Trump Maintains Huge Lead in Polls Ahead of Second Republican Debate

The second Republican presidential debate is coming up. And it’s an unusual one because the front-runner in the race, Donald Trump, won’t be attending. Before the first debate, it might have been reasonable to imagine that maybe Donald Trump would be hurt by failing to show up. But in the end, it’s hard to find any evidence at all that Donald Trump was hurt by choosing to skip the first debate. In fact, he’s actually polling better today than he was before the first debate. That doesn’t mean that the debate won’t have any effect on the race. Republican donors will be watching this debate, too. They’ll be making tough decisions about whether they think Ron DeSantis is still viable against Donald Trump or whether they’re better off supporting someone like Nikki Haley or Tim Scott. So the debate can really matter to these candidates even if it doesn’t move the polls at all. The race is starting to have some of the characteristics of a noncompetitive contest. His lead is just as large as the one that Joe Biden has over Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Like Biden, Donald Trump doesn’t believe that he has to participate in the debates and he hasn’t suffered a political cost for that. Many mainstream Republicans are not willing to criticize Trump or back one of his rivals because Trump increasingly looks like an inevitable nominee. When you put all of that together and it’s reasonable to start asking, you know, is the race over? You know, historically, it’s hard to say that, there’s a lot of time left. There are the early states in Iowa and New Hampshire. Candidates will drop out. And then there’s the specter of a full criminal trial right in the middle of the Republican primary season. So there’s a long way to go.