After an eventful month, Trump has lost support in the Republican primaries

Once again, with feeling: a couple of weeks have passed since The latest accusation of former President Donald Trump (this time in Georgia, in connection with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election there). Do the charges seem to have hurt your chances of returning to the White House?

After each of Trump’s three previous impeachments, his poll numbers changed in small and inconsistent ways – if they changed at all. The fourth impeachment followed this atypical pattern: some evidence suggests it gained ground in the Republican primaries, other evidence suggests it lost ground, and the little general election data we have suggests that nothing has significantly changed. And, adding to the frustration of political junkies everywhere, it’s very difficult to determine how much the fourth impeachment affected Trump’s standing in the race, given how close it occurred to two other major events in the election campaign: he third accusation and the Republican presidential debate.

Let’s take a deeper look at national polls of the republican primaries. 29 of them have been carried out completely after the news of the fourth accusation was known late into the night on August 14, and Trump has fallen from 53 percent in our polling average to 50 percent since then. But the Georgia indictment came on the heels of another major set of charges: On August 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 as much as in the period between the two indictments (August 1 and 14) and after the Georgia one (from August 14). This is important because, while theoretically we can compare, say, the Emerson College model Survey from August 16 to 17 to its Survey from June 19 to 20, it would be impossible to say that Trump’s 3 percentage point drop is due to the Georgia impeachment. It could have been due to the third accusation, or any other combination of events that occurred during those two months.

Then, to complicate matters further, only two of those pollsters concluded their post-impeachment survey before the Republican presidential debate on August 23, which could also have changed opinions about Trump. And those two disagree about how much the race changed after the indictment. According morning consultation, Trump’s national support among likely primary voters barely changed, from 57 percent to 58 percent. But according to Premise, Trump actually increased his numbers among registered Republican voters during this period, from 54 percent to 60 percent.

That’s not what we see when we look at average support for Trump, which has declined, but that may be related to the debate, which Trump refused to attend. According to three pairs of polls whose first half was conducted after the impeachment but before the debate and whose second half was conducted after the debate, national support for Trump fell by an average of 4 points. Besides FiveThirtyEight/Washington Post/Ipsos Poll conducted using Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel found that 5 percent of likely Republican voters who watched the debate were considering voting for Trump before but not after, making him the ideal candidate. Only candidate to lose a significant amount of potential support..

Nor does it appear that the fourth impeachment has changed the minds of many among the general electorate. Morning Consult and Premise were again the only two pollsters to ask about a hypothetical general election matchup between Trump and President Biden during our windows of interest (August 1-14 for the previous survey, August 15-23 for post-survey). . According to Premise, registered voters preferred Trump over Biden by 4 points before the impeachment and by 5 points after, which is not a statistically significant change. And according to Morning Consult, the results were the same (Biden 43 percent, Trump 41 percent) before and after the Georgia impeachment.

Another pair of pollsters and sponsors, Ipsos/ABC News, asked about Trump’s overall favorable and unfavorable ratings both before and after the impeachment. In your survey of August 2 and 3, 30 percent of American adults viewed it favorably and 59 percent viewed it unfavorably. and in his August 15-16 In the survey, 31 percent viewed it favorably and 55 percent viewed it unfavorably. That seems like an improvement, but it was within the poll’s margin of error, so it could just be noise.

To be sure, three measly polls taken 15 months before the election are not the final word on Trump’s fate in the court of public opinion. The case against Trump in Georgia (indeed, all the accusations against him) could hurt or help him more as time goes on, particularly if he is convicted or acquitted before the election. It’s also possible that this entire exercise is flawed, given that all of the “before” polls in this analysis occurred two weeks after Trump’s third impeachment; Perhaps Trump’s poll numbers in this period were already depressed because of those (similar) accusations.

But if we look at the bigger picture (including FiveThirtyEight averages) national republican primaries and Trump’s overall favorable and unfavorable ratings — it is clear that public opinion of Trump has not changed significantly in several months, even after he was indicted on nearly 100 criminal charges in four different jurisdictions. After what is expected to be his final impeachment, he remains the heavy favorite in the GOP primary and a competitive candidate in the general election.

CORRECTION (August 31, 2023, 8:37 am): A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that support for former President Donald Trump in our national Republican primary polling average was at 50 percent when news of his impeachment in Georgia broke on August 14. In fact, it was 53 percent.