[PJ] You can take this with a grain of salt, but according to Niall Ferguson, a historian and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, there is a strong possibility that former Donald Trump will emerge the victor in the 2024 presidential election.In an op-ed for The Spectator, Ferguson argued that "A second Trump act is not just possible. It’s fast becoming my base case."
Ferguson quickly dismisses the idea that Trump’s legal issues will hurt him because criminal cases against leading political figures often do not hinder their political success. In fact, he observed that they’re already backfiring because of the perception that Democrats are abusing the legal system for political purposes.
As for the primaries, Ferguson notes that Republican candidates that have an early lead in the polls, as Trump does, typically end up the nominee. "Early frontrunners have won Republican primaries in six out of eight competitive races since 1972, when the modern system of primaries was introduced," he notes. "The two exceptions were John McCain in 2008 and Trump himself in 2016."
If Donald Trump maintains his current average polling numbers throughout the first half of 2023 but fails to become the Republican Party’s choice for the presidential nomination, he would become the highest-polling candidate ever to be unsuccessful in securing the nomination. So the odds are clearly in his favor.