Trump’s Rivals Must Make the Case against Him If They Want to Change Voters’ Minds

By Noah Rothman

Monday, June 12, 2023

 

Fewer than 72 hours have passed since the unsealing of the federal indictment against Donald Trump on charges relating to his alleged mishandling of classified documents and his efforts to mislead investigators. The revelations in that document inspired pollsters to take the temperature of the Republican electorate, and their findings confirmed Trump critics’ worst suspicions: GOP voters are still yet to rethink their allegiance to the dominant figure in Republican politics.

 

CBS News/YouGov pollsters found that 76 percent of GOP primary voters surveyed on Friday and Saturday dismissed the indictment as “politically motivated.” While 80 percent of all adults said Trump’s careless stewardship of classified materials represented a “national security risk,” only 38 percent of Republican voters agreed. Sixty-one percent of GOP voters said the news wouldn’t have any impact on their views of Trump, and 80 percent said the former president should still be able to serve in the White House if convicted.

 

In the same time frame, an ABC News/Ipsos poll produced similar results. Just 38 percent of self-identified Republicans described the charges against Trump as “serious,” compared with 61 percent of the general public and 63 percent of self-identified independents. That survey found that the public’s views on Trump’s fitness for high office remain largely unchanged by the indictment, which is hardly shocking given the recency of the event and the voting public’s hardened views on the candidate.

 

These results generated spasms of outrage among the GOP’s critics. How, they asked, could Republicans still stand by this man given the gravity of the allegations he is facing? Of course, recent history does indicate that Republican voters’ affinities for Trump are not conditional, and time alone will not suffice to convince the GOP-primary electorate that the revelations in this or any other forthcoming criminal indictments are disqualifying. If the details contained in the indictment are going to bite, Republican officials and the right-leaning media elites GOP voters trust will first have to press the case it makes against Trump.

 

There would be precedent for that sort of attitudinal shift. A survey of some of the most divisive issues among Republicans suggests that GOP voters’ views are fluid and subject to revision — a condition that is masked by the absolutist bombast so often deployed by recent converts to the emerging orthodoxy. Take, for example, the issue of immigration.

 

The conventional wisdom that emerged in the wake of Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection maintained that the GOP would have to soften its opposition to comprehensive immigration reform if it hoped to compete among Hispanic voters. That point of view was lent credence across the spectrum of right-wing influencers, from Sean Hannity’s primetime Fox News Channel program to much of the GOP conference in Congress. Accordingly, by 2014, six-in-ten self-described Republicans supported legislation that would establish legal residency for illegal migrants. All that changed with the rise of Donald Trump and his demonstration in 2016 that a hardline policy toward illegal immigration wasn’t an insurmountable obstacle to electoral success. By 2018, Republican voters indicated in polls that they not only opposed the legalization of the nation’s illegal population but wanted to reduce legal immigration into the U.S. Trump argued the case, and he won the argument.

 

A similar phenomenon characterized Republican voters’ schizophrenia when it came to American intervention in the conflict in Syria. In April 2013, while Obama was seeking any and every available means to avoid acting on his self-set “red line” for military action against the Assad regime, 56 percent of Republicans supported strikes on Syrian targets. But by late summer of that year, Obama seemed to acquiesce to pressure and handed the issue off to Senate Democrats, who were prepared to authorize those strikes. That was when Republican opinion flipped. On the eve of the most confused speech of Obama’s presidency, in which he made the case for action in Syria while insisting Moscow had saved him from having to act on his convictions, only about 20 percent of Republicans still backed the strikes. In the interim, Republican influencers had turned against the project, and their supporters followed their leads.

 

Early in his tenure, Donald Trump executed targeted strikes on Syrian facilities in response to a nerve-gas attack against civilians, which 86 percent of Republicans backed. Republicans were caught off guard in December of the following year, when Trump performed an about-face and sought the removal of U.S. forces from western Syria — a decision that prompted the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis. In the summer of 2018, nearly 70 percent of GOP voters endorsed U.S. involvement in the fight against “Islamic extremist groups in Iraq and Syria.” But when Trump flipped, so, too, did his loyalists with access to microphones, and Republican voters followed suit. By January 2019, only 30 percent of Republicans believed it would be the “wrong decision” to pull all U.S. troops from Syria.

 

More recently, the debate over the proper level of U.S. support for Ukraine’s effort to resist Russia’s war of territorial expansion has followed a similar trajectory. Within the first month of the invasion, Republicans sided with the majority of Americans who believed Joe Biden hadn’t done enough to support Ukraine in advance of the Russian onslaught. Most Republicans joined Democrats and independents in support of a NATO-backed no-fly zone over Ukraine. But a familiar pattern emerged as the loudest voices in Republican politics agitated against U.S. support for Kyiv. By April of this year, majorities of Republican voters and GOP-leaning independents concluded that the war in Europe did not imperil vital U.S. interests and opposed providing material support for Ukraine’s resistance.

 

None of this is to say that Republican voters are uniquely susceptible to influence; this is an observably bipartisan phenomenon. What it indicates is that these are complex issues that require deep historical knowledge and a background understanding of policy to fully grasp. As we might expect from representative government, voters outsource that work to their representatives and the experts in the world of politics whom they trust.

 

For now, the indictment has failed to change Republican voters’ affection for Trump. But we can only expect that condition to pertain indefinitely if influential Republicans who have earned the confidence of GOP voters decline to popularize the case made against Trump in this indictment. And perhaps that’s what will happen. After all, Trump’s opponents are hostage to the shadows on the wall, too.

 

History suggests that Republican voters’ views are not static. They can change provided the right inputs. The real question is what Trump’s rivals for the 2024 nomination will do. If they press the case against him, they’ll stand a chance of winning voters away from his side. If they instead take the path of least resistance, dismissing the significance of the DOJ’s indictment because making the case that Donald Trump jeopardized U.S. national security is just too hard, his odds of being the Republican nominee in 2024 will remain good.