After An Eventful Month, Trump Has Lost Support In The GOP Primary – By Nathaniel Rakich (FiveThirtyEight) / Aug 31, 2023
But he still has a dominant lead.
Once more, with feeling: It has been a couple of weeks since former President Donald Trump’s latest indictment (this time in Georgia, in connection with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election there). Do the charges appear to have affected his chances of returning to the White House?
After each of Trump’s three prior indictments, his polling numbers changed in small, inconsistent ways — if they changed at all. The fourth indictment followed this non-pattern pattern: Some evidence suggests that he’s gained ground in the Republican primary, other evidence suggests that he’s lost it, and what little general-election data we have suggests nothing has shifted significantly. And, adding to the frustration of political junkies everywhere, it’s very difficult to figure out how much the fourth indictment affected Trump’s standing in the race given how close it occurred to two other major events on the campaign trail: the third indictment and the GOP presidential debate.
Let’s take a deeper look at national polls of the Republican primary. There have been 29 of these conducted completely after news of the fourth indictment broke late at night on Aug. 14, and Trump has fallen from 53 percent in our polling average to 50 percent since then.1 But the Georgia indictment came on the heels of another big set of charges: On Aug. 1, Trump was indicted by a federal grand jury, also for allegedly interfering with the 2020 election. And only five combinations of pollsters and sponsors conducted polls both in the period between the two indictments (Aug. 1 and Aug. 14) and after the Georgia one (since Aug. 14).2 That’s important because, while we can theoretically compare, say, Emerson College’s Aug. 16-17 survey to its June 19-20 survey, it would be impossible to say that Trump’s 3-percentage-point decline is due to the Georgia indictment. It could have been due to the third indictment, or any other combination of events that occurred over those two months.
