Donald Trump’s poll ratings surge after FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago

In a new poll almost 60 per cent of the former president’s party believes he ‘deserves re-election’.

Donald Trump’s popularity among Republican voters has surged since the FBI raid on his Florida home amid an investigation into secret documents he kept after leaving the White House.

In a new USA Today/Ipsos poll 59 per cent of Republicans said they believed he should be the nominee for the White House in 2024 and “deserves re-election”. Forty-one per cent said it was time for the party to move on.

The finding underscored Mr Trump’s enduring grip on his party, despite revelations since the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago three weeks ago that he had kept dozens of classified documents. The discovery, including material related to US spies and “clandestine human sources”, has left Mr Trump facing criminal investigation by the Department of Justice for obstruction of justice and potential espionage.

The poll, on Sunday, showed a 10-percentage-point surge for the 45th president compared with polls last month that suggested Republicans had begun to tire of the relentless chaos that surrounds him.

A New York Times/Siena College poll in July found that half of Republican voters were ready to move on from Mr Trump for 2024, with 49 per cent backing him as the party’s nominee. That followed evidence at the congressional committee investigating the January 6 riot last year, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to try to block certification of President Joe Biden’s election victory. The committee disclosed evidence that Mr Trump and his allies mounted a systematic campaign to overturn his 2020 election defeat, findings that prompted a separate DoJ investigation of the former president.

The search of Mar-a-Lago has galvanised supporters, however, as Republican voters respond to his claims that the raid was politically motivated to force him out of the 2024 race. After a federal judge released the redacted affidavit used by the DoJ to justify the search, Mr Trump continued to allege a cover-up. The DoJ had requested the redactions to protect witnesses named in the affidavit. Mr Trump railed at the “witch hunt” against him throughout the weekend, claiming that the Biden administration, backed by the DoJ and FBI, were conspiring to wreck his 2024 challenge and the Republican campaign for midterm elections in November.

While Republican voters rally to Mr Trump, however, most party leaders have gone quiet since the release of the search warrant and affidavit, which both underscored the former president’s legal jeopardy over his handling of classified material and the scale of the potential national security breach. Few Republicans turned out for America’s big Sunday morning news shows, and those that did questioned the timing of the FBI raid rather than offering a defence of Mr Trump.

Roy Blunt, the Republican senator for Missouri, conceded that Mr Trump “should have turned the documents over” to the DoJ earlier in the months-long investigation, and lamented the distraction to the Republican midterm campaign and its attempt to focus on Biden. “What I wonder about is why this could go on for almost two years and, less than 100 days before the election, suddenly we’re talking about this rather than the economy or inflation,” Senator Blunt told ABC.

The caution of Republicans in congress now contrasts with the first days after the FBI raid, when party leaders sprang to Mr Trump’s defence. Some called to “defund” the FBI and pledged to impeach Attorney-General Merrick Garland if Republicans took back Congress at the midterms.

“Some of the president’s biggest cheerleaders … have gone kind of silent,” the anti-Trump Republican representative Adam Kinzinger, a member of the January 6 committee, told NBC. “That tells you all you need to know.”

Republicans fear that a midterm poll they had planned to turn into a referendum on Mr Biden and the economy has been overshadowed by Mr Trump and the mounting allegations of wrongdoing. But Mr Trump’s fixation with avenging his defeat has led to a series of extreme candidates securing nomination for the races. Most back his claim that the election was stolen and Republican leaders fear their radical ideology will alienate voters in key state races.

The Times