Republican opinions of Trump are sagging — but he’s still very popular

Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential bid is off to a bad start.

The former president had clearly hoped that his announcement the week after the midterm elections would help lock out other possible contenders for the Republican nomination in two years. His goal, it seemed, was to flip a switch that would bring him back to something like a 2020 level of support, as the presumptive nominee.

It has not worked out that way. The announcement was dampened by the party’s weak performance in the election, triggered in part by candidates who Trump had loudly promoted. The launch event itself earned mostly shrugs, and Trump’s ongoing legal issues continue to trigger some Republican skepticism.

In recent days, polls have shown that Trump’s position with his party is at or near a low since he first won in 2016. Against a theoretical field of opponents, Trump holds a lead, but in one-on-one contests, he often trails.

So the question is, in part, how many opponents Trump will face and how much more his ratings with his party might fall. And to inform our understanding of those — unanswerable! — questions, it’s useful to consider the path Trump has taken to this point, both with Republicans and overall.

We must acknowledge at the outset that 2024 will not play out precisely like 2016, if it will do so at all. Yet much of Trump’s evolution with the party that year has been forgotten — including how quickly perceptions changed.

In May 2015, when Trump was only offered as a potential candidate, most Americans viewed him poorly. In Washington Post-ABC News polling, 16 percent of voters viewed him favorably and only 23 percent of Republicans did. Then he announced his candidacy — immediately triggering a massive fight with his business partners after his disparagements of immigrants. That fight attracted enormous attention to his candidacy and his positions, and by mid-July, his favorability with Republicans had risen to 57 percent. That pushed up his overall favorable rating to 33 percent.

The chart below shows overall and Republican favorability for Trump in Post-ABC polls before his presidency. It also shows net favorability — favorable views minus unfavorable — to give a sense of how polarized opinions were at the time.

Interestingly, once the primaries were underway, Trump’s favorability ratings weren’t that great. He was in the mid-50s for much of the beginning part of 2016, with polling from March 2016 showing that Trump led in the overall race — but trailed in head-to-head matchups against Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). As candidates dropped out, though, enough of their support went to Trump that, by early May, he’d all but locked up the nomination by winning Indiana.

From that point on, with Trump as the presumptive nominee, his favorability rating with Republicans shot above 70 percent. It stayed there through the election in Post-ABC polling, with one exception: a poll taken right after the publication of the “Access Hollywood” tape. Then, his favorability ratings dipped slightly before recovering, a pattern that would become familiar.

Once Trump was president, two things happened. First, his favorability among Republicans slowly climbed higher, in part a function of his assiduous efforts to appeal to his base of support. Second, his favorability with everyone else largely stayed flat, even after the killing of a counterprotester at a right-wing rally in Charlottesville.

The graph below shows weekly YouGov data as well as a three-week average of polling numbers.

There were three points at which Trump’s position softened appreciably, though — in ways that are important to consider. The first was after the midterms, when Democrats won the House and embarrassed Trump and the GOP. Republicans, promised nonstop winning from the president, got less enthusiastic about him.

In the wake of the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, Trump’s favorability took a noticeable hit from Republicans and Americans overall. His favorability stayed a bit lower until he lost the election, at which point (as is not uncommon) perceptions of him improved a bit. Until Jan. 6, 2021.

Even so, YouGov’s last poll from Trump’s presidency had him at 85 percent favorability with his party, down slightly from the 90s, where he had been. He stayed in the 80s for most of 2021; his average favorability with Republicans that year was 84 percent.

Finally, we arrive at 2022. For most of the year, his average favorability with Republicans was about 82 percent, just under the 2021 average. Then came the FBI search of his home at Mar-a-Lago. From that point until the midterms, his favorability with his party averaged 80 percent. After the midterms, though? Down more, to an average of 76 percent.

About where he was right before he came into office in 2017.

But consider what’s changed since then. Since January 2017, Americans have seen Trump as president, have seen his reaction to the pandemic, the racial justice protests of 2020 or the riot at the Capitol. In June and July 2015, Republicans came to like Trump in part because he was defining himself in a way they appreciated. Now, he’s well defined, and retains strong favorability.

That, by itself, is not enough to ensure that he’ll win or even hold his position atop a Republican field. But it is a reminder that Republicans have seen the past six years and still largely view Trump positively — something that can’t be said of the Republicans he’ll be running against. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) hasn’t cemented his position with Republicans the way Trump has, nor has he faced the sort of political travails that Trump did.

We are a long way from 2024 primaries, and a lot can change. The central questions remain those offered at the outset: who runs against him and whether his favorability will erode more substantially.

The idea that Trump is irrevocably weakened, though, is clearly not the case.