For the past month, Donald Trump has been on a roll. The indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has given him a major boost, with a new set of grievances he can complain about — and nobody better at being a victim than Trump. Conservatives rallied around the former president, and all his potential and current primary opponents condemned the indictment.
And all that overwhelming support has helped Trump in the polls — by maybe 5 points.
Given all the media hyperventilating, you would think Trump has the Republican nomination locked up and it is all smooth sailing. But the fact is, Trump continues to have a difficult time wrapping up GOP voters, even though he is still largely unopposed, and he benefits from a news media desperate for clicks (and Trump is great for business).
The good news for Trump is that he is up. Determining where he really stands is the tricky part.
The major polling operations disagree and are using their own sampling methods that are likely trapping them within their own bubbles. In addition, polls right in the aftermath of the indictment should be discounted in favor of later polls that allow the news to sink in. Unfortunately, few polls satisfy these conditions.
For the Republican nomination, Trump jumped 5 points in the Harvard-Harris poll between March 23 and the April 19, going from 50 percent to 55 percent. His current top competitor, Ron DeSantis, dropped from 24 percent to 20 percent.
The ultra-Trumpy Emerson poll has Trump at 62 percent, well above any other poll — and DeSantis at just 16 percent (nobody else polls DeSantis under 20 percent). Worth noting, Emerson has consistently polled Trump much better than any other national poll, including a statistically improbable 9-month streak at exactly 55 percent. To put it bluntly, Emerson has all the credibility of a One America News Network Twitter poll.
Polls from Fox News and Republican pollster Cygnal are not so good for Trump. Cygnal has him rising from 40 percent in December to 46 percent. Fox News has Trump flat, moving from 54 percent at the end of March to 53 percent in April. NBC News has Trump at just 46 percent vs. DeSantis at 31 percent, and The Wall Street Journal, under GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio, has Trump at 48 percent.
After the big rush of sympathy, Trump has still failed to close the deal.
Trump has stretched his lead over DeSantis, with the Florida governor falling across the board into the low- to mid-20s. But it should be noted that this coincides with Trump going full-scale-attack on DeSantis. Trump has pushed down DeSantis’s numbers, but he has not gained much.
The decline of DeSantis has not been matched with improvements by other real and potential GOP primary candidates. Mike Pence remains mired in the single digits with his best result at just 7 percent in Harvard-Harris (unchanged for four months). Nikki Haley maxes out at 5 percent in The Wall Street Journal poll. Vivek Ramaswamy charts at 2 percent and Tim Scott ranges from 1 to 3 percent — both closer to rounding error than serious contenders.
The most concerning numbers for DeSantis are, strangely enough, Pence’s. Trump has successfully wrecked his former vice president despite his impeccable conservative credentials. Pence’s refusal to fight back against Trump’s attacks left him an afterthought, at best. DeSantis is at risk of the same fate. If DeSantis turns into a Trump punching bag, he cannot catch up.
Trump remains neck and neck with Joe Biden in the early ballot test, with Trump having a sliver of a lead in the RealClearPolitics average. Two outlier polls prop up Trump a bit: Rasmussen has him at a 7-point lead, higher than any other poll, and the Harvard-Harris poll is consistently Trumpy with the former president up 5 points. That continues a streak of 5-point leads stretching back to December, with a dip to 4 points in March.
But it is the approve/disapprove ratings that are telling. Biden is in terrible shape, with a RCP average deficit of over 11 points. The numbers are even worse with independents. In the most recent YouGov poll, Biden is at 32 percent favorable to 60 percent unfavorable.
In such a terrible environment, Trump should be leading Biden consistently. But Trump’s numbers are even worse. His average is a colossal 16 points in the negative. Again, the Trumpy Harvard-Harris poll pushes him up with just a 3-point deficit. YouGov also has Trump’s negatives much lower than average (as it does for Biden). Fox News has Trump negative by 13 points, The Wall Street Journal by 18 points and NBC News by 19 points. The only thing that can be said for Trump is that he is not more unpopular than Biden’s VP, Kamala Harris, who has a 16-point deficit. Meanwhile, DeSantis is only net unfavorable by 0.5 percent.
The main takeaways from the last several months of ballot tests and approval numbers are that Biden’s post-midterm election bump has faded back to roughly a dead heat and that Trump’s loathsomeness is propping up Biden.
After a month of non-stop publicity, very little criticism from other Republicans and playing the victim card at every turn, Trump has seen little movement upward. DeSantis has fallen noticeably but is still far ahead of every other potential GOP challenger to Trump — and he still is not an official candidate. Trump remains roughly in a dead heat with a president who is himself unpopular in a struggling economy.
Trump remains an uncertain front-runner for the Republican nomination and a weak opponent for Biden.
Keith Naughton, Ph.D., is co-founder of Silent Majority Strategies, a public and regulatory affairs consulting firm. Naughton is a former Pennsylvania political campaign consultant. Follow him on Twitter @KNaughton711.