Less than 72 hours have passed since the federal indictment against Donald Trump was unsealed on charges relating to his alleged mishandling of classified documents and his efforts to mislead investigators. Pollsters have taken the temperature of the Republican electorate, and their findings confirmed Trump critics’ worst suspicions: GOP voters are still yet to rethink their allegiance to the dominant figure in Republican politics.
CBS News/YouGov pollsters found that 76 percent of GOP primary voters surveyed on Friday and Saturday dismissed the indictment as “politically motivated.” While 80 percent of all adults said Trump’s careless stewardship of classified materials represented a “national security risk,” only 38 percent of Republican voters agreed. Sixty-one percent of GOP voters said the news wouldn’t have any impact on their views of Trump, and 80 percent said the former president should still be able to serve in the White House if convicted.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll produced similar results. Just 38 percent of self-identified Republicans described the charges against Trump as “serious,” compared with 61 percent of the general public and 63 percent of self-identified independents. The public’s views on Trump’s fitness for high office remain largely unchanged by the indictment, which is hardly shocking given the recency of the event and the voting public’s hardened views on the candidate.
These results have generated outrage among the GOP’s critics. How, they ask, could Republicans still stand by this man given the gravity of the allegations he is facing? Recent history indicates that Republican voters’ affinities for Trump are not conditional, and time alone will not suffice 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 bite, Republican officials and the right-leaning media elites GOP voters trust will first have to press the case it makes against Trump.
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. By 2014, six-in-ten self-described Republicans supported legislation that would establish legal residency for illegal migrants. All that changed with the rise of Donald Trump and his demonstration in 2016 that a hardline policy toward illegal immigration wasn’t an insurmountable obstacle to electoral success. 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.
A similar phenomenon characterized Republican voters’ schizophrenia when it came to American intervention in the conflict in Syria. Republican opinion flipped from supporting strikes on Syrian targets to opposing them after Republican influencers turned against the project.
For now, the indictment has failed to change Republican voters’ affection for Trump. But we can only expect that condition to pertain indefinitely if influential Republicans who have earned the confidence of GOP voters decline to popularize the case made against Trump in this indictment. History suggests that 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.
