As Donald Trump’s legal difficulties have intensified over the last year and a half, the former president and his allies have made a variety of predictions about public attitudes. Those forecasts have been wrong with amazing consistency.
After the FBI executed a court-approved search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, for example, many Republicans expressed great certainty that the vast majority of Americans would share in their outrage and denounce federal law enforcement. Polls soon after showed the opposite.
After Trump’s criminal indictments, leading GOP voices again said that the American mainstream would be repulsed by the developments and rally behind the former president. It wasn’t long, however, before independent surveys found most voters actually endorsing the Republican’s prosecutions.
More recently, officials in Colorado and Maine have concluded that Trump is ineligible for the 2024 ballot due to the 14th Amendment, which bars any public official who swore an oath to protect the Constitution from holding office if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against it or gave “aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
Right on cue, Republicans responded to the news by predicting fury and rage from Americans. It’s against that backdrop that a new ABC News/Ipsos poll points in a different direction.
Americans are divided on how the U.S. Supreme Court should handle former President Donald Trump’s ballot access, but a majority in a new ABC News/Ipsos poll say they would support the court either barring Trump from presidential ballots nationally or letting states take that step individually.
To be sure, the results weren’t lopsided, but the survey nevertheless showed a 49% plurality endorsing the state-level rulings barring Trump from the ballot. The same poll found a combined 56% majority is willing to see the likely GOP nominee disqualified in all or some states.
If the former president and his cohorts are working from the assumption that the great…
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