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DES MOINES, Iowa — You don’t have to scratch the surface far to find voters like David Kerr in Iowa, who backed Donald Trump in the past two presidential elections but now figures he is history.
“I don’t think he can win a general election,” Mr. Kerr said.
Pollsters say Mr. Kerr is a distinct minority within the Republican Party. A flood of national and early-state surveys indicate that most Republican primary voters either disagree with or don’t care about Mr. Trump’s legal problems.
It’s one of the striking undercurrents of the party’s nomination battle. Even as his legal woes pile up and Democrats figure he will be a convict by the general election, Mr. Trump has Republicans’ support in overwhelming numbers.
Electability, usually a major threshold question for primary voters, has become “meaningless to most Republican voters,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute.
“The majority think Trump is the strongest candidate regardless of his legal troubles,” Mr. Murray said.
Those legal predicaments span four indictments: two at the federal level covering his activities around the 2020 election and mishandling of government secrets, one in Georgia stemming from alleged election interference, and one in New York focused on hush money payments to two women who said they had affairs with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump’s rivals for the Republican nomination are urging voters to think deeper about electability.
“We have to face the fact that Trump is the most disliked politician in America,” former Ambassador Nikki Haley said in the first Republican debate. “We can’t win a general election that way.”
Americans for Prosperity, a super PAC backed by billionaire conservative activist Charles Koch, has been airing dump-Trump ads in some Super Tuesday states.
“I’m just so tired of it all, the drama and chaos of Donald Trump,” a woman says in an ad. “His obsession with 2020, revenge and now all of the indictments, it’s exhausting, and none of it helps us beat Joe Biden.
“To beat Joe Biden, we have to move on from Donald Trump,” she said.
That message isn’t penetrating, according to polls.
Jim McLaughlin, a pollster with Mr. Trump’s ear, said most Republican voters think about electability in fatalistic terms.
“They believe Joe Biden is destroying America, and they believe that Donald Trump is the only one that can stop America’s decline,” Mr. McLaughlin said.
In an op-ed for The New York Times, Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster, said Republican voters disagree with the political pundits who warn that the risk of nominating Mr. Trump is too great because they see Mr. Biden as “eminently beatable” and they remember 2016 assertions “that Mr. Trump would never set foot in the White House.”
“In light of those facts, Republicans’ skepticism of claims that Mr. Trump is a surefire loser begins to make more sense,” Ms. Soltis Anderson said. “They are undeterred by pleas from party elites who say Mr. Trump is taking the Republican Party to the point of no return.”
Joe Zepecki, a Wisconsin-based Democratic Party strategist, said next year is shaping up differently from 2016, at least in his state.
He said the growth of Madison, a liberal bastion, and the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion have put Republicans on their heels.
“You add this all up … and then you add in the chaos surrounding Trump, and you ask yourself, ‘How is he adding voters he didn’t have in 2020?’” Mr. Zepecki said. “I have yet to get a satisfactory answer to that.”
Despite that, Mr. Zepecki said, Democrats would like Mr. Trump to fade away.
“Donald Trump as a major party nominee is an unmitigated disaster for this country and our politics,” he said. “Anyone rooting for that should have their head examined.”
Mr. Kerr, the former Trump supporter in Iowa, told The Times last month at the Iowa State Fair that his support for the former president has softened.
He cited Mr. Trump’s response to COVID-19, his penchant for being a “jerk” and the “dumb things” that come out of “his mouth on a regular basis,” including his recent criticism of Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a popular Republican.
“He has been doing it since 2015, and that is probably not going to change. He is 77 years old,” he said.
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
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