Democrats have given former President Donald Trump an unintended political boost with the criminal indictment and upcoming arraignment Tuesday as polls show more voters rallying behind the current 2024 GOP front-runner, a veteran political pollster and strategist said Monday.
"There’s a nexus between Americans that are bullied by the government and an increase in popularity," said Craig Keshishian, who worked as a White House pollster during the Reagan administration, on "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
"We’ve seen that clearly. Quite succinctly with the [Bill] Clinton case. Clinton was really on the rocks for a good chunk of that presidency. When the Republicans started to gang up on him, it actually worked to his benefit in the end… so we’re seeing this as an exemplar of that general theory," Keshishian added. "Americans don’t mind bullies. But they do not like to be bullied. Therein lies the difference and Trump is now the beneficiary of that."
INDICTMENT GIVES TRUMP A POLITICAL BOOST, BUT SOME GOP OPERATIVES WONDER HOW LONG IT CAN LAST
Trump and his 2024 White House campaign rushed to cash in on the former president’s indictment, announcing Monday that the campaign had hauled in $7 million in fundraising since last Thursday when he became the first former president in U.S. history to be indicted for a crime.
While donations poured into his campaign, Trump, who announced his third White House bid in November, also managed to maintain his spot as the front-runner in public opinion polls in the GOP nomination race. And his lead over the rest of the field of actual and potential contenders has increased in the past couple of weeks, as the indictment loomed.
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"The key thing here is that P.R. for Trump is like oxygen to a fire. So they may have given him the kiss of life," Keshishian said. "We’re seeing this in polling numbers conducted by my dear colleagues… where there’s been a de facto surge in Republican respondents who now sympathize with Trump in wake of this indictment."
Citing two polls that surveyed voters after the indictment was announced, Keshishian said that 50% of respondents felt "more strongly attracted to Trump and sympathetic to him than before."
"What is even more striking, and I look at those numbers as one of Reagan’s former pollsters, they’re bona fide. The numbers of respondents are high. Those are two legitimate polls," he added. "Frankly what stunned me the most about it were Republican women who are rallying around Trump as we speak. So the Democrats better be careful. They may get something if they really wanted it bad enough. I fear for them that there could be some sort of backlash in the making here."
GOP pollster Daron Shaw, who conducts Fox News surveys with Democrat Chris Anderson, similarly said last week that the indictment news seems to have "helped Trump quite a bit among Republican primary voters," emphasizing that GOP primary voters "view the case as politically motivated, and it reanimates feelings that Trump is still fighting forces they see as corrupt and out of control."
Trump will be arraigned Tuesday for allegedly giving hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels in 2016 to keep her quiet ahead of that year’s presidential election over her claims she had sexual encounters years earlier with Trump. The former president denies sleeping with Daniels and denies falsifying business records to keep the payment concealed.
