GOP voters think the economy is terrible, believe that most people agree with them, and assume voters would take Trump’s economic record over Joe Biden’s in a heartbeat — and they may not be wrong. Voters are deeply dissatisfied with the economy over which Biden has presided, blame Democrats for their circumstances, and consistently give Trump’s handling of economic issues high marks .
Republican voters think Trump is a victim of an overzealous government, which has been weaponized with the aim of neutralizing the former president as a political force and stealing from them the opportunity to vote for him again. Once again, they think most Americans agree with this point of view, and, to some extent, they do. When asked about the many criminal allegations against Trump, pluralities regularly tell Ipsos pollsters that they believe the charges are politically motivated .
The Republican primary electorate thinks Joe Biden is irredeemably corrupt and, once again, they have reason to believe theirs is not a minority point of view. Sixty-four percent of respondents to a recent YouGov survey , including 47 percent of Democrats and two-thirds of independents, believe Hunter Biden “definitely or probably” did something illegal. Forty-four percent of that poll’s respondents said “yes” when asked if “Joe Biden did anything illegal regarding Hunter Biden.” Republicans believe the stink of corruption about the president is contributing to the erosion of support for Biden’s reelection, and who is to say they’re wrong ?
Republicans believe all this while catastrophizing the prospect of Joe Biden’s reelection, often earnestly and in ways that are reinforced by prominent Republican officeholders . If you believed that Biden’s conduct is “treasonous ,” that “America is finished ” if he gets to spend another four years in the Oval Office, and you’re receiving signals from your environment that suggest most Americans agree to the extent they are willing to put their objections to Trump aside, why wouldn’t you conclude that your side can’t lose?
The problem with this analysis is not that it is a rationalization to justify nominating Trump to the presidency for a third time. The problem is that the analysis is incomplete.
Republicans trying to convince themselves that voters are purely economic actors and will subordinate their concerns about Trump to pocketbook issues fail to consider the fact that voters did not do that in either 2020 or 2022. Trump lost his reelection bid in 2020 despite voters’ favorable view of his management of the economy. Moreover, amid economic circumstances that were marginally worse than they are today and for which Democrats received the lion’s share of the blame , midterm-election voters turned out to vote against the GOP’s candidates — in particular, the party’s nominees who emulated Trump’s most grating habits .
The voting public may concede the notion that the charges Trump faces at the federal and state levels are politically motivated — an outlook that is likely to evolve as voters get more intimately acquitted with the evidence against the former president, which they surely will be when proceedings against Trump consume the national discourse. But American adults hold that view while still favoring the prosecution of the former president , sometimes in the same poll . If voters are willing to entertain (for now) the notion that Trump is being persecuted, it’s persecution they’re willing to live with if it extricates the former president from public life.
The allegations of corruption surrounding Joe Biden are breaking through despite a concerted campaign in the press to remind Americans that the GOP has produced no tangible evidence that the president benefited financially from his son’s con artistry. But they still think Trump and his family are worse. The same YouGov survey that the Right has latched onto found that a majority of respondents say that the former president and his adult children are corrupt, while just 28 percent disagree. “Since October, that gap has increased from 18 to 25 points,” observed Yahoo News reporter Andrew Romano .
Unseating an incumbent president, even an unpopular one, is a herculean feat. But Republicans have minimized the scale of that challenge in their minds because Trump is functionally an incumbent, too. He has a record on which to run, a formidable party machine clearing the path before him, and a ubiquitous cheering section in conservative media outlets. What’s more, the circumstances in which Americans find themselves are so undesirable that Trump polls competitively against Biden before the campaign has even begun. Why should the Right give its critics the satisfaction of abandoning Trump when there seems to be more risk in putting an unknown quantity up against Biden in 2024? Republicans don’t think Republicans can lose, and they seem determined to test that proposition over and over in the most improvident ways imaginable.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
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