‘There Is A Risk That Donald Trump Could Return To the White House’
New WSJ poll ringing election alarm bells
The conventional wisdom has been that while Donald Trump seems to have the Republican presidential nomination locked up, the four-time indicted former president has no chance to win the November 2024 general election for president.
A new Wall Street Journal now threatens to upend that thinking and throws a bright spotlight on a very real possibility that Trump could well return to the Oval Office in 2025.
Donald Trump is far-and-away leading his closest rivals at the moment to claim his party’s nod to set up a rematch next year with President Biden.
However, while each new criminal indictment only seems to cement his support among Republican primary voters, that build-up of dozens of felony charges appeared to create vulnerabilities with the moderate and independent voters he would need to defeat Biden.
A new public opinion poll perhaps said that Trump has much more of a chance to win than previously understood.
That poll has Biden and Trump tied at 46 percent apiece, with just 8 percent of respondents undecided.
“You have 46 percent of Americans supporting a guy who has been indicted four times, indicted for stealing nuclear secrets, indicted for stealing war plans, called a rapist by a New York judge, saying that what he did was akin to rape. You have a guy that’s being charged for his legal payoffs to porn stars. I mean, we could go down the list,” Joe Scarborough, co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe program, said when he was reporting the numbers on-camera. “A guy who started a riot on January 6, an insurrection, had fake electors, had this fraudulent scheme to steal votes from millions and millions of Americans in seven swing states. I mean, I could go on.
“Called the Republican secretary of state of Georgia and said, ‘Steal enough votes for me. Find enough votes so I can steal Georgia.’ Forty-six percent of Americans are voting for the guy who said he would terminate the Constitution to get back into power,” he added.
Democrats can't take the next election for granted, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson.
“Yeah, those numbers are unbelievable, but yet there they are. The Wall Street Journal does good polling, and, you know, any one poll can be an outlier, but there have been a lot of polls that indicate that if it’s a Trump/Biden rematch, this is going to be a close election,” Robinson said. “Again, that stupefies me. It should not be a close election. There is no way that any substantial portion of the electorate should support Donald Trump after we saw what we saw during the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, after what we have seen in the years since Donald Trump’s presidency, after all the felony criminal charges filed against him in four cases with what is basically open-and-shut evidence.
“You know, the man is an accused felon. What, 91 times, something like that, the total number of counts against him? Yet, potentially 46 percent of Americans are willing to return him to the White House,” he added. “What this poll, I think, does, it should lay out to Democrats that this is going to be a close election. They can’t take anything for granted. They should assume it’s going to be decided by perhaps tens of thousands of voters in the swing states that we all know about.
“And they’d better get cracking now because there’s a real risk, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, there is a risk that Donald Trump could return to the White House,” Robinson said.
The election in 2024 actually will be the most important election, according to Morning Joe co-host Jonathan Lemire.
“I mean, we hear every four years this is the most important election of our lifetime. This one actually is, I think, by most measures and you’re right, being on the campaign trail, you see this polarization, something that’s been part of the American politics for awhile, really accelerated in the 1990s through the Bush years, of course, then through the Obama years and I think it’s not a coincidence that a man like Donald Trump followed the nation’s first black president into office, a man whose political career started on the backs of a racist life of birtherism,” Lemire said. “There is a reaction to that and we’ve become that much more tribal.
“In my book it gets into how both parties and people across this country exist among their fellow travelers and exist in their own silos, it’s easy to do that because of social media and because you can find a talk show host that agrees with your point of view and you don’t even have to interact really with someone who doesn’t agree with everything you say,” he added, referring to the book he published last year, The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020.
Please support our work…
Please subscribe…