Tag Archive for: 2024 gop primary

Polls Show Trump Looming Large over GOP Primary Field, Despite Indictments

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Former President Donald J. Trump is dominating the GOP primary field, according to several polls. A Wall Street Journal survey published Saturday shows that Trump is the top presidential pick for 59% of Republican voters, with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) in second place at 13%. None of the other Republican contenders polled higher than single digits.

This follows an Economist/YouGov poll showing Trump at 51% among Republicans and DeSantis at 14%. Both surveys also found that if Trump weren’t running, DeSantis would be the likely Republican second choice, with The Wall Street Journal poll placing the Sunshine State governor at 35% support as a second choice and the Economist/YouGov poll placing him at 28%. Both polls also showed Trump as the Republican nominee beating incumbent Joe Biden, though not by a wide margin.

Trump is, of course, currently engaged in several legal battles, most stemming from his claims that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulently tampered with. The former president has multiple criminal charges and four indictments leveled against him, and at least one major criminal trial looming. The most recent indictment stems from alleged election interference in Georgia. Trump and 18 others — including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani — were arrested in Fulton County last month after voluntarily turning themselves in, yielding Trump’s now-famous mugshot, the first taken in connection with any of the four indictments. Trump and his allies have been released on bail.

But according to The Wall Street Journal, most Republicans see the indictments as politically-motivated persecution. All Republican respondents said they were aware of the indictments, with 87% responding that they were following news of the indictments. Regarding Trump’s alleged “hush money” payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels, 79% of Republicans said the indictment was politically motivated, with 61% saying the case had no merit.

Eighty-one percent of Republicans said the indictment against Trump for allegedly taking classified government documents when leaving the White House was politically motivated, with 67% saying the case had no merit. Eighty percent of Republicans classified the indictment against Trump for allegedly attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results as politically motivated, with 70% saying the case had no merit. And a stunning 82% of Republicans said the Georgia indictment is politically motivated, with 71% saying the case has no merit.

As many pundits have noted, the indictments against Trump are unprecedented, as no former U.S. president has ever been indicted after leaving the Oval Office. But the criminal charges against Trump have only made Republicans more likely to vote for him. Forty-eight percent of Republican voters told The Wall Street Journal the indictments have made them more likely to vote for Trump, with 36% saying the indictments have had no effect on how they plan to vote, and a paltry 16% saying the indictments have made them less likely to vote for Trump. Furthermore, a whopping 78% of Republicans said that Trump’s actions after the 2020 election “were a legitimate effort to make sure votes were tallied accurately.” Only 16% said Trump’s actions were an “illegal” attempt to interfere in a legitimately-conducted election.

Despite his popularity among Republicans, several Democrats are attempting to keep Trump off the 2024 ballot, arguing that a Civil War-era clause in the 14th Amendment prohibits Trump from holding office again for having allegedly “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has even stated that Trump doesn’t need to be convicted of insurrection or rebellion for the clause to apply.

However, when a Florida lawyer filed a lawsuit to bar Trump from appearing on the 2024 ballot, U.S. District Judge Robin Rosenberg dismissed the case. The lawsuit alleged that Trump was an insurrectionist, citing the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and was thus unfit to hold office. Without addressing the constitutional question, Obama-appointed Rosenberg tossed the case out on lack of standing, arguing that the plaintiffs could not show they had been in any way harmed by the events at the Capitol and stating that “an individual citizen does not have standing to challenge whether another individual is qualified to hold public office.”

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

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Christian Voters Are Likely To Put Their Faith In Trump. Here’s Why

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  • The Christian vote in the 2024 primaries is an important demographic for Republicans, and religious leaders that spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation indicated that only one candidate really stands out.
  • Recent polls show former President Donald Trump winning the GOP nomination spot by as much as 26%, while his chances against President Joe Biden still present a large question about whether or not a 2024 rematch would place Trump in the White House.
  • “[W]hen you look at how [Trump] performed as president in what he did in terms of advancing or restoring policies that respected faith and upheld a moral foundation, no one comes close,” Tony Perkins, the founder and president of the Family Research Council, a Christian advocacy organization, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

As the presidential primaries approach, religious advocates believe that Donald Trump, of all Republican candidates, is likely to claim a large majority of the Christian vote.

