Former President Donald J. Trump has been arrested four times since he left office and declined to participate in his party’s first debate, but Republican voters seem to know who they want, and it’s Trump, according to another round of polls.
After skipping the party debate Wednesday evening and despite his arrest by authorities in Georgia on Thursday, recent polling and fundraising indicate that Trump continues to maintain his grip on the GOP.
According to Trump’s campaign, on the Friday following his surrender to authorities in Fulton County the 45th president had his best fundraising day of the 2024 campaign. His jail mugshot, plastered on campaign memorabilia and shared across the one-term chief executive’s social media accounts, is apparently quite appealing to conservative donors.
“Close to $20 [million] raised in the last 3 weeks, coinciding with indictment in DC and the Atlanta mugshot,” Trump 2024 campaign spokesman Steven Cheung claimed Saturday via X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter. “$4.18 [million] yesterday alone, the highest grossing day of the entire campaign.”
Trump — despite a pair of past impeachments, losing the 2020 presidential election, arrests in New York, Florida, Washington D.C. and Georgia, and notwithstanding dozens of scandals stemming from his time in office — is by far and away the leading contender for the Republican party’s nomination to the presidency in 2024.
The man hasn’t shot anyone, on Fifth Avenue or elsewhere, but his past statement that he could do so and not lose any support is starting to seem less like bravado and more like a statement of fact. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Saturday, taken in the days after Trump’s debate dodge and subsequent short stint in state custody, shows the 45th president polling at 52% support and in first by more than 40-points.
On the other hand Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose center-stage debate appearance Wednesday was perhaps his best chance to close the gap with Trump, wasn’t much benefited by his attendance.
“Respondents who followed the party’s first debate on Wednesday were more open to DeSantis’ bid – good news for a campaign banking on the event boosting his profile after a summer slide in opinion polls. But it showed DeSantis remained stuck in distant second place with 13% of support of Republican respondents,” pollsters wrote with the release of their survey.
Trump wasn’t the only person to decline the debate. Pollsters say that most potential voters skipped it too. Only 19% of Republicans polled said they had watched the event live, with the vast majority of respondents saying they had seen only short clips of the candidates arguing or heard nothing of what happened in Milwaukee.
According to polling aggregator RealClearPolitics, Trump’s numbers have only improved following his four arrests. In mid-March it looked like DeSantis might be gaining ground when he crested 30%, but Trump saw a sudden boost after announcing Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg would arrest him over payments he allegedly made to a porn star ex-mistress for her discretion ahead of the 2020 election.
The former commander-in-chief has maintained majority support since.