Politics

Donald Trump Crashes In Polling If Convicted

[Staff Sgt. Marianique Santos, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]

Fair or not, Democrats have more reasons to indict and convict Donald Trump before the election of 2024. A recent large national survey of American adults says that only 20 percent of voters will vote for former President Donald Trump if he is convicted of any of the felonies he’s currently facing.  

It may be the only way to save Joe Biden, but the lawfare against Trump appears to be working. Trump’s national lead over the incumbent president has vanished now that the former president has taken a commanding lead in the GOP primary. 

Funny how that works. 

The surveys, from pollsters Ipsos and YouGov, gave Biden a lead of between one and two percentage points, though a Newsweek analysis released earlier this month suggested Trump is on track for a second White House term due to his stronger performance in key swing states, writes Newsweek.

On January 15, Trump scored a resounding victory in the Iowa Republican caucus, taking 51 percent of the vote versus 21.2 percent for second placed Governor Ron DeSantis, 19.1 percent for Nikki Haley and 7.7 percent for Vivek Ramaswamy, who then dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump.

The Ipsos survey of 3,815 registered voters, conducted between January 3 and 9 for Reuters, found Biden was the preferred choice of 40 percent of voters, against Trump on 38 percent, when these were the only two candidates highlighted. In this scenario, another 10 percent of voters said they would back “some other candidate.” When third party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was also included, Biden and Trump fell to 34 percent and 33 percent respectively, against 17 percent for the vaccine skeptic independent.

Similarly, the YouGov poll of 1,472 registered voters, which took place between January 14 and 16 for The Economist, gave Biden 44 percent versus 43 percent for Trump.

Despite his big win in Iowa on Monday, Trump appears to be personally troubled by his current legal troubles. At around 2 AM, the former president oddly “escalated his argument for ‘FULL IMMUNITY’ with a late-late-night social media post likening presidents to the occasional ‘ROGUE COP’ who must be shielded from prosecution for the greater good,” according to Mediate.

The news site continued, “Trump is a frequent poster on his Truth Social platform. Those posts usually take the form of text rants with copious use of ALL CAPS WITH EXCLAMATION POINTS about things like “STOLLEN” elections. They can often be a window into Trump’s thinking.

In this case, the context of Trump’s dead-of-night 2 am rant is a weeklong period in which Trump has engaged in courtroom theatrics and fireworks in two non-criminal trials — the fraud case brought by Attorney General Letitia James and presided over by Judge Arthur Engoron, and the E. Jean Carroll case.

But it was his immunity appeal that kept Trump awake Wednesday night into Thursday morning.”

Trump appeared to be embracing his lawyer’s argument that a president can, in effect, break no law. 

New Conservative Post reported last week that a panel of federal appeals court judges in Washington appeared skeptical of an argument from Trump’s legal counsel that the president could do anything he wanted while in office, including sending a team of Navy SEALS to kill his chief political rival. 

Although polling shows that the trials have begun to hurt his chances at winning the general election against Joe Biden, Trump clearly believes that they will help him secure the Republican nomination against Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. 

USA Today noted that “Trump is following up his big victory in Iowa by campaigning in some traditional and unusual venues: the state of New Hampshire and a courthouse in New York City.

Trump’s decision to shuttle between a defamation trial brought by columnist E. Jean Carroll and the battleground state underscores a paradox of an already odd election. The former president is trying to use his many legal troubles to help him politically, at least with conservative Republican voters.

‘Nobody’s ever had to do this before,’ Trump told supporters late Tuesday in Atkinson, New Hampshire, where he echoed his long-running unfounded argument that the legal cases against him are political efforts to derail his campaign. 

If anything, however, they have fueled his White House bid among Republicans.

Polling shows the civil lawsuits and four criminal cases Trump faces − including allegations that could have destroyed any other candidate − are helping the former president with his base.”

Somewhere, Joe Biden and the Democrats are probably smiling. 

[Read More: DA In Trump Case May Be Removed]

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