There hasn’t been a lot of recent polling on Donald Trump’s classified documents scandal, so it was good to see the latest report from Marquette Law School that included some striking new data on the subject.
Among all adults, 65% said they have heard or read a lot about Trump’s indictment in Florida, relating to classified documents he is alleged to have kept after leaving office. … The level of attention to news about the indictment was quite similar for Republicans and Democrats.
So far, so good. Most Americans are familiar with the controversy, and there’s no meaningful partisan gap. But the report then took an unfortunate turn:
While attention to the indictment was similar among Democrats and Republicans, there are sharp partisan differences in belief whether Trump had classified documents at Mar-a-Lago in Florida. … Republicans are now evenly divided, with 49% saying there were classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and 50% saying there were not.
These numbers haven’t changed much since January, when a Marquette Law School poll found nearly identical results: 48% of GOP voters said at the time that Trump had classified documents at his glorified country club, while 52% said he didn’t.
It’s hard to overstate how discouraging this is.
I can think of all kinds of arguments that rank-and-file Republican voters, driven by tribal instincts, might come up with — and have come up with — in the hopes of brushing off the seriousness of the scandal. Maybe they’d argue that Trump’s actions were inconsequential and shouldn’t be prosecuted as a crime. Maybe they’d claim that other former presidents have taken similar steps. Maybe they’d say Trump declassified the materials in question. Maybe they’d insist that federal prosecutors are big meanies, making a fuss as part of a partisan vendetta.
To be sure, each of these defenses is demonstrably wrong. The talking points have been peddled for months, and they’ve also been completely discredited. But at the very least, these claims, while plainly false, implicitly acknowledge that Trump took and kept sensitive documents.
What the polling data suggests, however, is that most Republican voters aren’t even prepared to go this far. Asked about the former president and the materials he took and refused to give back, a narrow majority of GOP voters is effectively responding, “There are no such materials.” But that’s not the part of the story they’re supposed to challenge. We already know this part of the controversy is true. There are unchallenged photographs — including a classic image taken in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom. There are detailed legal filings. There’s even an audio recording in which Trump is literally heard talking about the classified documents he took. In other words, the question of whether the former president had classified documents at Mar-a-Lago has been answered. Ideally, it wouldn’t even have to be included in a poll, because no one would seriously doubt what was plainly true. And yet, here we are.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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