Analysis: No, the Jan. 6 committee didn’t make Trump stronger
Setting aside the statement’s dude-who-quotes-Nietzsche vibe, the former president raises an interesting point. He’s made a political career out of parlaying criticism into support, casting himself as the eternal target of devious, desperate hubs of power. Was it true, then, that the House select committee’s investigation actually bolstered his standing among Republicans or Americans more broadly?It remains to be seen whether the criminal referrals have that effect.
A good measure of how Trump is viewed comes from favorability polling. Asking Americans how they view Trump personally doesn’t tell us whether they might vote for him, but it does allow us to separate what he does from who he is. It’s clear that a lot of people who don’t like Trump voted for him anyway;of the electorate in 2020 had a negative view of Trump but still supported him according to exit polling.
So the question then becomes: How did the House committee’s actions affect Trump’s favorability? Using polling from YouGov, generally published every week or so, we can track the evolution of opinions both overall and among Republicans, his base. Since individual polls can jump around a bit, the charts below use running averages of opinions of the former president.
We can start with two key points from 2021. The first was the vote to instantiate the select committee in early July. Within three weeks of that vote — before the committee conducted any hearings, obviously — Trump’s favorability did, in fact, tick upward. Then, later that month, the committee held its first hearing, featuring members of law enforcement. The effect on Trump’s favorability was negligible.
This year, the committee’s work entered high gear. A series of carefully presented hearings began in early June with a prime-time broadcast. Republican views of Trump, already down slightly from the prior summer, didn’t move much. A hearing later that month featuring Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Trump’s chief of staff, led to a more obvious decline — but still a small one.
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