With South Carolina GOP Primary Looming, Voters Don’t Care About Prosecutions As Trump Continues To Dominate Polls

Robert RomanoFebruary 21, 2024

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With the Feb. 24 South Carolina Republican presidential primary looming, former President Donald Trump continues to dominate polling in the Palmetto State, averaging in the latest RealClearPolling.com reading of polls a 25-point lead over former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley who if she cannot win her home state, it’s safe to say she cannot win.

So far, Trump has swept the first three contests in the GOP primary — Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada — a feat never achieved in a competitive nomination battle, underscoring the incumbency advantage that the former president still appears to retain in the contest.

After all, who’s more qualified to be president in the eyes of voters than somebody who has already done the job before? Sitting presidents running for reelection do that all the time, but never a Republican who wasn’t in office at the time of running. Opposing Trump in this context, especially as he retaine strong popularity within the GOP, might have always been a futile endeavor.

And so far, GOP primary voters appear unintimidated by the simultaneous prosecution of Trump by Democratic prosecutors in New York City, Fulton County, Ga., Washington, D.C. and Miami — with Trump on the potential verge of sweeping the primaries.

Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?

Yes

For example in the last poll taken by USA Today-Suffolk Feb. 15 through Feb. 18, Trump garners 63 percent suport, while Haley trails with just 35 percent. Trump leads across all age categories by roughly the same margin: leading 18-34-year-olds 64 percent to 36 percent, 35-49-year-olds 61 percent to 36 percent, 50-64-year-olds 67 percent to 31 percent and 65-years-old-and-older 62 percent to 36 percent.

By now, voters in the Republican presidential primary have had every opportunity to evaluate what they think of Trump’s prosecutions, with the verdict being that they either don’t care, or the prosecutions have counterproductively made them even more likely to support Trump.

This comes even as Special Counsel Jack Smith has sought for expedited trials against Trump hoping for a conviction before the election in November, but if the results so far are any indication, even locking up Trump might not matter to the support he garners at the polls — and it might even help him win the election. Why?

For starters, as partisan as many but not all Americans are, with some seeing their political opponents not merely as adversaries to be debated, but criminals to be jailed, the majority of Americans including independents remain fair-minded and do not wish to see the Republic be wrecked by these political prosecutions — one antidote to which is to simply vote against who the prosecutors are attempting to remove from the ballot.

The short-term thinking afoot when it comes to prosecuting Trump — a process that began in 2015 and 2016 when he ran for president the first time and the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC managed to get the FBI to open a counterintelligence investigation against their opponent on made-up charges that Trump was a Russian agent — is somewhat astounding, as it discounts the diminishing reputation and legitimacy of the nation’s prosecutorial and judicial systems.

Unfortunately for the American people, the more Trump wins electorally, the worse it seems to get as efforts now revolve around getting the U.S. Supreme Court to affirm Colorado and Maine’s decisions to arbitrarily remove Trump from the ballot. Even if Trump prevails at the nation’s highest court and remains on the ballot, the long-term damage that has been done to the electoral system in the government’s war against Trump remains difficult to calculate.

Even as voters in the short-term appear to be rejecting the prosecution of political opponents including Trump, the normalization of the practice should still be troubling to the American people. Right now, the current generation appears to at least clinging to the pretense of due process, but only barely, whereas future generations might be emboldened to see the deep constitutional issues posed today by political prosecutions to be mere technicalities to be overcome.

Lawfare today could become warfare tomorrow, unless the impartial administration of justice and limited government is somehow restored before it is too late. For now, Republican voters seem to be saying, you can’t lock up their leaders, they’ll vote for them anyway — but is that enough to protect our electoral freedom in the long term?

Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.

Cross-posted with The Daily Torch

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