Why is Trump already the Republican favorite for 2024?

Would Trump seek to run in 2024?

3:41

(CNN) -

Poll of the Week: A new Gallup poll found that 87% of self-identified voters as Republicans approve of President Donald Trump's performance in office.

An average of live interview polls, meeting CNN standards taken since the election, pegs Trump's approval rating among Republicans at 89%.

What is the point?

Trump's defeat in 2020 should, in theory, lead to a power vacuum in the Republican ranks.

The last person to win a major party nomination after losing a presidential election was Richard Nixon in 1968. The last president to do so was Grover Cleveland in 1892.

A look at the data reveals, however, that Trump is in an exceptionally strong position to maintain his grip on the party.

Until proven otherwise, Trump should be considered the front-runner for the Republican run for president in 2024.

In the last election, Trump won the highest proportion of self-identified Republican voters in the era of exit polls (94%).

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• OPINION |

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  Is something that could happen

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Polls since the election show little or no decline in that strength among Republicans.

Among his own party, Trump's average approval rating of 89% in the live interview polls and 87 and 90% in the two Gallup post-election polls are the strongest for any president who has lost a candidacy for a second term in the age of polls.

Gerald Ford came in with an 80% approval rating among Republicans in the December 1976 Gallup poll. Jimmy Carter was a mere 50% among Democrats in the Gallup figures for November and December 1980. George HW Bush averaged an 84% approval rating among Republicans in Gallup polls from November 1992 to January 1993.

In other words, no losing president in the polling age left the White House with more goodwill from his party's potential primary electorate than Trump.

• ANALYSIS |

  Why Donald Trump is the clear favorite for the 2024 Republican nomination

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Trump, Republican candidate 2024?

The small 2024 primary poll released since the election shows Trump as the front-runner.

He averages about half of the primary votes and no one else reaches 20%.

Surely that cannot deter other candidates from running for office.

In no way does he guarantee that he will be the Republican presidential candidate in 2024. We are still in 2020, for God's sake.

However, no other candidate who eventually ran and was voting as well as Trump at this time has lost his party's primary.

In fact, the other two candidates who are voting at the levels that Trump is voting for and took the plunge were Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The numbers for Gore and Clinton were so strong that they scared off most candidates from running in the primaries.

The other presidents who lost - Ford, Carter and Bush - came nowhere near matching Trump's starting numbers.

Ford was 20% behind Ronald Reagan in the 1977 Gallup polls.

Carter was 13% behind Ted Kennedy and Walter Mondale in the Gallup polls of early 1982.

Bush was an afterthought for the 1996 Republican nomination that no early poll seems to have listed him as a potential candidate.

An open-ended question (one in which respondents volunteer a response) from a 1993 CBS News / The New York Times poll found that only 4% of Republicans said he was their choice in 1996. That ranked fourth place behind Bob Dole (who won the nomination), Jack Kemp and Ross Perot.

In fact, losing a campaign generally hurts a president's future prospects.

Most Republicans, however, say that President-elect Joe Biden only won on voter fraud.

In other words, Trump's appeal as a winner is still true to them.

And until another Republican can pierce that mystique or Trump announces that he will not run, it will be hard to beat him.

Donald trump