Donald Trump has announced he will skip the Republican presidential debates as polls on Sunday and Monday have shown he has a commanding lead in the party’s nomination contest.
The move by Mr Trump breaks with the tradition of leading presidential candidates participating in debates. The first Republican debate of the 2024 race is set for Wednesday night in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The former president, whose campaign has been overshadowed by criminal charges brought against him at a federal and state level, had in recent weeks increasingly questioned the need to appear.
In a social media post on Sunday he confirmed he would not participate alongside his Republican rivals for the White House.
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“The public knows who I am and what a successful presidency I had, with energy independence, strong borders and military, biggest ever tax and regulation cuts, no inflation, strongest economy in history and much more,” Trump wrote. “I WILL THEREFORE NOT BE DOING THE DEBATES,” he added.
Mr Trump cited a CBS poll released on Sunday that showed 62 per cent of likely Republican primary voters said they would back him, his largest lead to date in the race to clinch his party’s nomination.
The next most popular candidate, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, trailed Mr Trump by a wide margin, garnering the support of only 16 per cent of those surveyed. The seven remaining presidential hopefuls had only single-digit support.
Another closely watched poll, released on Monday, showed Mr Trump with a large advantage in Iowa, the Midwestern state holding the first contest for the party’s White House nomination next year.
The NBC/Des Moines Register survey, conducted by veteran Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, found that Mr Trump had the backing of 42 per cent of likely participants in the state’s Republican caucus.
Mr DeSantis had 19 per cent while Tim Scott, the South Carolina senator, was in third place with 9 per cent. The poll showed Mr Trump maintaining a lead despite the flurry of criminal indictments he has faced in recent weeks. But it also indicated that Trump’s advantage was smaller in Iowa than it was nationally.
The New York Times reported on Friday that Mr Trump was planning to skip the first debate and instead sit for an interview with Tucker Carlson, the firebrand conservative television host formerly at Fox News. Mr Trump has not confirmed that plan, but such a decision would be particularly painful for Fox because it is hosting the debate on Wednesday.
All of Mr Trump’s main rivals are expected to appear at the first debate including Mr DeSantis; Mr Scott; Vivek Ramaswamy, the campaigner against environmental, social and governance investing; Nikki Haley, the former US ambassador to the UN; and Mike Pence, Mr Trump’s former vice-president.
“Who knows what’ll end up happening? We’ll be prepared either way. But I’m excited about doing it because most of what you do in this process is filtered through media,” Mr DeSantis said during an appearance in Atlanta, Georgia, on Friday.
Mr DeSantis also indirectly referred to Mr Trump and his insistence that he was unfairly deprived of re-election in 2020: “I hope that we will be focused on the future of the country, rather than some of the other static that’s out there right now.”
Mr Pence criticised Mr Trump for not appearing. “Every one of us that has qualified for that debate stage ought to be on the stage, be willing to square off, answer the tough questions and also draw a bright-line contrast” on various issues, the former vice-president told ABC News on Sunday.
To qualify for the debate, Republican candidates had to meet certain donor and polling thresholds, and pledge to support the party’s eventual nominee in the general election.
Wisconsin has been a crucial swing state in the past two general elections, with Mr Trump winning it by a small margin in 2016 against Hillary Clinton and then losing it to Joe Biden in 2020 – also by a slim margin.
Kevin Munoz, a spokesman for Mr Biden’s re-election campaign, said Mr Trump did not want to show up in Milwaukee because the state exemplified his “failed leadership”. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023