Republican presidential candidates have been working overtime to impress religious Americans, with many attending the recent Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in June and spending large amounts of time among religious voters in battleground states. Former President Donald Trump is leading the GOP contenders, and religious leaders that spoke to the DCNF believe his previous record on issues of faith, life and freedom will win him the Christian vote.

Evangelicals, particularly, are keen to see the former president back in office, according to Tony Perkins, the founder and president of the Family Research Council, a Christian advocacy organization, that spoke to the DCNF.

“Donald Trump kind of raised the bar, which sounds a little odd on its face, because he certainly was not a candidate when given his background, and everything that evangelicals would have been drawn toward,” Perkins said. “But when you look at how he performed as president in what he did in terms of advancing or restoring policies that respected faith and upheld a moral foundation, no one comes close.”

Trump’s alleged affair with Stormy Daniels, his infamous, expletive-filled Twitter rants against various media, celebrity and political figures and his more recent trouble with the law might otherwise preclude him from gaining such strong support from religious circles; however, Trump’s policies and stances during his first term as president often resonated with those same voters who have often felt ignored by more mainstream Republicans, according to Perkins.

Trump made waves as the first sitting president to appear publicly at the March for Life, an annual pro-life march in D.C. that usually draws upwards of 10,000 people. In 2019, he announced that his administration was working on creating a new federal policy that allowed religious adoption facilitators, homeless shelters, health care clinics and other organizations to participate in grants from the Department of Health and Human Services.

In 2017, the former president issued an executive order to Attorney General Jeff Sessions to defend laws like the “Religious Liberty Accommodations Act,” which allows religious Americans to adhere to their faith on issues of same-sex marriage and gender identity and sexual orientation, that was passed in Missouri.

In 2020, Trump took 80% of white evangelical voters in 2016 and 76% in 2020, while a March poll found that in a head-to-head matchup, Trump is currently holding 51% of the evangelical vote over DeSantis’ 42%, according to Reuters.

“I think he’s the undisputed favorite,” Robert Jeffress, the pastor at First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, and host of the radio show Pathway To Victory, told the DCNF. “I made a prediction shortly after he announced his candidacy last November. I said that eventually, evangelicals would coalesce again around Trump, some of them might try to kick the tires of different candidates, but eventually, they would coalesce. What I didn’t realize was that ‘eventually’ would come sooner than anybody expected.”

The Faith and Freedom Coalition’s annual conference this year hosted many of the top GOP contenders to give them a chance to speak to evangelical Christians and appeal for their support. Trump had a strong base of support among the attendees, with many booing fellow candidate Chris Christie during the conference for criticizing the former president, while other potential nominees avoided mentioning Trump entirely.

Trump is currently leading the pack in the Republican primaries by significant margins, according to Real Clear Politics. The most recent poll from the Economist/YouGov showed the former president winning the nomination spot by 26%.

Despite this, Trump has been trailing President Joe Biden in the polls. One poll from NBC News had Biden beating Trump at 49% to 45% but a new poll by the Morning Consult showed Trump closing the gap at 42% to Biden’s 43%.

Perkins told the DCNF that for Trump to keep up the momentum he will need to “cast a vision of the future” but said that regardless he felt Christians’ inclination was still to vote for the former president due to his previous record on religious issues.

While Trump appears to have a hold on Christian Americans, other candidates have chances at making inroads by focusing on issues like abortion, where the former president has struggled lately.

Tim Head, the executive director for the Faith and Freedom Coalition, an organization dedicated to “educating, equipping, and mobilizing people of faith,” agreed that Trump has a solid core percentage of the Christian vote, but cautioned that nothing is guaranteed since the election is still many months away.

Head explained that candidates like DeSantis could have an advantage over Trump in the pro-life arena after the former president went back and forth on a federal ban and criticized the governor for signing six-week abortion protections in May.

“Governor DeSantis has a lot of influence in this type of area, and he’s using that influence to deliver victories for religious voters on life, religious liberty [and] certainly on traditional family values,” Head told the DCNF.

