Donald Trump’s first post-arrest, post-debate Republican primary poll numbers are ugly for him already
All along we’ve been hearing this surreal narrative about how Donald Trump’s indictments, arrests, mugshot, trials, and convictions would somehow help him win the Republican nomination. But none of the people hyping this notion have ever been able to provide a rationale for why it might happen, beyond chanting the phrase “Trump’s base” on repeat. It’s always been a nonsensical notion.
Think it through: if someone is such a Trump die-hard that his arrests and trials are going to make them more eager to vote for him, that person was already going to vote for Trump anyway. There’s not a single person out there who’s going to say, “Well I wasn’t going to vote for Trump, but now that it looks like he’s going to prison, I’m going to waste my vote on him!” No one fits that profile.
Of course we’ve spent months seeing headlines and viral tweets about how Trump’s Republican primary numbers have improved as a result of his indictments and arrests – but if you look at the numbers that simply has not happened. What’s actually happened is that Ron DeSantis was polling at around 45% until he stepped onto the national stage and made a fool of himself, and his numbers collapsed. This meant that Trump technically had a bigger “lead” over the second place candidate. But even as roughly 35% of Republican primary voters abandoned DeSantis, the numbers say that Trump gained zero of those voters. He didn’t go up at all. Instead the voters who fled DeSantis ended up being split among the other candidates. It’s now clear that if some other Republican candidate gains serious momentum and doesn’t belly flop like DeSantis did, that person can easily reach about 45% in primary polling, and then try to start picking off the least enthusiastic Trump voters.
That’s why it’s always been downright silly to suggest that Trump has the Republican nomination locked up. In 2024 Republican primary polling, he’s never polled higher than the fifties. Roughly half of 2024 Republican primary voters have stood against him all along. This alone proves that Trump’s own base, and the overall Republican primary base, are two very different entities. It also proves that Trump’s base makes up far less than half of the Republican primary voting base, because obviously, some of the people picking Trump in primary polling are outside his base and are merely picking the person they’re being told is their party’s frontrunner.
The question has always been how many Republican primary voters Trump would lose as a result of getting indicted, arrested, and convicted. Some of the people who have been on the fence about him might say “Well it looks like he’s a criminal after all, I’m out.” Or some of them might say “Well it looks like Trump is going to prison anyway, so I’m not going to throw my vote away on him.” Again, these are not people in Trump’s base. They are people outside of Trump’s base who have been sticking with him but never liked him. This group of people never gets talked about, but this group clearly exists.
We’ve been waiting to see whether Trump would start losing the support of these types. The expectation has always been that if it was going to happen, it wasn’t going to be after the first arrest, or even the second, but was instead going to pile up until it was simply too much to ignore.
Sure enough, one new poll from Emerson says that in light of Trump’s latest arrest and his decision to skip the first Republican debate, Trump has dropped by six points in Republican primary polling. We always want to be cautious about any one new poll. We’ll need to wait for the other major polls to be updated post-arrest/post-debate, and look at the averages, and see what the impact really was. But when the first poll out of the gate has Trump having dropped six points, that’s a pretty clear indicator that this is some kind of negative trend for him.
It still remains to be seen how much further, and at what speed, Trump’s Republican primary polling numbers will drop as a result of his ongoing criminal justice system problems. It’s possible that even on his way down, Trump could end up eking out the Republican nomination with just over 50% of the vote. It’s just as realistic to think that some outsider could step into the Republican primary race just as Trump hits his most vulnerable point, and takes it from him. We’ll see. But at the least, we can safely put to bed the silly notion that Trump’s criminal justice system troubles were somehow going to help him get the nomination. Then again, based on logic alone, we were able to put that notion to rest from day one.
Keep in mind that no matter how this plays out, the Republican Party will end up nominating someone in 2024, and that person will likely be awful. President Biden will have to run for reelection against some Republican. There’s no scenario where the Republicans magically end up with no nominee. Would we be better off facing Trump, who lost the last general election by seven million votes and will be far less viable this time, or would we be better off with some other Republican nominee who’s just as hideous but far less vetted? That’ll be up to Republican primary voters to decide. But they’re already making clear that it’s far from a given that they’ll end up nominating Trump.
