Can a Third-Party Candidate Beat Trump?

Every once in a while, and it doesn’t happen often enough, but it does happen, I do my daily review of the political news and enjoy what the news has to say. And note that I refer to ‘news’ as what has been said, because in today’s media world what has actually happened and what a bunch of so-called experts say has happened is one and the same thing.

Be that as it may, today’s political news had two stories which rubbed me the right way. One story is about a new poll which shows that Trump is headed for the veritable garbage dump, the other is about what would happen if someone ran a serious, third-party campaign.

So, let’s start off with Trump.

A new poll from Monmouth University has Trump’s overall favorability rating down to 36%, the lowest it has been since Monmouth started running this poll every month since September, 2019.

This same poll, incidentally, doesn’t have such great news for Joe, who’s favorability rating is 43%, but at least he’s still doing better than Trump, whereas last year in this same poll the two guys were basically tied.

Given that we are still 16 months away from the 2024 election, we need to take every poll with multiple grains of salt. But Monmouth happens to be a polling operation which is seen as being more right than wrong. Their polls are…