Fall hasn’t yet arrived, and Labor Day has just passed; traditionally the start of serious campaigning in a general election year. But former President Donald Trump continues to heavily suggest he will run for president in 2024. The “will he or won’t he” has been going on for weeks, even as the brouhaha over the documents that were supposed to be carted over and stored at the National Archives are being handed over in dribbles from storage rooms and closets and desk drawers at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
The news last night about unsecured top secret documents pertaining to nuclear weapons capabilities was unnerving for many of us. But other news just out may be unsettling if not to Trump, at least to his mesmerized followers.
A new poll out from NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist shows voters in the middle overwhelmingly “don’t want him to give it another go.”
Some 67 percent of independents said they do not want Trump to run again, while just 28 percent of unaffiliated voters said they do. In 2020, Trump lost independents and lost the election.
In 2016, he did much better with this group of voters, but after he was elected, he never regained that popularity with them; or perhaps it could be called misplaced trust that he was there to work for them.
The same poll showed that related to the FBI search (ordered after he failed to obey National Archives requests for the documents), some 44 percent of respondents nationally said they think Trump did something illegal.
Another 17 percent think he did something unethical, but not illegal. Nearly 30 percent maintain he did nothing wrong (those are the diehards who keep repeating that ‘I could stand in the middle of Park Avenue and shoot someone’ myth, including 63 percent of Republicans.
Now that’s something. Fully two-thirds of Republicans said they want Trump to run again. Even if he were actually charged with a crime, and it looks increasingly like that might happen, some 61 percent of Republicans said they still want him to run even if he’s charged with a crime.
But as the survey clearly showed, Trump has continued to be heavily unpopular outside of his base — which for other than the fanatic base could raise questions about the strength of a Trump 2024 candidacy.
The divide is geographic: suburban women and people who live in large cities are two of the groups vehemently opposed to Trump.
So who is for him? Oddly, white evangelical Christians, whites without college degrees and those in rural areas. The reality that so many Trump supporters don’t seem to want to bother with facts, or truth, simply means that just as with other polls, they may not believe the truth of this one either.
Could there be any larger ideological divide than the divide between unaffiliated voters and Republicans? The ideas of good and evil, truth and lies, are being tested in ways that may never have occurred in this country. Until now.
Read more from NPR: HERE
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