According to a Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll poll provided exclusively to The Hill on Monday, former President Trump is the overwhelming favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 if he chooses to run for president again.
Almost 6 in 10 Republican voters polled (58 percent) said they would vote to reinstate the former president on the ballot in 2024, indicating that the party is ready and prepared to give Trump another opportunity.
No other possible Republican presidential contender in 2024 comes close to matching Trump’s popularity. Republican voters give former Vice President Mike Pence a distant second place vote of 13 percent, while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a rising star in the party, receives just 9 percent support in a primary field that includes Trump and other presidential candidates.
Former United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) are tied for fourth place with 3 percent support apiece, according to the latest poll results.
As Mark Penn, the co-director of the Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll study, put it, “While defeated candidates rarely come back, Trump has a strong lead in the Republican primary especially among the most dedicated Republicans.”
In the months after his departure from the White House in January, Trump has both publicly and privately entertained the idea of running for president in 2024.
However, in recent weeks, he has started to provide indications that he may be more likely than not to seek for re-election. He has increased the number of media appearances and press comments he makes, and he is organizing rallies in Georgia and Iowa, which is the first state to hold presidential caucuses in the country.
The Republican presidential primary battle in 2024 is still many years away, and it is conceivable that Trump may eventually decide not to run.
When he was not included on the list of possible presidential candidates, Pence rose to the top of the survey among Republican voters, with 32 percent support. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) overtook both Haley and Rubio to grab third place with 14 percent support, while DeSantis’ support increased to 20 percent, placing him in the second position.
Despite his widespread support among Republicans, Trump continues to be a profoundly divisive figure with the rest of the population. While 48 percent of those who answered the poll said they had a positive opinion of the former president, 47 percent said they had a negative opinion of him.
Even more concerning, Americans are divided on whether he was a superior president than his successor, Joe Biden. According to the Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll study, 51 percent of those polled believe Trump is the better commander in chief, while 49 percent believe Biden is the superior commander in chief.
Penn believes that the fact that Trump is no longer in the White House and no longer has the same public platform that he used to have, particularly in light of his exclusion from social media sites, may be contributing to the improvement in public opinion of him.
“Facebook may have done Trump a favor as since he is out of the daily social media traffic his numbers have risen to an unprecedented 48 percent favorable,” Penn said. “But the polarizing opinions on Trump make him today as likely to sink the Republican Party as help its return.”
It was performed from September 15 to 16 among 1,578 registered voters, including 490 Republicans, in a poll done by Harvard CAPS and Harris Poll. The sample of Republicans has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points, according to the survey. The survey was conducted in cooperation with the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University and the Harris Poll on behalf of the University of Chicago.
The complete poll results will be available on the internet later this week. Respondents are recruited on a randomized manner via voter panel providers, and their answers are subsequently weighted to match known demographic characteristics. The results of this representative survey, which was conducted online, do not provide a probability confidence range.
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