The best efforts of Democrats and the establishment media still can't keep Donald Trump down.

It might be obscenely early to be talking seriously about 2024 presidential election predictions, but a poll released Tuesday presents a picture that should pump up the voters who turned out for Trump two years ago, and get the attention of anyone who cares where the country is headed.

President Joe Biden is the Democrat to beat, and Trump is the Republican to beat him.

And this is after a nonstop campaign by Democrats to demonize the former president -- the televised histrionics of the Jan. 6 committee, the FBI's gratuitous raid on his Mar-a-Lago home, blatantly biased prosecutors in New York and Georgia. The attacks have never ended.

The national survey of 1,060 voters was conducted by Emerson College Polling from Friday to Saturday with a margin of error of 2.9 percent.

(The fact that the poll covered "registered voters" rather than "likely voters" diminishes the strength of its conclusions, no doubt, but with the election almost two years away, the picture is probably as good as it's going to get anyway.)

Among Republican voters, Trump held a massive lead with 55 percent support over his closest potential rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had 25 percent, despite the fact that he's not even officially running -- yet. No other announced or potential contender even broke out of single digits.

NATIONAL POLL

2024 #GOP Primary@realDonaldTrump 55%@RonDeSantisFL 25%@Mike_Pence 8% @NikkiHaley 5%@SenatorTimScott 2% @KristiNoem 1%@mikepompeo 1%@LarryHogan 1%@ChrisSununu .4%
Someone else 5%https://t.co/llM0N5gnQ4 pic.twitter.com/s4XA5tihUH

— Emerson College Polling (@EmersonPolling) February 28, 2023

Meanwhile, the poll showed Biden's support remains disturbingly high among Democratic voters, who gave the president a 77 percent approval rating in January and a 78 percent approval rating in February.

(Given Biden's obvious failings at this point -- an invasion of illegal immigrants and crippling inflation at home, a continuing war in Europe that his weakness essentially invited, ever-growing evidence of corruption in his own family -- it's enough to not merely question Democrats' patriotism, but their sanity.)

But in a head-to-head matchup, the poll found, Trump defeated Biden 46 percent to 42 percent, with 7 percent opting for a third possibility and 5 percent undecided. That's a spread outside the poll's margin of error.

On the other hand, when the poll asked respondents about a one-on-one contest between Biden and DeSantis, Biden won 44 percent to 40 percent. Against Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador who has actually announced for the Republican nomination, Biden won 40 percent 37 percent.

Again, any effort in February 2023 to get a picture of what the country will look like politically in November 2024 is going to produce a hazy image at best. But two things are crystal-clear at this point:

Even after a continuous smear campaign unmatched since that against Emmanuel Goldstein in George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four," Donald Trump remains one of the strongest political forces in the United States.

He was the Republican who defeated the political and mass media machine of Hillary Clinton in 2016 in one of the greatest upsets in the country's history.

He was the incumbent president who marshaled the support of 74 million voters against Biden even after years of character assassination by the massed forces of the Democratic Party, the nation's supposedly nonpartisan intelligence agencies, the burgeoning tyrants of social media and, of course, the establishment media.

And at this stage of the 2024 election cycle, he's the leading Republican to take on Biden in a 2020 rematch.

The second is that no matter how badly they've failed to destroy Trump in the past, the Democrats, their propaganda wing in the media and too many political enemies to name on both the left and the right are going to do their damndest to bring him down in the next 20 months.

They won't hesitate to take out his supporters, either. The treatment of the Capitol incursion defendants and various FBI stings have proven that.

However divided American politics look now, they're set to get even worse. And anyone who cares about the country should care about that.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.