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Donald Trump has a poll problem

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The 50 percent threshold in a poll can sometimes be distracting. When more than half of the people give a certain answer, that often becomes the dominant message emerging from the poll question. It’s the answer that seems to have won. Still, the most important information may be lurking elsewhere.

Take a look at last week’s polls asking Americans for their views on the federal charges against Donald Trump. Here are the results of it an ABC News/Ipsos investigationthat were similar to other survey results:

On the surface, a central message appears to be strong and sustained support for Trump — as a majority of Republicans said the allegations were not serious. Most Republicans also said he should not have been charged with a crime and that the charges were politically motivated.

The headlines have highlighted these pro-Trump majorities. At a dinner with Democratic backers this week, Jill Biden said she had just read one of these headlines and found it “a little shocking.” Republican voters, Biden said, “don’t care about the charges.”

To be clear, Trump’s continued support among Republicans is an important story. If it continues like this, he is likely to become the party’s nominee. That support is a sign that political polarization in the US has become so intense that most Republican voters seem to care more about loyalty to Trump than about the possibility that he harmed national security by circulating sensitive information.

But the existence of a lasting pro-Trump Republican majority isn’t the only important takeaway from the recent polls. A few more subtle patterns in the data are more concerning to Trump.

First, look at the relative size of minority opinions in each category in the chart above: there are significantly more Republicans who take the allegations seriously than Democrats or independents who don’t think they’re serious. The indictment divides Republicans more than Democrats.

A basic lesson of politics is that you win when the public debate focuses on issues that divide your opponent’s supporters and unite yours. For example, affirmative action is a problematic issue for the Democratic Party, even though most voters support the policy because more Democrats oppose it than Republicans support it. (The times recently explained how this dynamic led to a crushing defeat for an affirmative action referendum in California.) For similar reasons, undocumented immigration creates political problems for Democrats.

Problematic issues for the Republican Party, on the other hand, are access to health care, the minimum wage, same-sex marriage and, above all, the ban on abortion. Recent polls show that Trump’s behavior also falls into this category. There are more Republicans who think he should have been charged with a crime than Democrats who think he shouldn’t have been charged. “Trump is splitting the party,” said Jonathan Bernstein, a political scientist writing for Bloomberg Opinion. “No, not equal, but even an 80/20 split is a real split.”

Another problematic sign for Trump is that the number of Republicans affected by his legal troubles appears to be on the rise. So is the number of independents. More voters are bothered by the case against him – charged with stealing classified material and trying to hide the fact that he did – than the previous New York state charges related to hush money for a sexual encounter:

The 2024 election is still nearly a year and a half away, and prosecutors seeking to hold Trump accountable will have to continue to make their case not only in courtrooms, but also to the public if they hope to convince most Americans of the seriousness of the allegations. But those prosecutors don’t need to convince most Republicans to pass.

Just look at what happened in the 2022 midterm elections. A small portion of Republican voters were unhappy enough with Trump’s anti-democratic behavior (and the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling) to leave the party and help Democrats take control of to keep the Senate. The last two presidential elections provide a similar case study: Trump lost the presidency in 2020 in part because 11 percent of typical Republican voters supported Joe Biden, up from 9 percent who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. according to Katalista data company.

Fifty percent isn’t the only number that matters when you look at a subgroup in a poll. Small shifts within each party can determine the election outcome.

Related: “The night Mr. Trump announced his indictment, the wagons were circled” on Fox News, Nate Cohn, The Times’ chief political analyst, wrote. “But after the charges were released, the conversation became more mixed.”

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