Trump vs. DeSantis in 2024? You’d be a fool to count the Donald out | Opinion

I conducted Donald Trump’s first-ever presidential poll way back in 1987. At the time, he was a tabloid figure-of-fun in New York with a casino business that was lurching toward bankruptcy. This was a guy who didn’t listen to anybody; who could be abusive; and frequently didn’t pay his bills. I thought, and my polling confirmed, that his presidential ambitions were completely far-fetched.

Trump, despite his vanity, did not enter the 1988 race. But obviously, long-term, and with the benefit of hindsight, I was wrong about his political prospects. There was something I did not understand.

Like all of us, I have learned much more about Trump over the years, particularly in thinking about the lessons of his political blitzkrieg.

Trump, I concluded, has preternatural political talents that should not be underestimated — particularly as we enter the presidential campaign for 2024. As improbable as it might sound, his raw political savvy and my latest polling make him the likely Republican nominee.

The first time I really recognized Trump had a political future was when I accompanied him to his Atlantic City casinos. Despite reports of the financial difficulties, customers would rush up to embrace him or simply to touch him as they would a religious figure. Their devotion was a function of the fame he had achieved for his gold-plated lifestyle in the New York press. Even in his own casinos, where the house always wins, the punters treated him as a talisman of good luck.

It is always a crucial moment in politics when a leader finds his followers, and Trump had found his among disaffected regular Joes who saw him as aspirational. Market research I performed for his businesses, including the short-lived Trump Shuttle airline, showed that the common thread was not the businesses but merely his name. If he has one true claim to fame as a businessman, it is as a pioneer of branding, whether casinos, an airline, apartment buildings or steaks.

Remarkably, Trump was able to leverage his brand to become the first total political novice to win the White House since Dwight D. Eisenhower — and he was a five-star general who had already won a world war.

Just as Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy, was the first president to use the new power of television, so Trump is the first to master social media. Harking back to his New York days, Trump is a tabloid headline-writer manqué. (His greatest contribution to the genre is probably the New York Post front page on Feb. 16, 1990, when he coaxed Marla Maples to say: “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had!”)

Twitter’s punchy format was a perfect match for Trump. He pioneered a new form of communication in American politics with incessant, unpredictable and provocative tweets that dominated the narrative. When I served in the White House under Bill Clinton, the media staff was obsessed with trying to “win the day.” Trump was able to control the narrative almost every day.

The corollary of this constant communication turmoil is that the messages do not have to actually be true. It may be anathema to more staid politicians, but we are again seeing the naked power of Trump’s strategy.

Not only has he given his chief Republican rival his own disparaging moniker, “Ron DeSanctimonious,” Trump has now gone full QAnon by denouncing DeSantis as a virtual pedophile — the worst imaginable attack possible. He shared a post on his Truth Social suggesting DeSantis, a former teacher, was “grooming high school girls with alcohol.”

Many Republicans in Congress may be ready to move on from Trump, and major Republican donors such as the Club for Growth and the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity are dumping him.

The media, always in search of something new, seem ready to clamber aboard the DeSantis bandwagon.

I have a trigger warning for the media, however:

Our latest SchoenCooperman public poll released in early February shows Trump and DeSantis virtually tied in a one-on-one race. However, in a multi-candidate race with Nikki Haley and others, including potentially South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the anti-Trump vote is split, and Trump opens up a clear 11-point lead over DeSantis, underscoring the former president’s firm base among likely primary voters.

Our current polling shows that if the election were held today, Trump would be just three points behind President Joe Biden — closer than his 4.5% losing margin in 2020.

It would be a major mistake to discount Trump’s chances of winning a third Republican nomination at the party convention in Milwaukee next year.

Douglas E. Schoen is a Democratic pollster and strategist. He is the author of “Power: The 50 Truths.”