Down But Not Out: 75% of Republican Voters Want Trump to Have 'Prominent' Role in Party
These are the kinds of numbers that give liberals nightmares.
Despite a determined effort by the Democratic Party and its propaganda arm in the mainstream media that would like nothing better than to pronounce the Donald Trump influence dead, a poll released Monday showed the former president’s influence is alive and thriving.
And virtual landslide of Republican voters wants to see it continue into the future.
The Quinnipiac University poll was conducted Feb. 11-14, while Trump’s second impeachment trial was taking place in the Senate.
Of the 1,056 adults surveyed, the poll showed a resounding 75 percent of Republican respondents thought Trump should continue to play a “prominent” role in the party, and an even bigger percentage — 87 percent — thought Trump should be able to run for elected office again.
On the topic of Trump’s impeachment trial, 89 percent of Republicans opposed a conviction, the poll, which had a margin of error of +/- 3 percentage points, showed.
“He may be down, but he is certainly not out of favor with the GOP,” Quinnipiac pollster Tim Mallow said in the news release that announced the poll results. “Twice impeached, vilified by Democrats in the trial, and virtually silenced by social media … Despite it all, Donald Trump keeps a solid foothold in the Republican Party.”
As if to prove the point of the poll, Trump was greeted by a massive Presidents’ Day rally outside his home at the Mar-a-Lago resort in West Palm Beach, Florida, on his return from a round of golf, Breitbart reported.
It’s the kind of sight Americans might have to get used to, come the midterm season.
This is unbelievable! 45 returns to Mar-a-Lago this afternoon, after an awesome day out on the links….to this….❤️????? pic.twitter.com/QJwR3hAgMs
— Dan Scavino??? (@DanScavino) February 15, 2021
As might be expected, Democratic numbers on those poll questions were almost mirror opposites: 96 percent of Democrats didn’t want Trump playing a prominent role in the GOP (or on planet Earth, probably); 93 percent didn’t think he should be allowed to run for office again; and 92 supported an impeachment conviction.
Among independents, the numbers were closer — again as might be expected — with only 32 percent wanting to see Trump playing a prominent role in the GOP; 42 percent saying Trump should be allowed to run for office again; and 50 percent favoring an impeachment conviction
In other words, as polls have shown consistently though the barrage of massed media attacks on Trump, through the sham of a Democratic House of Representatives drawing up a spurious article of impeachment, though the farce of the Senate impeachment trial for a man who’s now a private citizen, virtually nothing has changed.
And that is very bad news for Democrats.
They know they have the mainstream media in their pockets. The disgraceful behavior of social media giants Twitter and Facebook in squelching the Hunter Biden story in the run-up to the election proved progressives are exercising a near-Ministry of Truth level of control over the flow of information.
And with the lockstep liberalism of the entertainment world, Democrats are assured that their Republican opponents — but especially Donald Trump — are subjected to endless mockery and caricature.
But it isn’t taking hold.
One clue to why that might be is another question posed by the poll: Whether respondents believed Trump was sincere in his allegations that the 2020 election was fraudulently decided.
On that crucial point, 84 percent of Republicans answered in the affirmative — that they thought Trump believed his charges were true.
Again, the number was the opposite for Democrats (90 percent thought he was deliberately spreading false information) and much closer to even for independents (42 percent thought Trump was telling what he thought was the truth; 51 percent said it was deliberate disinformation.)
Considering Trump’s overwhelming support in the other questions on the poll, it’s a good chance that the question about his feelings about election fraud match up pretty well with the feelings of Republicans as a whole.
[firefly_poll]
And there’s an excellent reason for that.
Questions about voting software or suspicious results in places like Michigan and Georgia aside, politically aware Americans watched for almost a full year as partisan elected officials and judges in states like Pennsylvania took advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to rewrite election laws.
They watched as the mainstream media dropped even the flimsy disguise of fairness in election reporting and devoted itself to an obscene degree to attacking the Republican incumbent while bolstering the campaign of a Democratic candidate whose apparent mental and physical frailty would have disqualified him from even a token run for the presidency if the Democratic field not been full of left-wing lunatics who didn’t have a prayer of winning a general election.
What liberals — and anti-Trump voices on the right — prayed for was a national rejection of Trump’s governing philosophy of “Make America Great Again.” What they got was a suspiciously squeaky “victory” that hinged as much on compliant courts as on any supposed “will of the people.”
The pros know it. The party knows it. And every liberal with any political sense knows that holding power in the 2022 and 2024 elections will mean discrediting Trump and everything voters support about him.
Monday’s Quinnipiac poll, and others like it, show that isn’t happening.
And with every passing day that Biden demonstrates how badly he compares to his predecessor, Trump’s supporters are going to be emboldened and independents are going to wake up. (The fact that Biden used his first day in office to sacrifice thousands of jobs on the altar of climate change is a pretty good indication of where this administration is going to go.)
Of course, four years is a long time in politics, and at 74, Trump is not getting any younger, so whatever happens in 2024 — or 2022 for that matter — is out of human hands.
But the bigger point here is that Democrats and the liberal establishment needed to do more than defeat Trump at the polls, one way or the other, in the 2020 election — they needed to destroy what he’s come to stand for.
They haven’t. In a Biden-Harris administration they won’t.
And that’s going to mean a nightmare for liberals in the years to come.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
