Democrats' pursuit of Trump is backfiring in a big way
WASHINGTON >> For more than a year, support for another presidential run by Donald Trump steadily faded among Republicans as more and more GOP voters decided that, while they admired the former president, they were ready to move on. But in the wake of revelations that President Biden also stored classified documents in his home and office, support for Trump is rebounding. Republicans repulsed by Democrats' hypocrisy are rallying around the former president.
In October 2021, the GOP nomination seemed to be Trump's for the taking — a Quinnipiac University poll found that 78 percent of Republican voters wanted him to run again. But by June 2022, that share was down to 53 percent, according to a Politico-Morning Consult survey. Last July, a New York Times-Siena College poll found support for a third Trump nomination had slipped to 49 percent — a 29-point slide in nine months.
Trump then got hit by a double-whammy: the news that he had unlawfully kept hundreds of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, followed by the disastrous showing of many of his handpicked candidates in the November elections. While many thought the August FBI raid on his home was excessive, there was also a sense that this was yet another self-inflicted wound. And many correctly held Trump responsible for the GOP's disastrous midterm performance, blaming him for costing Republicans winnable races across the country by endorsing unelectable candidates. More and more Republicans were becoming open to supporting a different standard-bearer.
Meanwhile, Trump's midterm record stood in stark contrast to that of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who won reelection overwhelmingly, helped in part by support from independents, women and Hispanic voters. When Trump lashed out at DeSantis after the election, he alienated many in the MAGA movement who love both of them. Trump's November announcement that he was seeking a third term landed with a thud. And his call in December to “terminate” the Constitution and declare him the “RIGHTFUL WINNER” of the 2020 election was bizarre and off-putting. A YouGov poll found just 35 percent of Republicans favored Trump for 2024, while 42 percent said they would prefer DeSantis — a reversal from the previous month.
But then something else happened: News broke that classified documents from Biden's tenure as vice president had been found in a D.C. office Biden had used and at his Delaware home. Significantly, it emerged that Biden had kept this information from voters in November. In the wake of the Biden documents scandal, Republicans are rallying around Trump again. A Jan. 14 YouGov poll found that 59 percent of Republican voters say they want Trump to run again in 2024 — a 14-point bounce since Dec. 10.
What changed? A swing bloc of Republican primary voters appear to feel they were duped into abandoning Trump. They were told that the former president's handling of classified documents was irresponsible, only to find that Biden had been similarly irresponsible.
The Democrats' strategy of relentlessly pursuing Trump is backfiring. Instead of ignoring the former president, and letting Republicans come to their own conclusion that they need another standard-bearer (which many were realizing), Democrats want to make that decision for them. As a result, they are pushing GOP voters back into Trump's arms, making it more likely he could again secure the Republican nomination — and the presidency.