Poll: Trump down to 35% positive; 53% back indictment
Former President Donald Trump’s popularity is plunging as his legal troubles mount.
Just 35 percent of Americans have a favorable view of Trump compared to 62 percent who view him unfavorably, according to an Associated PRESS-NORC poll released Wednesday.
The survey, which was conducted from last Friday to Monday, also found that 53 percent of all voters say they definitely wouldn’t vote for Trump for president in 2024.
Another 11 percent said they probably wouldn’t support his White House comeback bid.
The lackluster numbers for Trump extend to opinions about the efforts to prosecute him for trying to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.
Some 53 percent of those surveyed approve of the U.S. Department of Justice indicting Trump for his alleged scheme to stay in power illegally, compared to just 30 percent who disapprove.
The poll was taken after Trump’s indictment on the federal Jan. 6 probe but before he was charged late Monday with racketeering in Georgia.
The survey reveals a stark divide between Democrats and independent voters on the one hand and Republicans on the other. Some 86 percent of Democrats back the indictments compared to just 16 percent of Republicans.
Even so, Trump has built a dominant lead in the GOP presidential race even as his legal woes worsen.
Seven in 10 Republicans view the former president favorably, and about 60 percent say they are happy he’s making a return run for the White House.
Those findings dovetail with other polls of Republicans that show
Trump with a commanding lead over longtime main rival Ron Desantis and a string of other challengers.
But he has scant popularity outside his base of GOP voters, a scenario that has some analysts predicting a general election disaster for the party if he is on the ballot next November.
The poll of 1,165 adults was conducted using a sample drawn from NORC’S probability-based Amerispeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.