Our first CNN/SSRS poll since the insurrection of the Capitol contains mostly bad news for Republican President Donald Trump.
His approval rating (34%) is the lowest CNN’s ever recorded, and most Americans want Trump removed from office immediately.
But a look underneath the hood finds that Trump’s influence on the political scene is likely far from over. Many Republicans still like him, and he could be a figure to be reckoned with heading into 2022 and, yes, 2024.
Let’s start with the basic fact that Trump’s approval rating among Republicans in our poll stands at 80%. Other polls taken since the events of January 6 have similar ratings for Trump among Republicans, if perhaps a touch lower into the high 70s on average.
That 80% rating is certainly down from 94% before the election, but it’s still a very large percentage. It’s certainly a higher approval rating among his own party than the other presidents (Harry Truman, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush) who left office with an approval rating below 40% overall.
To give you some perspective, presidents who have approval ratings above 75% amongst the base have never faced a credible primary threat. In fact, every president who ran for another term with an approval rating above 60% within his own party won his party’s nomination.
A question in our poll that tries to get at Trump’s baseline support within the GOP reveals that there are a lot who don’t want to move on from him.
A large chunk (47%) say the party should continue to treat Trump as the leader of the GOP. That falls to 43% when you include Republican leaning independents, but, again, it’s a substantial portion. Just 19% of Americans, overall, want the party to continue to treat Trump as its leader.
Other recent polling points out that Republicans who go against Trump might not be able to escape his wrath in a 2022 or 2024 primary.
A quite high 57% of Republicans said in Ipsos KnowledgePanel poll that they agreed Trump should be the 2024 nominee. This included 37% who strongly agreed.
In other 2024 polling, Trump has continuously led the pack of named challengers. It does seem his support may have fallen off since the insurrection, but not tremendously. He’s still well out ahead with backing generally matching his 2016 primary performance of 45%.
Put another way, his position in very early hypothetical 2024 polling is at this point far better than other presidents after they lost their bid for another term (Gerald Ford for 1980, Jimmy Carter for 1984 and George H.W. Bush for 1996).
The polling, in this case, matches the reality you saw in the congressional vote to accept or reject the electoral votes from Pennsylvania, after the insurrection. A majority of Republican members of Congress chose to sustain the objection to those votes, despite no evidence that there was fraud that could have tipped the balance of the election in either Pennsylvania or any other state.
Indeed, the polling on the insurrection just gives you an understanding of how different the Republican base and the general electorate sees things right now.
While 65% of Americans place a great deal or moderate amount of blame on Trump “for the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6”, only 23% of Republicans do in our CNN poll. The vast majority of Republicans (76%) said little (20%) to no (56%) blame lies at the President’s feet.
The clear majority of Republicans (75%) say President-elect Joe Biden did not win enough votes to legitimately win the election, despite no evidence to make such a claim. Most Americans (65%) believe he did win legitimately.
And even as a majority of GOP members of Congress voted with no evidence to sustain the objection to Pennsylvania’s electoral votes, 51% of Republicans said in an ABC News/Washington Post poll that party leaders didn’t go far enough in supporting Trump’s bid to overthrow the election. Most Americans (52%) thought they went too far.
Therefore, it’s not surprising that, even as the majority of Americans (54%) in the CNN poll want Trump removed from office, a mere 10% of Republicans do. Other polling shows similarly.
The bottom line is that most Americans are ready to move on from Trump, but a lot of Republicans aren’t.
That could cause the party plenty of heartache. Under Trump, the party lost the House, Senate and the presidency. The party’s favorability rating has dropped over the past few months.
This puts the GOP party leaders in a bind. We already saw that low Republican turnout in the Georgia runoffs in areas most friendly to Trump cost Republicans. Functioning political parties cannot just ignore their base, even if what their base wants is in contrast to what the larger electorate does.
What Republicans need to hope is the party can unite, as most opposition parties do, around a common goal of defeating the majority party. You could see that working well in general elections.
Of course, that may not help out congressional Republicans who have defied Trump in a primary.
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