Trump's 2024 Return Favoured by Slim Majority of Republicans, Poll Finds

The former president has spent months titillating die-hard supporters regarding possible plans to run in 2024, with Republican-leaning media testing the waters by floating potential alternative candidates in light of disagreements with the business mogul's noninterventionist foreign policy and divisiveness at home.

Nearly two-thirds of Republicans want former President Donald Trump to remain leader of the party, but just 51 percent believe the GOP would have a better shot at the White House with him as their candidate in 2024 than without him, a new poll by social research firm SSRS for CNN suggests.

According to the poll, 63 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe Trump should remain the party's grandee, with 37 percent expressing the opposite opinion.

At the same time, 51 percent of those polled continue to believe that Trump could cruise Republicans back into control of the top office in the land, while 49 percent think another nominee would be more likely to secure them victory.

If the results are accurate, the polling seems to show a measure of Trump fatigue among the GOP. Similar polling conducted in March 2019 found that just 17 percent of Republicans would prefer an alternative to Trump in 2020.

The SSRS/CNN poll of GOP and Republican-leaning voter attitudes comes after a separate survey by Emerson College found that Trump would narrowly defeat Biden in the national race if the 2024 election were held today. The survey found Trump leading Biden 47-46 percent, while 6 percent of respondents said they would opt for another candidate. The Emerson survey also found that 67 percent of Republicans would support Trump's nomination in 2024.

Some Republicans from the George W. Bush wing of the party have been carefully testing the waters of GOP voter attitudes floating possible alternative candidates to Trump amid fears that the billionaire businessman could upset the military and intelligence community's interests, and that the chaos which followed the 6 January riots at the Capitol may have "tainted" him.

Along with Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, senators Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Rick Scott, former Vice President Mike Pence, and even former CIA head and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have been considered as potential candidates in 2024.

However, DeSantis, the perceived frontrunner in any potential primary race against Trump, has dismissed that he has any intention to run in 2024, recently telling reporters that at this stage, "all the speculation about [him] is purely manufactured".

Trump has said repeatedly that he is "100 percent" considering running again, and that he would "certainly" mull picking DeSantis to replace Pence, who publicly rebuked Trump over claims that the 2020 election was "stolen", as his running mate.

Trump spent weeks after the November vote accusing Democratic officials in key swing states of rigging the election by using faulty voting machines and fraudulent mail-in ballots, claiming he had "thousands" of witnesses and "hundreds and hundreds" of sworn affidavits on hand to prove fraud. State courts refused to hear the Trump campaign's allegations, and the Supreme Court struck down an attempt by the state of Texas to contest results in other states in December.

Democratic officials and media, and even some Republicans, dismissed Trump's claims of election fraud as nonsense and accused the president of engaging in a dangerous provocation to try to hold on to power. The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives impeached him for a second time amid the fallout from the 6 January violence, accusing him of being responsible, and suggesting that the rioters were motivated by his "absurd" and "dangerous" election-related allegations. Yet, recent audits of election results in several swing state counties in Georgia and Arizona have shown that negligible irregularities did take place, prompting the former president to once again repeat his claims that the election was rigged.