Explaining the Trump Surge

Trump's new supporters mostly coming from DeSantis rather than the undecided

Just a few weeks ago, Trump’s position within the Republican presidential nomination contest looked okay but shaky, and not necessarily the commanding position one would expect from a former president. Today, he has what appears to be a commanding lead in the opinion polls. Exactly what has shifted? Obviously, this is a product of his indictment in the Stormy Daniels case, but how different is the race now? And where did his support come from?

Let me just say at the outset that focusing a lot on public opinion polls for the Republican presidential nomination at this point in the contest is potentially misleading. Voters’ attention is only occasionally on this, there are lots of candidates who just haven’t gotten much airtime yet (but will), and public opinion is pretty volatile. That said, the patterns we’re seeing are kind of interesting.

So there are two real ways Trump’s lead could have increased. First, his new support could be coming from the undecided, who learned new information about him via the indictments and decided to weigh in for him. Second, he could be pulling support from Ron DeSantis, the only other candidate with double-digit numbers at this point.

My impression has been that the indictment didn’t necessarily shift the race so much as accelerate a trend that was going to happen anyway. That is, a lot of people within the party who are currently hesitating are going to find a way to support Donald Trump, much as they did in 2016, and after Access Hollywood, and after January 6th, etc. They may express concerns about him, but many will find a reason to support him, and claiming he’s being illegitimately prosecuted is just the most convenient way to get those Trump-leaning undecideds off the fence.

However, the figure below from Yahoo!/YouGov makes it pretty plain that the other story is what’s driving this. The number of undecided really hasn’t shifted. Trump’s new supporters are coming from the DeSantis camp. And support for other candidates hasn’t really shifted much yet.

So what’s going on here? Was DeSantis’ support really that soft? Part of the story is, again, polling in a nomination contest this early is going to be highly volatile and more a reaction to news stories than any credible forecast of how people are going to vote. It’s a substantial bounce in the polls, to be sure, but we should wait to see what this looks like a few weeks or months from now — and also in response to further likely indictments — before we decide the contest is over.

Relatedly, part of the story is that Trump’s earlier low polling position was also a volatile reaction to a news story — GOP underperformance in the 2022 midterm elections. So just as his low poll position would come to an end as distance from that news story faded, so will his new high position likely fade with time. Again, we’ll see.

But this is also what’s motivating my next survey of county Republican chairs, which is just getting underway. I hope to be able to report back on that in a few weeks, and that should give us a better idea of whether party elites — a pretty substantial number of whom expressed real problems with Trump — are willing to move in the former president’s direction in the wake of his indictment.