The Iowa caucuses are now less than two weeks away, and a compilation of polls by Real Clear Politics shows former President Donald Trump continues to hold a commanding lead there in The Hawkeye State.
Timothy Head, executive director of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, says Trump is in great shape right now.
"His lead not only has sustained in Iowa, but I would say former President Trump's lead has actually even slightly increased here in the last roughly six weeks," he tells AFN. "Clearly the competition, really through the entire primary so far, has been who will be the alternative to President Trump. And that's probably the main suspense at this point."
According to the polls, Trump leads second-place Ron DeSantis by nearly 33 points, and Nikki Haley, another 2.5 points back, is in third place.
"If nothing significant changes, he certainly looks to be the odds-on favorite to be the Republican nominee," Head continues.
And he expects Trump will eventually unify the party.
"Once there's a clean Republican versus Democrat, once there's kind of a binary decision between Trump and another candidate, I think that those people are likely to come back into the fold for Trump," Head predicts.
Will Trumphobia be the Democrats' downfall?
16 states are officially trying to kick former President Donald Trump off their primary ballots, with Colorado and Maine's decisions on hold pending legal review.
In Maine, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (D) unilaterally removed Trump from the state's ballot late last year, making herself the first election official to ever take such action. She used Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, the same Civil War-era provision the Colorado State Supreme Court used earlier that month to remove his name from the Republican ballot in Colorado ahead of its March 5 primary, as justification.
"I do believe this is wrong, especially to have someone from a rival political party making a decision on who the representatives are going to be in an election," comments Carroll Conley, executive director of the Christian Civic League of Maine. "The secretary of state shouldn't be making this decision. The courts should not be making this decision. We believe the citizens of the United States should be selecting the next president."
Strategically, Conley says the Democrats are making a horrible mistake.
"I've already gotten text messages from friends that were not necessarily big Trump fans that … said, 'You know what? I was on the fence, but I'm going to go find my MAGA hat,'" he relays.
And while many haters are salivating over the prospect of Trump-free ballots, some Democrat stalwarts -- including David Axelrod, former President Obama's senior advisor -- are discouraging this effort.
"I do think it would rip the country apart if he were actually prevented from running, because tens of millions of people want to vote for him," Axelrod recently commented. "I think if you're going to beat Donald Trump, you're going to probably have to do it at the polls."
Given the many persecutions levied against Trump, motivated by unhinged hatred of the man, talk host Jeff Crank says many believe another attack will turn Trump into a martyr, securing his second term in office.
"The more they do that, the more, I think, they drive people's sympathy towards Donald Trump, and the less likely it is that Joe Biden gets reelected," Crank submits.
Meanwhile, their solution for allegedly saving the country, he says, is to destroy it.
"The irony of all of it is that they are accusing him of doing the very things that they are actually doing to subvert our key institutions within government," the talk host observes.
But he understands that the Democrats are caught between a rock and a hard place.
"I would try and run a race against [Trump] that basically tries to attack his policies," Crank advises. "That's going to be difficult for him to do, because Joe Biden has a record, and it ain't a good one."
The Colorado Republican Party has already appealed the state's supreme court decision, and the Trump campaign plans to appeal Bellows' decision to Maine's state courts, where Conley is unsure of what will happen.
"They're not exactly the most conservative, so the fact that we have other blue states that are doing this I think gives impetus, if the state courts don't get it right, to take it to the Supreme Court," he adds.
Bellows has suspended her ruling until that court system rules on the matter.
