National Review senior writer Michael Brendan Dougherty argued Friday that there’s more than meets the eye to the story of the Republican presidential-nomination race.

Speaking on the Editors podcast, he said: “I’m just still a believer that there must be something to these poll results showing that, like 70 percent of voters in Iowa . . . are deliberating between Trump and DeSantis, right? They’ll say, ‘Well, I’m for Trump, but I’m also considering DeSantis.’ And that leaves an opening for some kind of dynamic to develop.”

Trump skipped this past week’s GOP primary debate, and a few of his rivals taunted him for his absence. But he continues to lead national primary polls by persistently huge margins and shows no indication yet that he feels compelled to join any debates.

Dougherty reminded listeners, though, of polls showing “something like 65 percent of the country says Donald Trump should never be president again.” That number “squares up somehow with polls showing him beating Joe Biden. So some number of those people who think Donald Trump should never be president again are willing to support him only because he’s facing Joe Biden. So there’s something of a softness to Trump’s support.”

That softness, according to Dougherty, is even clearer when compared to the contest between Biden and RFK Jr. “That the impregnable lead is what you see Joe Biden having over RFK Jr.,” he said. “That’s not what this race looks like now for Trump. And it’s not what I think it’ll look like if it’s winnowed down to two or three people.”

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