As far as the loyalty of his supporters is concerned, Donald Trump showed an irritating foresight many years ago. “I could stand on Fifth Avenue and shoot someone, I wouldn’t lose any voters,” he prophesied in January 2016. Although the ex-president hasn’t shot anyone, he is facing a lawsuit over the documents affair that will also put him in jail could bring. Now there are the first surveys that take the new circumstances into account. And Trump’s prophecy is coming true once again.
“If you compare the polls before and after the indictment on June 8, the numbers have not moved for either the primaries or the presidential election,” says the US website “FiveThirtyEight”. It deals primarily with demoscopy and surveys and clearly shows in its current chart that Trump’s popularity ratings are still more than 50 percent on average. More precisely: 53.5 percent of Republicans would nominate him as a candidate for the next presidential election in 2024. The current second-place contender for the nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is just 21 percent behind.
The picture is similar when it comes to the question of how a possible duel between Donald Trump and Joe Biden could end on election day. “FiveThirtyEight” evaluated the results of seven surveys: On average, the Republican is currently 0.6 percentage points ahead of the incumbent by a hair’s breadth. And apparently Trump’s lead, which he had over Biden even before the indictment was read out, has even increased slightly. There was a similar effect when Trump was indicted in the Stormy Daniels case in March. Even then, the legal trouble didn’t harm him in the slightest.
It is not the case that the Americans dismiss the new allegations as trivial offences. The vast majority considers it quite serious. And at least the relative majority of them think the ex-president should be held accountable. About 48 percent in an ABC News poll. At Civiqs/Daily Kos, as many as 50 percent of people agree that Donald Trump is guilty.
The latest indictment involves numerous secret documents that he took with him to his Florida estate after leaving office. That alone is already problematic. However, the fact that he did not reveal them himself at the request of the authorities and even hid them from them was the trigger for legal prosecution. If things go badly for the ex-head of state, then he has to go to prison. He faces up to ten years. Trump is the first ex-US President to be indicted at the federal level.
A possible prison sentence would not necessarily mean the end for the politician Trump. In theory, he could even campaign behind bars or rule the country from there. But there are still 17 months until the election – that’s a lot of time in the US election campaign. In addition, surveys are always only a current picture of the mood. And since the United States does not elect its presidents directly anyway, but via the states and the electoral college, the candidate with the most votes does not always win. Trump himself had benefited from this in 2016.
Sources: DPA, AFP, FiveThirtyEight, Realclearpolitics
