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Amid all the other uncertainties surrounding the possible indictment of Donald Trump, the flurry of events has made one thing unequivocally clear: the former president remains the center of the GOP universe.
The rush of GOP leaders to preemptively condemn Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s potential indictment of Trump as inherently illegitimate and politically motivated underscores the party leadership’s ongoing reluctance to separate itself from, much less criticize, Trump in almost any way. Republican leaders in the House have quickly moved in the opposite direction, demanding documents from Bragg and promising to investigate the investigators.
These rapid-fire events have been a reality check for those in the party who believed, or at least hoped, that Trump’s influence over the GOP had peaked. After the party’s disappointing performance in last November’s midterm election, which included losses for multiple Trump-endorsed Senate and gubernatorial candidates in key swing states, an unprecedented procession of GOP strategists, local leaders and fundraisers openly insisted that the party needed to move on from him in 2024. But the blistering attacks on the New York investigation by figures like House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and former Vice President Mike Pence quickly demonstrated how difficult that will be to do in practice.
“You would think they would have learned their lesson” from Trump’s defeat in 2020 and the GOP’s surprisingly weak showing in 2022, said Jennifer Horn, a former state Republican party chair in New Hampshire, who has emerged as a staunch Trump critic. “It’s like they are addicted to him. The GOP can’t break their addiction to Trump.”
But while the reaction has demonstrated the depths of Trump’s hold on the party’s elected leaders, it may be premature to assume that an indictment in New York – or potentially further indictments from federal and Fulton County, Georgia, investigations – is assured to strengthen his position in the 2024 nomination contest.
While indictments could well inspire a rally-around-the-flag reaction from Trump’s core supporters, more legal trouble for the former president could simultaneously harden the hesitations of the substantial party block worried about his ability to win in 2024, many GOP strategists believe.
“I think there are core Trump voters that this galvanizes,” says Dave Wilson, a conservative strategist in South Carolina with close ties to the evangelical community. “I think that there is a much broader group of Republican/conservative voters that this may give enough pause to, to then say, ‘I’m going to at least look at everybody else in the field.’”
All this suggests that the political impact of a potential indictment could differ for Trump personally, and for the party overall.
Once Trump posted that he could be arrested as soon as Tuesday, his allies hurried to declare that any such action would increase the odds of him winning the nomination and the presidency. “If the Manhattan DA indicts President Trump, he will ultimately win even bigger than he is already going to win,” far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia declared in a tweet Saturday. Likewise, the conservative commentator Erick Erickson insisted, “the people who want to lock him up, do not appreciate the backlash to arresting Trump that’ll happen.”
Few in either party doubt that Trump’s base will take any legal action against him as proof of his frequent charge that the “establishment” or “Marxist prosecutors” are targeting him as a way to silence them. But those voters, while a powerful faction inside the GOP coalition, are not the only voters who will decide the Republican nomination next year – much less the general election. And polls leave little doubt that there is a significant contingent not only of general election swing voters, but even likely participants in the Republican primary, who harbor significant doubts about Trump.
For hesitant GOP voters, those doubts revolve primarily around concern about whether Trump can win in 2024. In a February PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll, 54% of likely 2024 GOP voters said they believed the party would have a better chance to win next year if it nominated someone other than Trump, while only 42% said picking the former president again would give Republicans their best odds of success. The doubts were especially deep among Republicans holding at least a four-year college degree, with 71% of them saying that another nominee would improve the party’s prospects and only 26% saying Trump represented the GOP’s best bet.
