Less than 72 hours have passed since federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment against former President Donald Trump on charges related to his alleged mishandling of classified documents and his attempts to mislead investigators. The revelations in the document led pollsters to survey the Republican electorate, and their findings confirmed that GOP voters have yet to reconsider their support for the dominant figure in Republican politics.
Pollsters from CBS News/YouGov found that 76% of GOP primary voters surveyed on Friday and Saturday dismissed the indictment as “politically motivated.” While 80% of all adults said Trump’s careless handling of classified materials represented a “national security risk,” only 38% of Republican voters agreed. Sixty-one percent of GOP voters said the news would not impact their views of Trump, and 80% said the former president should still be able to serve in the White House if convicted.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted during the same time frame produced similar results. Just 38% of self-identified Republicans described the charges against Trump as “serious,” compared with 61% of the general public and 63% of self-identified independents. The poll found that the public’s views on Trump’s fitness for high office remain largely unchanged by the indictment, which is not surprising given the recentness of the event and the voting public’s entrenched views on the candidate.
These results have sparked outrage among the GOP’s critics, who wonder how Republicans can still support Trump given the gravity of the allegations against him. Recent history, however, suggests that Republican voters’ affinities for Trump are not conditional, and it will take more than time to convince the GOP-primary electorate that the revelations in this or any other forthcoming criminal indictments are disqualifying. If the details contained in the indictment are going to have an impact, Republican officials and the right-leaning media elites that GOP voters trust will need to press the case against Trump.
There would be precedent for this sort of attitudinal shift. A survey of some of the most divisive issues among Republicans suggests that GOP voters’ views are fluid and subject to revision. Take, for example, the issue of immigration. In 2014, six-in-ten self-described Republicans supported legislation that would establish legal residency for illegal migrants. By 2018, Republican voters indicated in polls that they not only opposed the legalization of the nation’s illegal population but wanted to reduce legal immigration into the U.S. Trump argued the case, and he won the argument.
A similar phenomenon characterized Republican voters’ views on American intervention in the conflict in Syria and the level of U.S. support for Ukraine’s effort to resist Russia’s war of territorial expansion. Within the first month of the invasion, Republicans sided with the majority of Americans who believed Joe Biden hadn’t done enough to support Ukraine in advance of the Russian onslaught. But a familiar pattern emerged as the loudest voices in Republican politics agitated against U.S. support for Kyiv. By April of this year, majorities of Republican voters and GOP-leaning independents concluded that the war in Europe did not imperil vital U.S. interests and opposed providing material support for Ukraine’s resistance.
Republican voters’ views are not static. They can change provided the right inputs. The real question is what Trump’s rivals for the 2024 nomination will do. If they press the case against him, they’ll stand a chance of winning voters away from his side. If they instead take the path of least resistance, dismissing the significance of the DOJ’s indictment because making the case that Donald Trump jeopardized U.S. national security is just too hard, his odds of being the Republican nominee in 2024 will remain good.
