The last month has arguably been the worst yet for former President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign. The emergence of Vice President Kamala Harris as the last-minute Democratic nominee has had Trump in a tailspin, and now even the editor of a major conservative news outlet is admitting that the GOP's chances of victory in November are slim.
In a recent column, National Review executive editor Mark Antonio Wright weighed in on the disarray of the Republican ticket and Trump's careening presidential campaign. While opining that the GOP nominee isn't getting fair treatment by the mainstream press, Wright nonetheless attributed Trump's flagging 2024 operation to the fact that he is simply "very unpopular" and that Harris represents a welcome departure from what was previously a stale race.
"Yes, this summer when the public was faced with the choice between the Democrats’ unpopular, probably senile, octogenarian Joe Biden and the Republicans’ unpopular, definitely nuts, septuagenarian Donald Trump, it seemed like the American people would reluctantly go with Trump," Wright wrote. "But at the same time, American voters for two years running had loudly and repeatedly told both parties, pollsters, and anyone who would listen that they preferred a different set of choices. The dominant emotion that most Americans felt about the coming election was dread. And then, in a remarkable turn of events, the Democratic Party gave Americans another option: Kamala Harris."
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Wright noted that throughout Trump's time in the White House, he "won by a razor's edge" in 2016, never enjoyed more than 49% support in public approval ratings and "yet has carried on as though he was given a huge national mandate and enjoys major popular support when there’s zero evidence for that proposition." He added that the Trump-dominated GOP lost the 2018 midterms, the White House in 2020 and had an underwhelming showing in the 2022 election cycle.
"So why is anyone surprised that, with the American people having been given another option — an option that isn’t Joe Biden, isn’t Donald Trump, and isn’t a million years old — Trump is showing such weakness?" Wright wrote.
Polling trends have showed that Harris is not only edging out the former president in battleground states, but is rapidly gaining on Trump in states previously thought to be safe Republican territory. A recent University of Houston/Texas Southern Poll of voters in the deep-red Lone Star State found that Harris is now within five percentage points of Trump, whereas Biden was nearly 10 points behind before he exited the race.
Additionally, the vice president is gaining significant ground in Trump's adopted home state of Florida. Even though the Sunshine State reelected Republican Governor Ron DeSantis and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) by decisive margins in 2022, more recent polling shows Harris trailing Trump by just five points in the third-most populous state in the union.
READ MORE: Harris just cut Trump's lead in half in one of the reddest states
"Trump isn’t losing because Kamala Harris is being hyped by the press and fluffed up to kingdom come. He isn’t losing because the press is being unfair to him," Wright observed. "He’s losing because he’s a weak, unpopular, undisciplined candidate running at the head of a weak, minority electoral coalition. That’s the truth, whether anyone wants to hear it or not."
The National Review is a storied conservative publication first founded by Republican activist William F. Buckley in 1955. However, it has had a rocky relationship with Trump since 2016, when it dedicated an entire issue to persuading Republicans to abandon the eventual 45th president of the United States.
Click here to read Wright's column in its entirety (subscription required).
