Donald Trump has shared a graph outlining his popularity among Republican primary voters on the heels of Mike Pence saying that he won’t necessarily vote for the former president if he’s the GOP nominee in 2024.
Mr Trump shared a graph on his social media platform Truth Social from McLaughlin & Associates, a strategic consulting and polling firm, showing his strong support among Republican primary voters.
According to FiveThirtyEight, McLaughlin & Associates has made the right call in 69 per cent of races, with 27 polls having been analyzed by the outlet.
The graph based on polling conducted last month showed 81 per cent of GOP primary voters supporting Mr Trump if he were to run for the Republican nomination in 2024 – 64 per cent strongly and 22 per cent somewhat supporting him – and 11 per cent opposing him.
Polling from the firm also revealed that 71 per cent of GOP primary voters want Mr Trump to run again, while 18 per cent want him to stay out of the race.
Mr Trump also re-shared an article from the far-right outlet Breitbart, published earlier this month, which said that “former President Donald Trump enjoys significantly more support from his Republican base than President Biden sees from Democrats”.
The former president boasted of his support within the GOP as his former second-in-command Mr Pence said in front of an audience at an event hosted by the Young America’s Foundation at Georgetown University in Washington, DC on Wednesday night that he might not vote for Mr Trump in 2024.
Following his speech, he took questions from the students in attendance.
“Mr Pence, if Donald Trump is the Republican nominee for president in 2024, will you vote for him?” one of them asked, according to Mediaite.
Following some gasps from the audience and a brief silence from Mr Pence, he said “well, there might be somebody else I’d prefer more”, prompting applause from the crowd.
“What I can tell you is I have every confidence that the Republican Party is going to sort out leadership. All my focus has been on the midterm elections and it will stay that way for the next 20 days,” he added.
The former Indiana governor said he would be “thinking about the future” after the midterms on 8 November.
Mr Pence has been willing to publically distance himself from Mr Trump following the January 6 2021 insurrection, during which Trump supporters took part in chants exclaiming “hang Mike Pence” because he wouldn’t support the then-president in his efforts to overturn the results of President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
Mr Trump has falsely claimed that Mr Pence had the ability to keep him in the Oval Office.
Mr Pence said in February that Mr Trump was “wrong” in that belief.
“There are those in our party who believe that as the presiding officer over the joint session of Congress that I possessed unilateral authority to reject Electoral College votes,” he told the Federalist Society earlier this year. “And I heard this week that former President Trump said I had the right to overturn the election.”
“President Trump is wrong,” Mr Pence added, according to Mediaite. “I had no right to overturn the election. The presidency belongs to the American people, and the American people alone. And frankly, there is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.”
Mr Pence has been visiting early primary states, such as Iowa, in what could be preparations for a 2024 run of his own.
