Trump’s 2024 Chances Fall Behind Biden & DeSantis, Betters Say

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Donald Trump’s chances at winning the 2024 presidential election aren’t looking as great as he’d want.

With his fundraising actually dropping in the weeks after he formally confirmed his 2024 campaign for president in the middle of November, and with polls showing Florida GOP Governor Ron DeSantis potentially beating Trump by a lot in key swing states, Trump now has another problem with his campaign metrics: bets. Although online betting markets are obviously based on a less scientific consensus than something like political surveys from an established pollster, the market known as Betfair showed Trump as third among those most likely to eventually win the presidential election in 2024, behind both Ron DeSantis and Joe Biden, on Tuesday. The site had DeSantis’s odds of eventually winning at 16/5 as of that point, with Biden seemingly at 10/3 and Trump at 9/2. “Shortened” odds in which the figures on each side are closer together suggest better chances.

The site did show Trump with a slightly better chance than DeSantis, the current governor of Florida, of winning the Republican nomination as of that same point. (The calculations aren’t scientific. Obviously, DeSantis, who hasn’t announced a campaign, likely wouldn’t win the general election if he lost the primary.) All of these figures follow Trump’s recent campaign swing through South Carolina and New Hampshire, two states that hold presidential primaries early in the process that’ll be starting next year, meaning the outcome of those Trump events wasn’t positive enough to boost the former president’s image to the point of leading the odds prevailing Tuesday on Betfair for the general election. Neither of the gatherings were big-budget Trump rallies. The New Hampshire speech was to a party meeting, while Trump’s appearance in South Carolina was before a crowd of just hundreds.

In New Hampshire, a recent poll found DeSantis leading Trump by 12 percent, although other polling has shown the ex-president leading the potential field of candidates in the state. In South Carolina, a recent round of surveys from Trafalgar showed the ex-president leading by a double-digit amount — although there was also a recent poll done that showed DeSantis up in the state by almost 20 percentage points. (Those numbers are all from this month.) Trump has also seen some struggles on the endorsements front. Although South Carolina GOP officials including Governor Henry McMaster and Senator Lindsey Graham are both supporting his campaign, a report from Bloomberg said Republicans in Iowa like Governor Kim Reynolds and Sen. Chuck Grassley weren’t answering at least some of his calls. Even Matthew Whitaker, a former federal prosecutor who Trump temporarily made acting attorney general, was keeping his rhetorical options open, endorsement-wise.