'Declare it over': Columnist says Trump has won GOP nomination — with one caveat

Here’s how four criminal trials, heightened extremist rhetoric in the face of two international wars and a slate of strong conservative opponents determined to defeat him are affecting Donald Trump’s presidential campaign: “If anything,” pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co, told the Des Moines register Monday morning, “he’s showing improvement.”

Selzer’s data — not the only poll showing Trump’s massive lead in the 2024 primary — spurred the Washington Post's columnist Philip Bump to, with qualifications, “declare it over.”

Polls show Trump has an average 30-point lead in three of the first four states to vote in the Republican primary: Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, according to the polling site 538.

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This suggests his followers are responding positively to rhetoric increasingly aligned with autocratic leaders such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and pulled from the pages of the "Hitler Nazi playbook," as one civil rights group described it.

But there is one wild card in the criminal court cases that have yet to mar Trump's popularity among his base, the Washington Post notes.

Should Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, special prosecutor Jack Smith or Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg land a criminal conviction, Trump might find himself unable to run.

“Were it not for those ongoing legal fights — the effects of which seem hard to predict — and probably for Trump’s own surprise overperformance in 2016,” analyst Philip Bump writes, “any reasonable observer would look at the 2024 nominating fight and declare it over.”