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- Nearly 60% of GOP voters want Trump to continue to play a major role in the party, a new poll shows.
- The Politico/Morning Consult poll also found that 54% would support Trump in a hypothetical 2024 primary.
- The share of GOP voters who blame Trump for the Capitol riots has fallen since January.
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While many top Republican leaders have distanced themselves from former President Donald Trump, he still enjoys strong support from GOP voters, a new Politico and Morning Consult poll finds.
The poll, conducted from February 14-15 following his impeachment acquittal found that 59% of GOP voters think Trump should continue to “play a major role” in the GOP going forward, up 18 percentage points from 41% in a Morning Consult poll conducted immediately after the Capitol riots from January 6-7.
And while 2024 is a long way off, the share of voters who would support Trump in a hypothetical 2024 Republican presidential primary matchup is at 54%, bouncing back to pre-insurrection levels. In the January 6-7 poll, 42% of GOP voters supported Trump in a potential GOP primary.
Trump leads the rest of the hypothetical field by a large margin, with 12% supporting former Vice President Mike Pence, 6% supporting Donald Trump Jr. and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, respectively, and 11% supporting another candidate.
In total, the poll surveyed 1,984 registered voters with a margin of error of ±2 percentage points, while the hypothetical Republican primary matchup surveyed approximately 600 registered voters with a margin of error of ±4 percentage points.
The share of Republican voters who hold Trump somewhat responsible for the Capitol riots has significantly declined from 41% in the January 6-7 poll to 27% in the most recent survey.
The share of Republican voters who hold congressional Republicans responsible for the riots has also decreased from 34% on January 6-7 to 24% from February 14-15.
The proportions of GOP voters who hold the rioters, congressional Democrats, local law enforcement, and President Joe Biden somewhat responsible for the insurrection, however, have all increased since the January 6-7 poll.
Among all Americans, 87% hold the rioters at least responsible for the insurrection, 64% hold Trump at least somewhat responsible, and 52% hold congressional Republicans at least somewhat responsible for the insurrection.
Conspiracies about who was in the crowd of rioters also continue to persist, with the February 14-15 survey finding that 43% believe the insurrectionists were supporters of Trump, 29% think they're opponents of Trump, and 27% unsure.
Trump's second impeachment was the most bipartisan in history, with ten House Republicans voting to impeach Trump on the charge of inciting the January 6 insurrection and seven GOP senators joining all 50 senate Democrats in voting to convict Trump on the charge.
The conviction vote, 57 to 43, fell ten votes short of the two-thirds majority required to find Trump guilty. But with Trump's standing improving among the GOP base, many of the Republicans who voted to convict are facing censures and GOP backlash in their home states.
Two of them, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, have already been censured by the Republican Party organizations in their states since the conviction vote on February 13.