Sununu: Trump could lose nomination if GOP candidates drop out, rally behind one alternative

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) on Wednesday pushed back against the idea that former President Trump will run away with the GOP 2024 presidential nomination, predicting Trump would lose if the other candidates had the “discipline” to drop out and make the GOP primary a one-on-one match-up.

“Look, if seven of those candidates have the discipline to get out, Trump loses,” Sununu said in an interview on Fox News. “When you think about it that way, the voters’ job is to find the alternate to Trump, but the candidates’ job are to get out of that race. And if you do that, and make it a one-on-one race, Trump loses. There’s no question about it.”

Sununu, the moderate Republican leader of an important early primary state, predicted that Trump would get about 40 percent to 42 percent of the vote in that case, noting, “but that’s not going to be enough to win, especially going into something like Super Tuesday.”

“So, huge opportunities for these candidates to say, I’m going to be the alternative and make sure the other candidates ultimately know, there’s no room for you, and there’s too much at stake with the entire Republican ticket in ’24, just to let everybody on there,” he added.

Sununu also said he thinks polls are wrong in showing that Trump would win in a hypothetical match-up with President Biden, noting that polls have frequently overestimated GOP performance.

“The polls were neck and neck in 2022, and the Republicans got their butts kicked. We should have had a huge red wave, and we barely got by with a red ripple. We should have had big wins in 2020, and the entire ticket suffered. You know, we should have had wins in 2018. And we lost the House,” Sununu said.

“We always think we’re going to win. The polls always seem to think that the Republicans are going to win, but the reality is we don’t, and when you have Trump and his message on top of the ticket, we lost in ’18. We lost in ’20. We lost the ’22. Why would you think that it’s going to be a different result in ’24?” he added.

Sununu said he thinks it’s more likely that Biden is not on the Democratic ticket than that Trump isn’t on the Republican one, a point he did not elaborate on. He said if that happens, though, “You’re going to have a new candidate, a new generational change potentially within the Democrat Party. And we’re going to be here trying to, as Republicans, relitigating what happened four years ago.”

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