(JustPatriots.com)- Donald Trump is running for president again, but many Republican voters are looking for an alternative.
While it seemed like a foregone conclusion a year or so ago that Trump might coast to the Republican nomination in 2024, a lot has changed in a relatively short amount of time. The former president has faced many legal challenges, political setbacks and cultural controversies, which have all contributed to many Republicans believing it’s time for an alternative candidate to take the helm.
A recent USA Today/Suffolk University Poll found that the majority of Republican voters want someone else to win the GOP nomination in 2024. According to the poll, only 31% of Republican respondents said they wanted Trump to both run for president again and continue the policies he pursued while he was in the White House.
In addition, 61% of respondents agreed that they wanted Trump’s policies to be pursued in the White House again, but with a different nominee from the GOP this time. David Paleologos, who serves as the Suffolk University Political Research Center’s director, commented:
“Republicans and conservative independents increasingly want Trumpism without Trump.”
In other words, these voters still strongly believe in the policies that brought Trump to the White House in the first place, but they are tired of the man who brought them there. They also believe that Trump has strayed too much from what won him the presidency in 2016, as he now focuses so much on his loss in 2020 and simply going off on any of his critics.
As such, his actual political messages get lost, and he’s unable to get anything done. That seemed to prove itself out during the midterm elections in November, when the GOP performed well under expectations, as many Trump-backed candidates lost to their Democratic challengers.
Susan Page, a reporter for USA Today, recently wrote on the subject:
“Republican support for Donald Trump’s presidential bid in 2024 has cratered … as the former president is beleaguered by midterm losses and courtroom setbacks. By 2-1, GOP and GOP-leaning voters now say they want Trump’s policies but a different standard-bearer to carry them.”
She then quoted the stats listed above, and said that these same GOP and GOP-leaning voters have a replacement in mind. Page wrote:
“Two-thirds of Republicans and those inclined to vote Republican want Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to run for president. By double digits, 56% to 33%, they prefer DeSantis over Trump.”
That is quite the change from polling numbers from even just earlier this year, when DeSantis was rising in popularity but still soundly trailing Trump in polls. Now, it seems that a majority of conservative voters — at least the ones questioned in this poll — believe that DeSantis would make the better candidate to carry through similar policies to what Trump professed in the White House.
There’s still a lot of time before the 2024 election, though, and a lot can change — as this poll’s results certainly show.
