According to polling, Political Prisoner No. P01135809 has slipped in the horse race of late.
A new Emerson College Polling survey of U.S. voters following the August Republican Primary debate finds half of Republican Primary voters (50%) plan to vote for Donald Trump, the lowest support to date for the former President in Emerson national polls. Trump’s support has dropped by six percentage points since last week’s pre-debate national poll…
Overall, 57% of Republican Primary voters say they will definitely vote for the candidate they selected, a five point decrease from last week. Forty-three percent say there is a chance they could change their mind and vote for someone else.
In this instance, the conclusion of the pollsters regarding Trump’s modest decline and other candidates’ modest gains is that they are due to the former president’s absence from the theatrical production marketed as a debate.
Related: National-Level Political Debates Are Exhausting Theater Productions With Ugly Actors
However, polling organization and liberal favorite FiveThirtyEight (which infamously got 2016 completely wrong, along with every other mainstream outlet) is explicitly banking on the prosecutions to hurt him politically.
Via FiveThirtyEight (emphasis added):
Two weeks after Trump was indicted by a federal grand jury for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, polling data suggests he has been unable to convince voters that his latest boogeyman — the United States Department of Justice — is really out to get him. Instead, polls show that while it may not be putting a serious dent in his lead in the Republican primary, voters overall view his latest indictment as serious and believe that Trump’s actions related to the events of Jan. 6, 2021, merit criminal charges. And among both adults and Republicans, Trump’s favorability rating fell after he was indicted in June for illegally retaining classified documents and refusing to return them to the U.S. officials when asked.
This is true Banana Republic stuff.
This is election interference.
Nonetheless, the prevailing conventional wisdom consensus (after Trump destroyed all conventional wisdom of antiquity) appears to remain that no volume of political prosecutions of Trump will ever be enough to substantially chip away at his support from the base. In typical bombastic fashion, Trump once infamously declared that he could “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue” without incurring any negative political consequences.
Call me a contrarian or whatever, but every time the Deep State pops up with a new prosecution of him — regardless of the evidence of criminality as I regard all such prosecutions as arbitrary and politically motivated — it only makes me want to vote for Trump in 2024 that much harder.
All things considered, I don’t actually have a net favorable view of Donald Trump as a politician or a man. I will not belabor the reasons here, but I have enumerated them at great length elsewhere if you care to learn why. I wonder how many people like me will see his political persecution as a positive, not a negative, indicator of his merit as a candidate. For obvious reasons, the corporate state media never reflects on this possibility, just the one in the opposite direction that his supporters will slowly turn away if they can just give him the legal shaft hard and long enough.
