(RightWing.org) – Now that Thanksgiving Day has passed, Christmas is less than a month away, and within a month of that the presidential primary season will be foisted upon the American people. The Republican Party of Iowa has decided on January 15, 2024 (Martin Luther King Day) as the date that they will hold their caucus, while in New Hampshire they will go to the polls in their primary election on the 23rd of that month. Those will give the world a hint to the minds of the voters, and soon after things hit full stride in early March, the wheeling and dealing and jockeying for positions within the administration of the more likely-to-win candidates will begin in earnest.
I’ll Pass, Thanks
Those who throw their hats into the ring in their party’s primary season frequently end up in a high position in the winner’s administration. Kamala Harris is now the VP and Pete Buttigieg went from being the mayor of a relatively small city to being the Secretary of Transportation. In 2016, former President Donald Trump placed one-time opponent Dr. Ben Carson, MD into the position of Director of Health and Human Services. Going back one more administration to that of President Barack Obama, his one-time opponent, now-President Joe Biden, became his Vice President for eight years, and Hillary Clinton served time as Secretary of State.
That, however, would not hold true for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in the event that Trump gets the nod to face off against the Democratic Party’s 2024 nominee. Campaign spokesperson Carly Atchison said during an interview on Newsmax in no uncertain terms that he would not consider running on the ticket with the ex-president unless, of course, he was the main candidate.
Atchison played the blame game against Trump saying that he failed to meet his campaign promises from 2016 about building the border wall and eliminating the national debt. That is unlikely to endear her candidate to the masses of the former president’s supporters who understand that he made multiple efforts that were blocked by the Democrats in Congress and Liberal judicial activists from the bench.
By the Numbers
On the other hand, DeSantis and his campaign find themselves in a position where their concern about further hurting their chances with MAGA supporters is barely a blip on their radar. The polling aggregator Real Clear Politics reports that on average, between November 9-20, in the race for the Republican nomination, Trump is the pick of 61.6% of the voters, DeSantis is a distant second at 13.7%, and Nikki Haley is third with 9.8%.
According to data from pollster McLaughlin & Associates, Florida’s governor has watched the gulf between him and the front-runner widen throughout 2023. In January they showed Trump/DeSantis at 43%/31%, but in November it was 58%/11%. Furthermore, assuming a standard 3% margin of error for these types of surveys, the backward slide has put him in a statistical dead heat for second with Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy with 8% each.
Regardless of the witchhunts that are being disguised as legitimate trials in New York and Georgia, the McLaughlin data for a hypothetical general election battle between Trump and Biden, show the incumbent trails his predecessor, 49%/43%. If Kamala Harris becomes the Democratic Party nominee that gap widens to 51%/40%.
One should always be cautious of falling into the trap of using one group of number-crunching results in an analysis. At Project 538, the statistical analysis arm of ABC News, recent polls they have studied all show Trump leading Biden.
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