While the loud, hypocritical base of Republican voters seem to be sticking with the criminally-indicted. disgraced former president Donald John Trump in his bid to win back the presidency he lost in 2020, latest polls show support slipping not only among independents but among staunch members of the GOP.
In an Associated Press-NORC poll, 1 in 5 or fewer Americans said they believed Trump did “nothing wrong” in each of his four legal cases. Of his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, 21 percent said he did “nothing wrong.” In both the classified documents case and the Georgia case (the poll was conducted before this week’s indictment there), it was 15 percent. And just 14 percent said Trump did “nothing wrong” in the Manhattan case involving an alleged coverup of hush money payments.
The poll echoes two CNN polls in recent months that have shown just 15 percent of Americans said Trump did “nothing wrong” in the classified documents case. It also comes the same day a separate survey, from Marist College, showed just 22 percent overall said Trump had done “nothing wrong” in the various cases he’s facing.
Those numbers are the lowest of Trump’s political career.
–The Washington Post
The AP/NORC poll finds a crucial warning sign for the former president and his supporters, Trump faces glaring vulnerabilities heading into a general election, with many Americans strongly dug in against him. While most Republicans — 74% — say they would support him in November 2024, 53% of Americans say they would definitely not support him if he is the nominee. Another 11% say they would probably not support him in November 2024.
The findings bolster the arguments of some of Trump’s rivals for the Republican nomination who laud his tenure as president, but warn that he can’t win in a general election when he must compete for votes beyond the GOP base. Trump lost the popular vote in the 2016 campaign, attaining the presidency only by winning a majority in the Electoral College. He lost to Democrat Joe Biden by an even larger 7 million-vote margin in 2020, a defeat he has falsely attributed to widespread voter fraud.
A study by The New York Times show Trump has told more than 800 documented lies about the 2020 election he lost, legally and outright.
Before the 2020 election had even concluded, President Donald J. Trump laid the groundwork for an alternate reality in which he was declared the victor, falsely assailing the integrity of the race at nearly every turn.
Those lies are now central to two criminal indictments brought against him by the Justice Department and in Georgia, and formed what prosecutors have described as the bedrock of his attempts to overturn the election.
In public, he made more than 800 inaccurate claims about the election from the time the polls began closing on Nov. 3, 2020, to the end of his presidency, according to a database compiled by The Washington Post. Dozens of times, he simply characterized the election as “rigged,” “stolen” or “a hoax,” and flatly and falsely declared he had won — even as a mountain of evidence proved otherwise. Other falsehoods were more specific about the voting and ballot-counting process, contained unproven allegations and promoted conspiracy theories.
Here are five common ways in which Mr. Trump has lied about the 2020 election.
How Mr. Trump sought to undermine the election:
–The New York Times
Which is why doubts about Trump are increasing.
“There is a meaningful number of voters who have voted for Trump twice and can’t vote for him again after all of this,” said Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who has been running focus groups with GOP voters.
“Trump needs to embody the voters’ grievances and not his own grievances,” Longwell said. “Anytime he’s talking about 2020 he’s looking backward and the voters get more excited about looking forward.”
Former Trump support Mary Kinney of Des Moines, says she’s planning to support South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott in the caucuses, arguing that it’s time for the party to move forward with a next-generation candidate.
“I think people are just done with it,” she said. “It’s time to move on. I think people are trying to move forward from 2020.”
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