Republicans still support Trump
DNYUZ:
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Republican voters see the same polls that I do, showing Mr. Trump effectively tied against Mr. Biden even though commentators tell them that Mr. Trump is electoral poison. And they remember that many of those same voices told them in 2016 that Mr. Trump would never set foot in the White House. In light of those facts, Republicans’ skepticism of claims that Mr. Trump is a surefire loser begins to make more sense.
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But by the end of the spring 2023, following the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis’s rocky entrance into the presidential race, not only had Mr. Trump regained his lead, he had expanded upon it. Quinnipiac’s polling of Republican primary voters showed that Mr. Trump held only a six-point lead over Mr. DeSantis in February, but that lead had grown to a whopping 31 points by May.
Any notion that Republicans ought to turn the page, lest they face another electoral defeat, largely evaporated. And the multitude of criminal indictments against Mr. Trump have not shaken the support of Republicans for him, but have instead seemingly galvanized them.
In our focus group of 11 Republican voters in early primary states this month, Times Opinion recruited a range of likely primary voters and caucusgoers to weigh in on the state of the race. They were not universally smitten with Donald Trump; some described him as “troubled,” “arrogant” or a “train wreck.” About half of our participants said they were interested in seeing a strong competitor to Mr. Trump within the party.
But the argument that Donald Trump won’t be able to defeat Joe Biden? Not a single participant thought that Mr. Trump — or any Republican, really — would lose to Mr. Biden. In polling from CBS News, the ability to beat Joe Biden is one of the top qualities Republican primary voters say they are looking for, and they think Mr. Trump is the best poised to deliver on that result. Only 9 percent of likely Republican primary voters think Mr. Trump is a “long shot” to beat Mr. Biden, and more than six in 10 think Mr. Trump is a sure bet against Mr. Biden. Additionally, only 14 percent of Republican primary voters who are considering a Trump alternative said they were doing so because they worried Mr. Trump couldn’t win.
In an otherwise strong debate performance last week, when Nikki Haley argued that “we have to face the fact that Trump is the most disliked politician in America — we can’t win a general election that way,” the reaction from the crowd was decidedly mixed. This isn’t to say such an argument can’t become more successful as the primary season goes on, as Mr. Trump’s legal woes (and legal bills) continue to mount and as the alternatives to Mr. Trump gain greater exposure.
But for now they think that Mr. Biden is both enormously destructive and eminently beatable. They are undeterred by pleas from party elites who say Mr. Trump is taking the Republican Party to the point of no return.
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While Donald Trump can occasionally say things that make even his supporters wince, the fact is he was an effective President, and the US was much better off when he was president. The inflation was lower and the economy was better under Trump and the US was not funding an expensive war with Russia. In fact, I think Biden's weakness in the way he exited Afghanistan is what tempted Russia to invade Ukraine. Joe Biden has been a terrible president on other fronts too. We are still suffering from the inflation Biden induced with his reckless spending upon taking office. He was never very smart, and his dementia has made him worse. He won because the media and the Dems had an irrational hostility to Trump as a person. That hostility began when he upset Hillary Clinton in the election and two or three years of the Russian collusion fraud were used to vilify him. The media even gave itself awards for pushing the Russian collusion hoax.
See, also:
Biden still quiet on Afghanistan withdrawal as August comes to a close
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