DES MOINES, Iowa — You don’t have to scratch the surface very hard to find voters like David Kerr here in Iowa, who backed Donald Trump in the last two presidential elections but now figures he’s history.

“I don’t think he can win a general election,” Mr. Kerr said.

But pollsters say Mr. Kerr is a distinct minority within the GOP. A flood of national and early-state surveys indicate that most Republican primary voters either disagree or, frankly, just don’t care about Mr. Trump’s legal problems.

It’s one of the striking undercurrents of the GOP nomination battle. Even as his legal woes pile up, and Democrats figure he’ll be a convict by the general election, Republicans back Mr. Trump in overwhelming numbers.

That’s because electability, which is usually a major threshold question for primary voters, has become “meaningless to most Republican voters,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute.

“The majority think Trump is the strongest candidate regardless of his legal troubles,” Mr. Murray said.

Those legal predicaments span four separate indictments, two at the federal level covering his activities around the 2020 election and mishandling of government secrets, and two at the state level — one in Georgia stemming from alleged election interference, and one in New York focused on hush money payments to two women who said they had affairs with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump’s rivals for the GOP nomination are urging voters to think more deeply about electability.

“We have to face the fact that Trump is the most disliked politician in America,” former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley said in the first GOP debate. “We can’t win a general election that way.”

Americans for Prosperity, a super PAC backed by billionaire conservative activist Charles Koch, has been running dump-Trump ads in some Super Tuesday states.

“I’m just so tired of it all, the drama and chaos of Donald Trump,” a woman says in an ad. “His obsession with 2020, revenge and now all of the indictments, it’s exhausting, and none of it helps us beat Joe Biden.”

“To beat Joe Biden, we have to move on from Donald Trump,” she says.

But that message isn’t penetrating, according to polls.

Jim McLaughlin, a pollster who has Mr. Trump’s ear, said when most GOP voters think about electability, they see it in fatalistic terms.

“They believe Joe Biden is destroying America and they believe that Donald Trump is the only one that can stop America’s decline,” Mr. McLaughlin said.

In an op-ed for The New York Times, Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster, said Republican voters do not agree with the political pundits who warn that nominating Mr. Trump is too great a risk, because they see Mr. Biden as “eminently beatable” and they remember being told “in 2016 that Mr. Trump would never set foot in the White House.”

“In light of those facts, Republicans’ skepticism of claims that Mr. Trump is a surefire loser begins to make more sense,” Ms. Soltis Anderson said. “They are undeterred by pleas from party elites who say Mr. Trump is taking the Republican Party to the point of no return.”

But Joe Zepecki, a Wisconsin-based Democratic strategist, said next year is shaping up differently than 2016, at least in his state.

He said the growth of Madison, a liberal bastion, and the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion have served to put Republicans on their heels.

“You add this all up … and then you add in the chaos surrounding Trump and you ask yourself, ‘how is he adding voters he didn’t have in 2020?’” Mr. Zepecki said. “I have yet to get a satisfactory answer to that.”

Despite that, Mr. Zepecki said Democrats would still like Mr. Trump to fade away.

“Donald Trump as a major party nominee is an unmitigated disaster for this country and our politics,” he said. “Anyone rooting for that should have their head examined.”

For his part, Mr. Kerr, the former Trump backer in Iowa, told the Times last month at the Iowa State Fair that his support for the ex-president has softened over time.

He cited Mr. Trump’s response to the coronavirus, his penchant for being a “jerk,” and the “dumb things” that come out of “his mouth on a regular basis” — including his recent criticism of Gov. Kim Reynolds, the popular Iowa Republican.

“He has been doing it since 2015, and that is probably not going to change — he is 77 years old,” he said.

• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.