This read is by the people over at Five Thirty Eight…..
And those of us who watch the 2024 GOP Primary and General Election polling HAVE noticed that the ex-President is NOT getting stronger as some pundits are saying….
He’s actually slowly and steadily LOSING support among GOPer’s and Everybody else….
Donald J. Trump maybe in line for the 2024 GOP Presidential nomination,…
BUT?…..
He IS in SERIOUS trouble Legally AND starting to bled Politically right now….
After each of Trump’s three prior indictments, his polling numbers changed in small, inconsistent ways — if they changed at all. The fourth indictment followed this non-pattern pattern: Some evidence suggests that he’s gained ground in the Republican primary, other evidence suggests that he’s lost it, and what little general-election data we have suggests nothing has shifted significantly. And, adding to the frustration of political junkies everywhere, it’s very difficult to figure out how much the fourth indictment affected Trump’s standing in the race given how close it occurred to two other major events on the campaign trail: the third indictment and the GOP presidential debate.
Let’s take a deeper look at national polls of the Republican primary. There have been 29 of these conducted completely after news of the fourth indictment broke late at night on Aug. 14, and Trump has fallen from 53 percent in our polling average to 50 percent since then.1 But the Georgia indictment came on the heels of another big set of charges: On Aug. 1, Trump was indicted by a federal grand jury, also for allegedly interfering with the 2020 election. And only five combinations of pollsters and sponsors conducted polls both in the period between the two indictments (Aug. 1 and Aug. 14) and after the Georgia one (since Aug. 14).2 That’s important because, while we can theoretically compare, say, Emerson College’s Aug. 16-17 survey to its June 19-20 survey, it would be impossible to say that Trump’s 3-percentage-point decline is due to the Georgia indictment. It could have been due to the third indictment, or any other combination of events that occurred over those two months.3
Then, to make matters even more complicated, only two of those pollsters wrapped their post-indictment poll before the Aug. 23 Republican presidential debate, which also could have shifted views of Trump. And those two disagree about how much the race shifted after the indictment. According to Morning Consult, Trump’s national support among potential primary voters barely budged, from 57 percent to 58 percent. But according to Premise, Trump actually boosted his numbers among Republican registered voters over this period, from 54 percent to 60 percent.
That’s not what we see when we look at Trump’s average support, which has decreased — but that may be linked to the debate, which Trump declined to attend. According to three pairs of polls4 whose first half was fielded after the indictment but before the debate and whose second half was fielded after the debate, Trump’s national support dropped by an average of 4 points. In addition, a FiveThirtyEight/Washington Post/Ipsos poll conducted using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel found that 5 percent of Republican likely voters who watched the debate were considering voting for Trump before it but not after it, making him the only candidate to lose a significant amount of potential support…..
GOP Primary Voters See Trump as More Electable
A new Morning Consult poll finds 62% of potential Republican primary voters said Trump has the best chance of beating Biden, matching a tracking high.
Just 13% of potential GOP primary voters said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is most electable against President Joe Biden — matching a tracking low — while the share who said the same of entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy fell from 10% to 6% following his high-profile appearance in the debate.