Trump is losing the poll that matters most
Zachary Faria
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There is a lot of outsize focus being put on GOP presidential primary polls in July 2023, one month before the first debate and six months before the first primary contest. Less attention is being paid to former President Donald Trump losing the poll that matters most: favorability among the voters he would be asking to elect him back to the presidency.
According to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average, Trump’s unfavorable numbers are now at the highest that they have been since the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot in 2021. His unfavorable rating is 56.3%, the highest it’s been since Feb. 23, 2021. His net favorability is 16.3 points underwater. It has only been worse in February 2021 after the riot and December 2022 after the GOP underperformed in the midterm elections.
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This comes after Trump was indicted in New York City over falsifying business records. On Tuesday, Trump announced that special counsel Jack Smith informed him he is the target of “the January 6th Grand Jury investigation” with four days to report to the grand jury, “which almost always means an Arrest and Indictment.” Meanwhile, the Georgia Supreme Court unanimously dismissed his attempt to block Fulton County’s district attorney from investigating him for election interference in Georgia in 2020.
Trump is a completely known commodity at this point, but consider this question: If there were to be any movement on his favorability ratings, do you think it is more likely that these indictments will convince people who dislike him to become fans or people who were fine with him to sour on his candidacy? The answer is very clearly the latter.
The focus on primary polls as the end all be all of the race for Republicans at this point is excessive. On July 18, 2019, Joe Biden was 13 points ahead of his nearest competitor in the Democratic presidential primary. He lost his lead to Elizabeth Warren in October, and Bernie Sanders led the polling by a substantial amount for most of the month of February 2020. Biden ultimately did win, but it illustrates just how drastically the landscape can change when the primaries get going. Those numbers can and will change; Trump’s favorability won’t.
Again, Republicans are one month away from even seeing the candidates in their first debate and six months away from actually casting votes. But we are now over three years away from Trump’s four-year term, and he has no game plan to win back voters he lost in 2020 and that Republicans lost in 2018 or 2022. He has not offered an explanation for how he can win a general election after losing his most recent one. If Republicans want to win in 2024, that is the only thing that matters.