In a Tuesday interview with conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk, Big Data pollster Rich Baris claimed that support for former President Donald Trump is stronger today than in either 2016 or 2020. He also believes the 2024 election will be a “total disaster for the Democrats.” From his lips to God’s ears.
Here’s some of what Baris had to say:
It’s just not 2020. It’s not 2016. They are just totally different races and he’s doing so much better with e-groups – which we can get into – than he was in either ’16 or ’20. I’m not a lawyer, but as a pollster, it’s just very clear why they’re trying to do what they are doing to him.
They can’t beat him. When we look back at 2020 and I know a lot of people, especially Trump supporters, think that he won in 2020 and that’s fine. And you know how I feel about that personally as well. But the truth is, he still could have done better with certain groups that would have made it even more difficult for them to pull something like that off.
Look at new voters for instance. Biden won that by 30 points in 2020 and in September of 2021, that turned into a Trump +2. Now in this poll, it is going to be roughly Trump +8. Massive shifts, new generation Xers and millennials that are men working that are coming into the fold. Non-whites that are coming into the fold. And underclass voters. It’s a total disaster for the Democrats. A total disaster. And we do poll other candidates and I have to make this clear, this is only Donald Trump.
So if you are a crook DA or a crook prosecutor for the Justice Department, you’re looking at this and you’re trying to survive. You don’t want him to come back in, now a target of their prosecutorial misconduct and whatever else it is, and have him clean house. So, if you’re the Biden administration and you’re hiding bribes, you’re going to try to make sure that he cannot get on that ballot. You’re going to try to make sure that he doesn’t have the money to campaign, he’s going to be prosecuted, he’s hurt by political prosecutions and right now, that’s just not happening. … Nothing damages him. Nothing.
Kirk reminded Baris that Trump is currently facing four indictments and asked if it was correct to say that he is more popular now than before the indictments.
Baris replied:
Yeah, that’s correct to say. Favorability is one thing. … There are people that always never liked Donald Trump but would vote for him and flirt with voting for him. And to us, that group is what matters. They are going to dislike both him and Biden, but they trust him to do a good job. Or they see what is going on and think it’s just wrong, Charlie. Just wrong. We don’t do this to people in this country. We don’t beat people in the jury box, we beat them in the ballot box. So he has strength with this group right now even more so than he had with Hillary Clinton.
Despite the frequently repeated talking point that Republicans will support Trump no matter what, but his real challenge lies with opposition from independents, Baris claimed that Trump is leading with independents as well.
Baris went on to say that Americans love an underdog. When the trials begin, he said, “It’s just going to look like the guy is being persecuted and Americans don’t like that.”
Interestingly, he pointed out that Martin Luther King Jr. had been “extremely unpopular until they threw him in prison. … He was grossly unpopular. … The beatings really did it. The most popular photo of him back then was the mugshot.”
“Americans don’t like watching someone beat down by the man,” he said.
Rich Baris is obviously a right-leaning pollster, but there are indications he may be right.
A CNN panel worried out loud last week about Trump’s strength in head-to-head polls against Biden. The two are currently neck and neck in the RealClearPolitics average of polls.
But a look at 2020 presidential polling data shows that Biden maintained an overwhelming lead – in the high single-digits to the low double-digits – over Trump throughout the election cycle.
Although not quite as pronounced as Biden’s lead in 2020, Hillary Clinton also led decisively in the polls over Trump throughout the 2016 election cycle.
Just a little something for us to think about as we wait for tonight’s debate to start!
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