Is the liberal media shocked that Donald Trump’s numbers with GOP voters and independents have improved? Based on how the GOP reacted to the Mar-a-Lago raid last August, one could easily have predicted more support to coalesce around him despite his second indictment over allegedly mishandling classified documents. A Harvard Harris poll found that 56 percent thought the latest charges against Trump constituted election interference on behalf of the Biden Department of Justice. The Russian collusion hoax has damaged these institutions, as half the country sees them as the secret police for the Democratic Party. Trump surviving the indictment is the American voter telling the political class they’re willing to set Rome on fire if it means engulfing them in flames and burning their best-laid plans to ash. I agree with that, but first, you must win the election. And while Trump has positioned himself to win the nomination as we see things now, the general is a different animal, one where the same voter bloc that blocked him and his supporters from power for three cycles can do so again this year.
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— Kevin Tober (@KevinTober94) June 18, 2023
That latter part is what Democrats are gambling on and maybe hoping for, knowing that Trump is the best candidate for Biden to face in a rematch. There will be plenty of time to expound upon that later. For now, the liberal media is learning that there will never be an event that could disqualify Trump from an election. He has survived it all—literally. The more you attack Trump, the stronger he becomes. Perhaps the media newsrooms are still perplexed, but Democratic Party operatives are working meticulously to turn that into a double-edged sword, hence their eagerness for him to win the 2024 GOP nomination.
FiveThirtyEight thinks this indictment will be different, but for the general election:
Trump’s first indictment didn’t seem to permanently damage him politically among the general electorate either. After the New York indictment, the share of Americans with a favorable opinion of him fell from 41 percent on March 29 to 37 percent on April 7, according to FiveThirtyEight’s average. But the share with an unfavorable opinion of him was relatively stable, increasing from 53 percent to 55 percent. And by April 19, both numbers were back to their pre-indictment levels. In other words, it appears that some Trump supporters withheld their support for him for a couple weeks after the indictment, but they didn’t necessarily turn against him either, and they quickly returned to the fold. (This could also have been a product of differential nonresponse, the phenomenon where people aren’t as excited about answering polls when things aren’t going well for their preferred party or politician.) This continued a long-standing trend of public opinion on Trump being extremely stable. And there’s also the possibility that the charges won’t be taken as seriously by some voters because they’re being pursued by lawyers within Biden’s administration, a fact that conservative media is already going out of its way to note.
But polling suggests that the charges in this case could be viewed as more serious than those brought in New York, which relate to a hush-money payment that happened almost seven years ago. According to a late May poll from YouGov/Yahoo News, Americans said 52 percent to 32 percent that falsifying business records to conceal hush-money payments to a porn star was a serious crime. But they said 63 percent to 20 percent that taking highly classified documents from the White House and obstructing efforts to retrieve them was. That poll question didn’t mention Trump specifically, but a different YouGov poll, conducted for The Economist in early June, found that Americans believed 49 percent to 35 percent that Trump should face criminal charges for his handling of classified documents.
And of course, even if the indictment doesn’t hurt Trump politically, that doesn’t mean that an eventual conviction wouldn’t. The YouGov/Yahoo News poll also found that 62 percent of Americans said Trump should not be allowed to serve as president again if he is convicted of a serious crime.
Okay, but then again, back to Harvard Harris, 56 percent surveyed said the second indictment was election interference, providing insight that more than half the country views the indictment as illegitimate. And that’s also an issue the liberal media has with Trump: they need to chill. There’s a deluge of ‘way-too-soon’ polls, and this is a prime example. How they’re worded is also key—and polling in the Trump era has become infamously unreliable, especially now.
The New York Times outlined how Trump will survive the second indictment politically, and thus far, it’s been a success:
But Mr. Trump has rarely looked past the task immediately in front of him, and for now that is the primary. The CBS poll showed him dominating his closest rival, Mr. DeSantis, 61 percent to 23 percent.
[…]
Another person familiar with the super PAC’s strategy said that the fundamentals of the political race had not changed even as the indictment has brought Mr. Trump the gravest legal threat he’s ever faced. And the PAC would eventually continue attacking Mr. DeSantis, while also elevating other Republican candidates to shear off some of Mr. DeSantis’s support.
The uncomfortable initial posture of Mr. Trump’s rivals was captured in a video released by Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC attacking the “Biden DOJ” for “indicting the former president.” Mr. Trump’s team was delighted to see it, even if the ad cast Mr. DeSantis as the man to clean house inside the federal government. Forcing rivals to rally around Mr. Trump, as they see it, is a reaffirmation of the former president’s place at the head of the G.O.P.
[…]
One Trump adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss strategy, noted that most politicians would assume a defensive crouch when facing a federal indictment. But not Mr. Trump, who delivered two speeches on Saturday, has posted dozens of times on his social media site and is determined to use the national spotlight to drive a proactive message of his own. “It is Trump 24/7, wall-to-wall — why not use that to your advantage?” the adviser said, referring to the blanket media coverage Mr. Trump has been receiving after his indictment.
[…]
The indictment news has blotted out other developments on the campaign trail. The announcement over the weekend by Mr. DeSantis of his first endorsement from a fellow governor, Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, was barely a blip. And when Mr. Trump turns himself in at a Miami courthouse on Tuesday, it will keep the attention on the former president.
Roughly 15 different groups are trying to galvanize Trump supporters to come to the Miami courthouse for his hearing, according to one person briefed on the plans.
The juxtaposition in Mr. Trump’s own language about the stakes, legally and politically, can be jarring.
“This is the final battle,” Mr. Trump said on [June 10].
Soak up your opponent’s media coverage, continue solidifying your support base among GOP voters, and maintain your lead in the polls. Trump has done all that. The debates are the next test in the primary battle, but when has Trump fallen short in those contests? Yet, the Times did add that the Trump camp didn’t release how much money they raised after the second indictment. On the first, over the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, they raised around $4 million, a nice haul. I wonder why they’re withholding the figures, especially from a campaign that likes to tout its wins. And after all this, Trump could still be indicted by the New York attorney general and Special Counsel Jack Smith over the January 6 riot. The Left is making Trump the 2024 GOP nominee one indictment at a time. Not so sure we should be happy about that.