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The federal indictment of former president Donald Trump over his post-presidency handling of classified records doesn’t seem to have undermined his standing among Republican voters, including those in New Hampshire.
Trump’s campaign reported raising millions of dollars immediately after his arraignment last week in Miami, much like the fundraising haul he saw after his indictment on state-level charges in New York in March. And the results of a new poll add to the reasons to believe Trump’s prosecution hasn’t chipped away at his base ahead of New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation 2024 presidential primary, which is seven months away.
About 21 percent of Republican-aligned voters in New Hampshire said Trump “probably” or “definitely” committed a federal crime with the way he handled government documents, but only 9 percent said the federal indictment makes them less likely to vote for him in 2024, according to results released Tuesday by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center.
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Nearly half of the 459 Republican-aligned voters surveyed, or 48 percent, said Trump’s federal indictment made them more likely to vote for him. (That includes registered Republicans and Republican-leaning undeclared voters, who can participate in the GOP primary.)
Andrew Smith, director of the UNH Survey Center, said a lot more will happen between now and January, so it’s too early to say how Trump’s indictments will impact his electoral performance in New Hampshire.
That said, Trump is acting as though these prosecutions strengthen his case that “the swamp” is persecuting him, Smith said. “So far, that message has been resonating with his Republican base,” he added.
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Nathan Shrader, a politics professor at New England College in Henniker, N.H., said the data show that Republican primary voters in New Hampshire, like their counterparts nationwide, seem to be focused more on “remaining steadfast to the leader of their party” than on weighing his odds of defeating President Biden in the general election.
“I am confident,” Shrader said, “that Trump remains strong with the Republican Party rank-and-file in part because most of his Republican opponents for the nomination have rushed to his defense while also trashing the justice system. They are basically echoing Trump’s message instead of finding a path to defeat him.”
Two other polls released this month show Trump as the clear frontrunner in New Hampshire’s GOP primary, followed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in a distant second place, while several other candidates trailed in the single digits.
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Steven Porter can be reached at steven.porter@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @reporterporter.