Donald Trump’s campaign and supporters are trying to kill Ron DeSantis’ campaign in the womb. It hasn’t been born, but since two days before the 2022 midterms Team Trump has been attacking DeSantis relentlessly, crudely, and falsely. But it didn’t work. While there was some movement in polling towards Trump, the attacks failed in the mission of prematurely knocking DeSantis out.
Then came Alvin Bragg. If Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee, he has Alvin Bragg to thank for single-handedly making Trump a martyr, causing a substantial rally-around effect. It’s understandable and predictable. We’ve rallied-around Trump as a target, as has DeSantis. There is truth to the claim that Trump serves as a proxy for the way many of us are abused by institutional rot.
Even Jeb! is getting in on the act:
Two things, however, can be true at the same time: It’s possible to defend against Trump being targeted, but also to understand that a Trump general election candidacy is a likely disaster for Republicans.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that 2016 was a fluke. It was a unique confluence of a large anti-Hillary vote, Trump bringing new working class voters into the GOP, and a Democratic apparatus and media that did not take Trump seriously.
They didn’t make that mistake in 2020, or the 2022 midterms where Trump candidates did mediocre at best, and they won’t be asleep in 2024. That’s not to say that it is impossible for Trump to win a general election in 2024, but ignoring the problems in favor of rallying-around him could be electorally fatal.
Yet Team Trump tactically is conflating defending the attacks on Trump with the necessity of having him be the nominee. It’s understandable as a campaign tactic, but there’s no reason Republican voters need to go along, at least not this early. You can defend him and also recognize the risk of him being the nominee.
A poll just released by YouGov reflects the Trump surge post indictment:
A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll — one of the first conducted after former President Donald Trump was indicted Thursday for his role in paying hush money to a porn star — shows Trump surging to his largest-ever lead over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, his likely 2024 GOP primary challenger, as Republican voters rally around the only president in U.S. history to face criminal charges.In the previous Yahoo News/YouGov survey, which was conducted less than two weeks ago, Trump (47%) led DeSantis (39%) by eight percentage points in a head-to-head matchup among registered voters who are Republicans or Republican-leaning independents. As recently as February, it was DeSantis who was narrowly ahead of Trump, 45% to 41%.But the new, post-indictment poll suddenly finds Trump lapping DeSantis by 26 percentage points — 57% to 31% — in a one-on-one contest. The former president even attracts majority support (52%, up from 44% previously) when pitted against a wider, 10-candidate field of declared and potential GOP challengers, while DeSantis plummets to 21% (down from 28%).No one else cracks double digits.
The Bragg-effect is clear in the YouGov chart, it’s where the lines sharply diverge:
That rally-around effect is being exploited by the Trump campaign — my text and email boxes have lit up with fundraising pitches centered around Trump as the victim. For the first time I saw on Tucker repeated anti-DeSantis advertisements by a pro-Trump PAC.
As a campaign tactic, I can’t blame them.
But that YouGov poll showed the downside of the rally-around rush. First, it may be fleeting:
The survey of 1,089 U.S. adults was conducted in the first 24 hours after a New York grand jury voted to indict Trump, as news about the case continued to break and sink in. For many respondents, the opinions expressed may be tentative and volatile — and some of the shifts evident in this immediate snapshot may be fleeting.Just 34% of Americans, for instance, said they had heard “a lot” about “Donald Trump being indicted on Thursday in Manhattan” — a number that will rise in the coming days. And while the former president has reportedly been charged on more than two dozen counts, the public still doesn’t know what those charges are. They are likely to be unsealed when he is arraigned Tuesday in Manhattan….So even though some pro-Trump respondents may have been especially eager to register their opposition to the indictment by expressing support for Trump, it’s far from clear that Trump’s legal woes will actually help him regain the Oval Office in 2024.In fact, the latest Yahoo News/YouGov poll suggests the opposite may be possible. Most Americans, for instance, think Trump should not be allowed to serve a second term if he is “convicted of a crime in this case” (52%). Perhaps even more ominous for Trump is how few think he should be allowed to serve as president if found guilty: just 31%. Another 17% are unsure.
Second, it has not helped Trump versus Biden:
Meanwhile, the new survey shows no change at all in preferences for the general election, with President Biden maintaining the same two-point edge over Trump (45% to 43%) that he enjoyed in the previous Yahoo News/YouGov poll.
We don’t know how this will play out over the rest of the year. To annoint Trump at this early point would be suicidal as to chances of winning back the White House for Republicans.
The NY Times reports (and take it with a grain of salt):
His indictment is forcing Democrats to wrestle in public with thorny questions they have discussed privately for months. There is a broad consensus in the party, supported by ample polling, that the former president would be the easiest Republican rival for Mr. Biden to face next year, if he runs as expected.
Mr. Trump is saddled with legal problems, similarly aged and polarizing even within his own party, and his nomination would let Democrats and Mr. Biden use their 2020 playbook of running as the candidate of normal against a chaos agent.
The White House’s own polling backs up this theory. Surveys done for the White House in recent weeks found Mr. Biden in a more favorable position against Mr. Trump than he finished in 2020 in all of the closest battleground states.
The same polling showed Mr. Biden faring less well against Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a likely contender for the Republican nomination, who has had a rocky rollout on the national stage and trails well behind Mr. Trump in national Republican primary polling. Yet a matchup between the president and the Florida governor is far more competitive, according to people familiar with the polling.
Yet those supposed Democrat insider polls also are reflected in public polling showing that DeSantis remains a better or at least equal general election candidate:
Democrats have a long history of interfering in Republican primaries to promote the candidate they think will be weakest in the general election. Expect them to cheer on the rally-around effect – it’s where NeverTrump and OnlyTrump converge.
I agree that Democrats are probably celebrating the rally-around effect.
It’s far from over. At the end of the day, I think a majority of Republicans vote for the person they think can win the general election. Team DeSantis likely understands that, and when the Bragg effect wanes, and DeSantis declares his candidacy, expect them to focus on that.
The people telling you the race already is over are afraid of the electability question and primaries, which is why they keep telling everyone it’s already over. They don’t believe what they are saying. If they really believed it was over, they wouldn’t keep attacking DeSantis while also expecting him to rally around Trump.
There is too much at stake to rush off the cliff. If Republican voters fall for it, they deserve what they get.
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