Trump support steady after indictment: survey

Support for former President Trump has remained largely steady, despite being indicted for a second time last week over his handling of classified documents, according to a poll released Wednesday.

The Quinnipiac University poll found that 53 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters said they would support the former president in a GOP primary. That’s down 3 points from a survey in late May.

Trump’s competition for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination is still trailing far behind in the polls.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sits in a distant second with 23 percent, while former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, former Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.) and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie are all tied in third at 4 percent.

In a hypothetical 2024 rematch, Trump is trailing President Biden by 4 points, with the former president garnering 44 percent support and the sitting president picking up 48 percent support, the poll found. In the May iteration of the survey, Trump sat 2 points behind at 46 percent support.

The poll was conducted in the midst of Trump’s second indictment. The former president announced he had been charged Thursday night, and the indictment was unsealed the next day.

He pleaded not guilty Tuesday to 37 counts at a Miami courthouse related to his alleged mishandling of classified documents and efforts to block the government from recovering them.

“A federal indictment. A court date on a litany of charges. A blizzard of critical media coverage. The negative impact on the former President’s standing with voters? Not much at all,” Tim Malloy, a Quinnipiac University polling analyst, noted in a press release.

The Quinnipiac University poll was conducted June 8-12 with 1,929 U.S. adults and had a margin of error of 2.2 percentage points.