A Republican pollster is hailing former President Donald Trump's 2024 general election trajectory — and not only because of the strength of his fiercely loyal base, but also because President Joe Biden is "enormously destructive and eminently beatable."
"Any notion that Republicans ought to turn the page, lest they face another electoral defeat, largely evaporated," Kristen Soltis Anderson wrote Monday in The New York Times. "And the multitude of criminal indictments against Mr. Trump have not shaken the support of Republicans for him, but have instead seemingly galvanized them."
Biden's Justice Department, along with Democrat district attorneys in the blue strongholds of Manhattan, New York, and Fulton County, Georgia, might have sought to damage the runaway GOP primary polling leader politically, but it has backfired, according to Soltis Anderson.
"Most Republicans aren't looking to be rescued from Donald Trump," she wrote. "The fact is, they really do like him, and at this point they think he's their best shot.
"Despite losing the 2020 elections and then experiencing a disappointing 2022 midterm, most Republicans seem confident that their candidate — even Donald Trump, especially Donald Trump — would defeat Joe Biden handily in 2024.
"They have watched as Mr. Biden has increasingly stumbled, as gas prices have remained high and as Americans have continued to doubt the value of 'Bidenomics.' Many of them believe the pernicious fantasy pushed by Trump — and indulged by too many Republican leaders who should know better — that the 2020 election was not actually a loss."
The more Biden and anti-Trump media try to spin the narrative to try to "poison" Trump's 2024 election hopes, the more voters refused to turn away from him.
"Republican voters see the same polls that I do, showing Mr. Trump effectively tied against Mr. Biden even though commentators tell them that Mr. Trump is electoral poison," Soltis Anderson continued. "And they remember that many of those same voices told them 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."
The indictments of Trump actually only help sink his chief GOP primary rivals.
"In my own polling immediately following the election, I found the Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis running even with Donald Trump in a head-to-head matchup among likely Republican primary voters, a finding that held throughout the winter," Soltis Anderson wrote. "Even voters who consider themselves 'very conservative' gravitated away from Mr. Trump and toward the prospect of an alternative for a time.
"But by the end of the spring 2023, following the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg's indictment of Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis' rocky entrance into the presidential race, not only had Mr. Trump regained his lead, he had expanded upon it."
The Times pollster found in a small sample of GOP primary voters "not a single participant thought that Mr. Trump — or any Republican, really — would lose to Mr. Biden."
"For now they think that Mr. Biden is both enormously destructive and eminently beatable," she concluded. "They are undeterred by pleas from party elites who say Mr. Trump is taking the Republican Party to the point of no return.
"Republicans both deeply fear a 2024 loss and also can't fathom it actually happening.
"Candidates seeking to defeat Mr. Trump in the primary can't just assume Republican voters will naturally conclude the stakes are too high to bet it all on Trump. For now, many of those voters think Mr. Trump is the safest bet they've got."