Did the Federal Indictments Cause Republicans to Rally for Trump?

A look at survey results before and after the classified document indictments

In the latest round of my survey of Republican county chairs, I asked them several questions about their support of different candidates. Luckily(?), I was conducting this survey at the time that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictments of Donald Trump went public, with 44 percent of responses coming before the indictment and the rest coming after. This can give us a sense of whether the indictments had any effect on the contest.

The first question was whether county chairs were committed to Donald Trump. I’ve plotted the results below, with a vertical line at June 9th, when the indictment was made public. Now, to be clear, the trend line in this figure is what’s called a lowess moving average. The data points are just zeros (didn’t support Trump) and ones (did support Trump). So the lowess just tries to capture the overall trend, even if it wiggles around quite a bit.

What we can see is that the proportion of respondents saying they were committed to Trump grew over the course of the time period. It’s hard to say whether the indictments caused his support to grow, but it’s consistent with that, as well as with many other surveys.

I also asked the county chairs which candidates they are considering supporting. Below we can see the trends for those who said they were considering Trump and those who said they were considering DeSantis. As we can see, prior to the indictments, a greater proportion of chairs were considering DeSantis; that reversed itself afterwards.

Here’s another way to look at it. This chart plots the proportion of chairs who said they were considering Trump against the proportion who said they definitely did not want Trump to be the nominee. The former category rose after the indictments, while the latter shrank.

Finally, I asked the chairs, regardless of which candidate they preferred, who they thought would win.