As Donald Trump’s legal difficulties have intensified over the last year and a half, the former president and his allies have made a variety of predictions about public attitudes. Those forecasts have been wrong with amazing consistency.
After the FBI executed a court-approved search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, for example, many Republicans expressed great certainty that the vast majority of Americans would share in their outrage and denounce federal law enforcement. Polls soon after showed the opposite.
After Trump’s criminal indictments, leading GOP voices again said that the American mainstream would be repulsed by the developments and rally behind the former president. It wasn’t long, however, before independent surveys found most voters actually endorsing the Republican’s prosecutions.
More recently, officials in Colorado and Maine have concluded that Trump is ineligible for the 2024 ballot due to the 14th Amendment, which bars any public official who swore an oath to protect the Constitution from holding office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against it or gave “aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
Right on cue, Republicans responded to the news by predicting fury and rage from Americans. It’s against that backdrop that a new ABC News/Ipsos poll points in a different direction.
Americans are divided on how the U.S. Supreme Court should handle former President Donald Trump’s ballot access, but a majority in a new ABC News/Ipsos poll say they would support the court either barring Trump from presidential ballots nationally or letting states take that step individually.
To be sure, the results weren’t lopsided, but the survey nevertheless showed a 49% plurality endorsing the state-level rulings barring Trump from the ballot. The same poll found a combined 56% majority is willing to see the likely GOP nominee disqualified in all or some states.
If the former president and his cohorts are working from the assumption that the great American mainstream is on their side on the 14th Amendment question, there’s fresh evidence to the contrary.
The same poll also asked respondents, “Trump has been indicted on federal and state charges that he conspired to illegally overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and that he illegally retained classified documents after leaving office. Do you support or oppose these criminal charges having been brought against Trump?”
A 56% majority endorsed the criminal charges.
Circling back to our earlier coverage, these results were hardly inevitable. In fact, I wasn’t necessarily expecting them. For months, there was a noticeable asymmetry to the public conversation: One side of the political divide flooded the airwaves with vitriol, insisting an indictment would be proof of a corrupt Justice Department and an unjust system, while the other side was largely circumspect, saying very little about the suspect, the process, and his alleged crimes.
Given this, much of the public has only heard part of a larger argument. As Republicans have screamed bloody murder in defense of Trump, Democrats have largely responded with “Anyone want to talk about infrastructure and the importance of reproductive rights?”
Indeed, it’s no secret that the Biden White House made a deliberate decision to stay silent — and the party directed congressional Democrats to bite their tongues, too.
With only one side of the political divide engaged in the public conversation, it seemed plausible that much of the public would believe GOP talking points, despite their absurdities, because it was the only rhetoric voters were hearing.
And yet, despite this asymmetry, the polling evidence suggests the public still isn’t buying what Trump and his allies are selling.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
