Former President Trump’s support has slightly slipped among Republicans following his federal indictment in the classified documents case, according to a poll released Thursday.
The AP-NORC survey found that 60 percent of Republicans surveyed currently view Trump favorably, down from the 68 percent who said they had a favorable view of him in April. Also, 38 percent of Republicans now say they have an unfavorable view of Trump, an uptick from the 30 percent in April.
Pollsters also noted that while Trump’s favorability dipped among Republicans, it stayed the same among the overall public compared to April’s survey, with about 33 percent of the public viewing the former president favorably and 63 percent viewing him unfavorably. The poll was conducted after Trump pleaded not guilty earlier this month to 37 federal charges in connection with his alleged mishandling of classified documents and attempts to keep them from the government.
When asked about Trump’s classified documents case, respondents were more likely to say the former president did something illegal in connection to the documents found at his Mar-a-Lago home last summer; 53 percent said that they believed Trump did something illegal in this case, a slight increase from the 47 percent in April.
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Answers differed by party lines, with 84 percent of Democrats saying Trump did something illegal with the classified documents. This is up from the 75 percent of Democrats who answered the same way in April, and only 2 percent of Democrats said in the new survey that Trump did nothing wrong in the classified documents case.
Republicans’ view of the classified documents case remained about stable from April to June, with 23 percent saying the former president did something illegal. Nearly 30 percent of Republicans said in the new poll that what he did was unethical but not illegal, and 26 percent maintain that Trump did nothing wrong.
The latest survey was conducted June 22-26 among 1,220 adults and had a margin of sampling error of 3.9 percentage points.