Recent history suggests former President Donald Trump will be impossible to beat for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination despite his absence at the party's first debate of the election cycle.
An Emerson College poll during the weekend showed Trump with a 46-point lead over his nearest opponent, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, in the GOP primary field.
FiveThirtyEight's average shows Trump with a more than 37-point cushion over DeSantis.
Such domination in the polls is noteworthy because no presidential candidate has overcome a more than 30-point deficit at this point in the election cycle, according to CNN.
A Washington Post analysis said that no presidential candidate since the 1970s has made up a gap similar to one existing between Trump and the other GOP contenders.
And despite four criminal indictments, Trumps has averaged more than 50% support in national primary polls, Politico reported.
Clearly, when eight opponents for the 2024 presidential nomination take to the stage to debate on Wednesday night in Milwaukee, Trump's presence in the race will be looming over the event.
Trump also finds himself in good position when it comes to a hypothetical general election race against President Joe Biden. Polls show the two men in a tight race.
In 2016 and 2020, Trump trailed the Democrat nominees at this point in the cycle, CNN reported.
Large leads in the polls helped Trump decide to skip the first primary debate of the cycle.
"People know my Record, one of the BEST EVER, so why would I Debate?" the former president wrote on Truth Social last week.
Politico reported that Trump still faces challenges. A potential rematch could cause voter fatigue, and nearly a third of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents have a very or mostly unfavorable view of him.
"He's been president, he's been the nominee twice, so he's an obvious choice for a lot of Republicans, but I don't think he's sealed the nomination by any means," Dan Cox, the director of the American Enterprise Institute's Survey Center on American Life, told Axios.