President Donald Trump’s popularity with Republicans has “diminished,” and voters may no longer support his “brand,” the Washington Examiner’s Sarah Westwood told Fox News’s Your World.
“There’s evidence, electorally speaking, from 2022 that his brand of politics is no longer popular within the Republican Party,” Westwood said Monday.
“Trump, in a lot of ways, shifted the center of the Republican Party. … That’s why [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis is so popular,” she told guest host Charles Payne.
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Referring to a recent Fox News poll that found 58% of voters didn’t want President Joe Biden or Trump to run in 2024, Payne asked if Republicans were merely writing Trump off too early.
“I think we would all be stupid to do that again. When, in 2016, everyone made predictions that he wasn’t going to be successful,” Westwood said.
“That being said, his popularity within the Republican Party has diminished pretty significantly since 2020,” she added.
DeSantis is gaining popularity as a rival to Trump, successfully waging culture war fights on issues important to voters, such as education and immigration. His landslide reelection in Florida in the midterm elections included hundreds of thousands of Democrats switching to support him.
“DeSantis has all the makings of someone who could knock Trump off the throne because he has all the positive elements of Trump without a lot of the baggage,” Westwood said.
“The problem for DeSantis will be if so many Republicans get into the race and split the anti-Trump vote, Trump could skate through. It really depends on how the primary field shapes up,” she added.
On the other side, Biden has yet to announce a 2024 run.
While, vocally, Democrats seem to support him, they also created distance during the 2022 midterm elections. Many didn’t even want him to come to their states or to campaign with them.
Westwood explained that Biden doesn’t have the right amount of support from his own party.
“Biden is objectively just really unpopular, even among Democrats,” she noted, adding, “He doesn’t even have as much support as an incumbent president should have within his own party.”
“They voted on other issues, like abortion, when they cast their ballot. But 2024 will literally be a referendum on Joe Biden’s presidency.”
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Voters will have to assess how they feel about Biden in 2024. Democrats will need to figure out a way to distance vulnerable candidates on the ballot from him, she added.
“I think that’s why a lot of Democrats are sort of nervous about the fact that he seems to be positioning himself to run again,” Westwood said.
