During a segment on Sunday’s “This Week” on ABC, host George Stephanopoulos brought up a Wall Street Journal presidential poll released over the weekend. He expressed his dismay that the poll showed that if the 2024 presidential election were held now, support for Trump and Biden would be split at 46% support for either candidate.
“It is kind of shocking, in a way, that despite all of the baggage that Donald Trump carries he’s tied with Joe Biden right now,” Stephanopoulos said.
“Baggage?” “Shocking?” Not really. Among the Republican primary voters surveyed for the WSJ poll, 60% said that the multiple criminal charges against Trump were politically motivated and lacked merit. Another 78% said that Trump’s actions following the 2020 elections were actually legitimate actions to ensure an accurate vote. Only 16% said that Trump illegally attempted to prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election.
Clearly the Democratic mantra that Trump is the quintessential criminal has not made significant inroads in Republican ranks. Presumptive Trump supporters already weathered more than four years of unrelenting allegations of criminal wrongdoing and worse against him. The present indictments are almost universally seen as conjured up pastiches that would never have been brought to bear if Trump had not been targeted by Democratic leaders for revenge and political oblivion. The Biden Justice Department’s plainly corrupt treatment of the Hunter Biden investigation, with all its sordid twists and turns, could hardly suggest otherwise to them.
That would explain why Trump is running well with his Republican veterans, but how to explain why he is running even with Biden among all voters?
It is interesting that Stephanopoulos, an old Bill Clinton hand, limited himself to expressing shock that the indictments not only weren’t hurting him but were actually helping Trump with voters. He could have easily and plausibly suggested that with the solid wall of Republican support, Trump needed only to peel off a relatively few Democratic stragglers who were also disgusted with the Department of Justice’s Hunter Biden shenanigans. He could also have posited that, with the growing body of evidence building a case of possible financial wrongdoing by President Biden when he was vice president, perhaps voters were swayed by the legal issues facing both Trump and Biden.
Lest one thinks that Stephanopoulos’ omissions were inadvertent, it seems that his script came directly from Democratic central.
NYT White House correspondent Peter Baker, referencing the WSJ poll in an MSNBC interview Saturday, remarked: “After the mugshot and four criminal indictments, you would think that President Biden would have a significant advantage, but apparently not.”
In a TV interview about the poll, CNN’s Jim Acosta made a point of reminding viewers that despite Trump’s “four indictments … he is still tied with Joe Biden in the poll.”
Former Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile said she found the poll’s findings alarming. “When I looked at the recent poll [from] the Wall Street Journal, I said, this could keep me up at night.”
Apparently none of these individuals could bring themselves to find fault with President Biden. It is almost as if they were trying to convey that the problem lies solely in Trump being given a pass and that is what has to be the focus, not that Biden has developed some really potent negatives that need addressing.
We are reminded that in the run up to the 2016 election, few thought Trump could beat Hillary Clinton. He was just not presidential. What became clear after the election, however, was that there was something going on in the country that defied the pundits.
There may well have been a miscalculation about the effect of the prosecutions on the Trump candidacy, but Biden never forgot 2016 and doesn’t want Trump the wild card to run – no how, no way.
