What polling says about a possible Trump indictment
Does anything matter for Teflon Trump?
Former President Donald Trump is saying he will be arrested in a few days on a possibly forthcoming indictment for hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels. He has called for protests, which The New York Times likens to his calls for protests against the 2020 election result on January 6, 2021.
The comparison to January 6 is useful. While we can’t predict with certainty how people would react to an arrest, there has been substantial polling about January 6 and its aftermath over the last two years that we can look to as an indicator it could play out. While there will likely be a round of condemnation from some elected Republicans, don’t expect that to be mirrored in the potential Republican electorate.
In a PRRI survey just after the events on January 6, only 18% of Republicans said Donald Trump held a lot of responsibility for the violence, compared to 57% of all U.S. adults.1 A few months later in August, that was steady at 15%. A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll shows similar numbers a year later – 15% of Republicans said Trump held a great deal of responsibility.
Opinion didn’t change as we learned more about the events of that day, including during and after the hearings by the House committee investigating the attack. A PBS News Hour/NPR/Marist poll showed the same partisan divides during the early stages of the hearings, and a Monmouth University poll showed no change later in the process.2
Who do Republicans blame? Well, to the extent they believe something problematic happened, and most survey questions on the topic come in with that assumption, they blame liberal and left-wing activists (there is no evidence for this). The chart below, from PRRI’s August 2021 survey, shows how Republicans line up on the blame game. Note that it also shows blame differs by what media source Republicans trust most – Fox News and farther-right sources like One America News and Newsmax are associated with more extreme views.
Countless surveys from the last two-plus years, including the ones linked above, show that around 60-70% of Republicans believe that the 2020 election was stolen, the cause behind the January 6 events. A CNN/SSRS poll from just last week shows 63% of Republicans hold the belief. There is still no concrete evidence of widespread election fraud.
All of this indicates that Republicans in the general public are likely to mostly believe whatever Trump himself says – or what Fox News and other right-wing media says.
Before I get accused of implying anything else (I have previously had this problem on social media), let me say that Trump should absolutely be held accountable. Nothing about how this plays in public opinion should be interpreted to mean he shouldn’t be subject to the same laws as the rest of us.
We have to be realistic about his supporters, though. An indictment, particularly for something unrelated to his job as president that is easily written off as a witch hunt, is quite unlikely to make a significant dent in opinions of him among his supporters. How that translates to primary votes is unclear – there is still a lot of time before voting starts.
But if we’ve learned nothing else by now, we need to have learned that Trump read the room better than the rest of us when he said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and still hold onto his supporters. This is a huge challenge for Republicans who don’t buy into Trump. They need his supporters’ votes to win elections, but they also don’t like what he’s turned the party into. How this plays out has incredible consequences for the direction of the country.
Disclosure: in case you don’t know, I have been research director at PRRI for the last four years, ending at the end of this month. I oversaw the surveys I’m discussing.
Disclosure: I also worked at the Marist Poll 2012-2014. I have not ever worked at Monmouth or any others I’m citing.