geoff Duncan, the former lieutenant governor of Georgia and a Trump critic. “The reality is despite all of those historical fatal flaws, Joe Biden is performing that bad and none of reality seems to matter. Tens of millions of Republicans are hoping, if not praying, that Trump fever breaks before it’s too late.”
South Carolina state Rep. Chris Wooten, a Republican backing Haley, said he thinks polls showing Trump crossing 50% in a general election don’t match what he’s seeing on the ground.
“I hear all these news stories of polls are here and polls are there, polls show Trump’s got 52% or Trump’s got 54% or whatever,” Wooten said. “I don’t know where those people are. Because I’m not seeing them. I don’t talk to them. Polls can say what you want them to say.
“We need to figure out who we’re going to get behind, and have them team up and take on Trump,” he added.
Most national polls show Trump and Biden within the margin of error of each other, and Trump has a lead of just less than 1 point in the latest RealClearPolitics polling average.
The environment will change, according to former Rep. Barbara Comstock, R-Va., an outspoken Trump critic.
“Because when he’s convicted and when the negative ads 24/7 remind everyone why they don’t want him back in their living rooms, he will crater in swing states just like his MAGA candidates last year,” she said, pointing to the widespread failures of Trump-backed candidates in contested statewide elections last fall.
But one Trump ally said the other candidates and anti-Trump Republicans are dreaming.
“Their entire candidacy is predicated on the premise that is really a fantasy that Trump can’t win. And it’s time to move on,” this person said, adding they have seen no evidence that any momentum is shifting against Trump in the primary. “It’s all fantasy. It’s all role play. And this isn’t the World of Warcraft. This is campaign world.”
Source: NBC News
