Then-President Donald Trump gestures as Sen. Lindsey Graham speaks about an upcoming afternoon vote in the Senate during an event in the White House on November 6, 2019.
AP Photo/Patrick Semansky
- GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham said he would be “shocked” if Trump passed on a 2024 White House bid.
- “All the polling shows he would be the front-runner by a country mile,” he told The Washington Post.
- Trump has yet to announce his intentions, but has teased another run since he left the White House.
Sen. Lindsey Graham said he would be “shocked” if former President Donald Trump passed on a White House bid in 2024, according to The Washington Post.
Graham — a South Carolina Republican who morphed from Trump critic in 2016 to legislative ally during the former president’s time in the Oval Office — pointed to polling that has overwhelmingly shown the former commander-in-chief at the top of surveys among GOP voters.
“I’ll be shocked if he doesn’t run,” the senator told the newspaper. “All the polling shows he would be the front-runner by a country mile. The day that Trump makes it clear he’s going to run — it would be a mountain to climb to beat him.”
Graham told The Post that Trump will do quite well if the Republican contest is centered on policy issues.
“If it’s a policy election, he’s in good shape,” he said. “It’s his primary to lose.”
However, several potential opponents of the former president have a different take on the subject, pointing out that several early GOP presidential frontrunners in past cycles have fizzled out as the election came into full view.
In June 2006, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was a highly-touted Republican figure who many saw as one of the party’s strongest potential standard-bearers to succeed then-President George W. Bush.
Giuliani also led in many of the pre-election polls in 2007; a Gallup survey that March showed the former GOP mayor as the top pick among primary voters, winning 44% of the vote, well ahead of the eventual 2008 presidential nominee, John McCain, who earned 20% support in the poll.
In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, all eyes were on Republican Gov. Scott Walker, a Midwestern conservative star who had won his initial 2010 gubernatorial race, survived a 2012 recall election, and won reelection in 2014.
Despite Walker’s record of curbing the power of labor unions and seeking to restrict abortion, which appealed to the increasingly conservative primary electorate, his presidential candidacy fizzled.
And then Trump — who had never run for elected office but had universal name recognition — eventually jumped into the race and captured the White House.