Jeffress conceded that in the event that Trump does not become the nominee, he believed Mike Pence would be the one to receive the full support of Christian voters due to his commitment to his faith and his involvement in the Trump administration.

Bob Vander Plaats, the president and CEO of the Family Leader, a Christian advocacy organization in the key primary state of Iowa, told the New York Times that Vivek Ramaswamy, who is Hindu, impressed him despite the difference in faith because he was willing to answer the “deeper questions.”

The odds, however, are against any other candidate taking the nomination, according to Jeffress and Perkins.

“When you look at his four years as president and how he championed all of these issues, and look at how he continues to push back on the left,” Perkins told the DCNF. “He puts himself into a position that many who have been marginalized and attacked by the culture identify with. So I think he’s in a very strong position from this standpoint.”

Trump, DeSantis, Ramaswamy and Pence did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.

AUTHOR

KATE ANDERSON

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Ron DeSantis Is Living Rent-Free In Trump’s Head

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There are a lot of people who are confident that the contest for the Republican nomination for president is pretty much all over except for the formalities. President Trump, obviously, does not share that confidence.

There is no other explanation for the consistent and aggressive attacks from Team Trump (and Mr. Trump himself) directed at Governor DeSantis.

For example, twice in the last few weeks, the former president has taken to Truth Social to attack Governor DeSantis for his temerity (or “disloyalty” if you prefer) in seeking the nomination against his ostensible benefactor. Over the weekend, the former president’s media team collected and shared bad headlines from Governor DeSantis’s recent overseas trip.

No telling how many Republican primary voters there are in Japan or the United Kingdom.

The silliness has gone so far as having Mr. Trump complain about the State of Florida (to which he moved from the dumpster fire that is New York not 5 years ago).

In comparison, Team Trump rarely engages with the other candidates in the contest. They took no notice of Governor Hutchinson’s recent entry into the race. They have remained mostly silent with respect to Governor Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Senator Tim Scott, and the always provocative Governor Christie.

Why is Governor DeSantis living all alone rent-free in Team Trump’s head?

Perhaps Mr. Trump has seen the recent polling that indicates that Governor DeSantis would do better than Mr. Trump in a general election.

Mr. Trump’s own polling team (Fabrizio Lee) recently released the results of a survey they did for the Wall Street Journal. That survey indicated that Governor DeSantis would defeat President Biden nationally (by 3%) while Mr. Trump would lose nationally by that same margin (which was also coincidentally the same margin by which Mr. Trump lost in in 2020).

In state-level polling done by Public Opinion Strategies, Mr. Trump trails Mr. Biden in Arizona by 1; Governor DeSantis leads Mr. Biden by 6. In Pennsylvania, Mr. Trump trails Mr. Biden by 4 points; Governor DeSantis leads Mr. Biden by 3 points.

In Nevada, Governor DeSantis leads Mr. Biden by 3 points; Mr. Trump trails him by 1. According to a survey done by Cygnal, Governor DeSantis runs 4 points better than Mr. Trump in Iowa.

If the polling is right — always a question — and Mr. Trump were the nominee and the election were now, Mr. Biden would win reelection with 319 electoral votes. If Governor DeSantis were the nominee, he would win the election with at least 286 electoral votes.

We are, of course, at the very beginning of this cycle and things can and will change. Team Trump knows that.  They also know that the notion that governor will perform better than the former president in a general election is a powerful narrative that needs to be strangled in its crib.

At the same time, one of the cardinal rules of life generally and politics specifically is to never punch down. You never attack anyone who is or should be beneath your attention. By focusing on Governor DeSantis, even more than on the incumbent president, Mr. Trump, wittingly or otherwise, is elevating the governor.

Presidents and former presidents should know better. If he wants to sail smoothly towards renomination, Mr. Trump needs to avoid creating a campaign vibe in which the two leading contenders are considered competitors within the same peer group.

Mr. Trump does better when he speaks to the issues that matter to people and the nation, avoids the airing of his personal grievances, and ignores potential competitors. There is, however, no telling how long he can maintain that discipline.

AUTHOR

MICHAEL MCKENNA

Michael McKenna was most recently a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs at the White House. He co-hosts a weekly podcast, The Unregulated.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.