AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty
If Joe Biden thought siccing his Department of Justice on Donald Trump would keep him from returning to the White House, that strategy appears to be backfiring.
A new poll conducted Aug. 2-7, which is entirely after the latest indictment by Special Counsel Jack Smith, shows that Trump now leads Biden in a 2024 rematch. The survey by Premise found that Trump garners the support of 42% of registered voters, while Joe Biden gets 38%, giving Trump a 4-point advantage.
If you’re a Democrat seeing this poll, it has to make you nervous. Trump was indicted earlier this month, and Democrats have been accusing him of crimes from the moment he decided to run for president. To them, the indictment not only represents Trump getting justice, but it’s the key to keeping him out of the White House. However, many experts panned the indictment for being weak and for criminalizing free speech.
As for the voters, while most Democrats support the indictment, Republicans and Independents do not, and a majority of all voters believe the indictments are political and attack free speech.
If the latest indictment hasn’t made Trump unviable for the presidency in the eyes of the voters, it is plausible that it has actually boosted him. In fact, we’ve seen it before. After his first indictment in Manhattan by the George Soros-funded prosecutor Alvin Bragg, Trump was beating Biden by seven points in the Rasmussen poll after he’d been behind Biden by three points before the indictment. That’s a ten-point swing in Trump’s favor. Biden was also beating Trump by four points in the YouGov survey before that indictment, and then Trump was leading by two points after — a six-point swing in Trump’s favor.
We’ve noticed Trump’s enjoyed a boost in GOP primary polling after the indictments, but these new polls suggest that nationwide, voters are troubled by the politicization of the judicial system, and that could help Trump in the general election. Once again, it looks like Democrats’ attempts to undermine Trump could propel him back to the White House.
If the Biden administration thinks that the indictments will keep Trump out of office, they’re making a risky gamble. Trump gets to spend the next fifteen months campaigning on the fact that he’s a target of prosecutorial misconduct at the hands of the Biden administration. This will not only make GOP voters extremely angry and send them rushing to the polls, but it will also terrify independent voters who are concerned about a weaponized justice system.
