Jack Posobiec of Human Events and Richard Baris of Big Data Polls discussed the polling trend that former President Donald Trump continues to garner support despite being indicted twice on Friday. Posobiec said that “Republican strategists are telling donors, or were telling donors, that when Trump is indicted, his polls will go down, they’ll shoot down, they'll race to the bottom and it’ll knock him out of the race.”
He asked Baris: “Aren’t we seeing the exact opposite now?”
Baris responded: “What we see is a slight bump out of the margin for Trump in most of the states and nationally, and it decline for other candidates. I said this when we talked the other day that every single day, take a candidate like Ron DeSantis, every single day these consultants, you know, feed this advice to him and to others, and every single day his unfavorables rise even further.”
“Soon he's gonna end up in Mike Pence territory,“ Barris added. “Consultants don't live with voters. They don't even do particularly good polling. I mean, this is the tragedy of it all. And a lot of these guys jumped into this race, thinking that I'm going to run for a cabinet position or I'm going to run to be the replacement candidate when lawfare takes out Donald Trump. And what we have seen is a circling of the wagons by Republican voters around the former president, and it decline for the other candidates.”
“There's only good news for one other non-Trump candidate in this race, and that is Chris Christie, increasing a little bit in New Hampshire, but he just came back from a trip there. He's got a lot of Chris Sununu's connections, he got favorable coverage, and he's about to overtake DeSantis for second place.”
Posobiec cut in, asking Baris if it is “a losing strategy” for Republican candidates to hope that Trump’s favorability decreases amid the legal battles he is involved in.
“It is because there's nothing worse that you can do to yourself than confirm or affirm something as suspicion that voters have of you,“ Barris responded. “And when you take the top couple of candidates behind Trump, of anyone else, other than I'd say Nikki Haley, because, like or love her, at least she's been consistent, right? Take Mike Pence, take Ron DeSantis, the voters have basically suspected or believed that these two men were simply just trying to ride off of Donald Trump's personal destruction.
"And you have to remember this is a former president who more than 80 percent of the [Republican] party still beloves, Jack. So this isn't a hated former president among his party. So it was a stupid strategy. There's no other way to put it. And then they were banking on fear and I really think the more I talked to some of these people, I think they projected themselves and how they feel onto the American voter, and they really don't understand them, and they're very different from them.”
Baris said, “So what do I mean by that? I mean, they're afraid, Jack, they're afraid of the indictments, the lawfare,“ later adding that, “I think they thought voters would believe that, and then put that above their defense of this president, and that was a catastrophic mistake for the future of these candidates.”
“I think it was a losing strategy,“ Posobiec responded. “And I think honestly, if you're sitting out there as a Republican and you're interested in higher office, potentially national office, the highest office in our land, you must be prepared to go through the pain box. You must be prepared to go through what they will put you through, and they would do it to any candidate or any person that actually stood up against the agenda.”
