- A new post-arraignment poll shows worrying signs for former President Donald Trump.
- Trump maintains a huge lead over the GOP field, but his support is slipping amid his legal struggles.
Former President Donald Trump's legal woes are slightly eroding his sizable lead over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, according to a new poll.
The findings illustrate that while Republicans broadly want Trump to stay in the race after being arraigned on federal charges, there are still pockets of the party that are uneasy about supporting the first former president to be federally indicted. Trump has repeatedly denied that he mishandled classified documents or that he obstructed federal prosecutors from retrieving them, though his comments on Monday night underlined that narrative.
According to a CNN poll released on Tuesday, Trump holds a 21-point lead over DeSantis (47-26), his closest Republican challenger, when Republicans and Republican-leaning voters were asked who they will support. The former president dropped six points on the early ballot question from CNN's May poll. The June poll was conducted entirely after Trump was arraigned in federal court last week.
In response, a Trump campaign official said in a statement that "President Trump continues to dominate in poll after poll— both nationally and statewide."
Trump's decline is underlined by softening throughout various demographic groups. The most notable feature of the drop is that it is echoed throughout different demographics and wings of the GOP.
His favorability among GOP voters dropped 10 points, though he remains very popular at 67%. In terms of whom Republican-aligned voters would likely support, Trump declined 9 points among men and voters ages 18 to 49; 7 points among voters making less than $50,000 a year; and 6-points among voters ages 50 to 64 in addition to voters making more than $50,000 a year. There were not enough respondents of color in either month's poll to compare Trump's level of support among any of those demographics. It is important to note that as subsamples get smaller, the margin of error increases.
The good news for the former president is that neither DeSantis nor any other challengers have thus far shown an ability to benefit from Trump's struggles. The Florida governor held steady at 26%. Former Vice President Mike Pence was the only other hopeful to come near double digits at 9%. This was also the first CNN poll to be conducted since DeSantis formally announced on May 24.
As other polls have found, Republicans also widely want Trump to stay in the field after the charges. In fact, CNN found a majority of Republican and Republican-leaning voters don't care about Trump's conduct, because a president's effectiveness is more important.
It is still very early in the GOP nomination fight, but the contest will begin to take shape over the summer. CNN found that 41% of GOP voters are open to changing their minds on their first choice for the nomination.
The CNN poll was conducted by SSRS Opinion Panel from June 13-17 online and over the phone. The overall sample was a random sample of 1,350 US adults. The margin of error is plus/minus 3.4 percentage points, though as noted above that increases for smaller subgroups.