Trump is likely to receive yet another bump in the polls after the court disqualified him from the 2024 ballot, just as he did after the Bragg indictment.
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If history is any guide, the Colorado supreme court has likely just handed former president Donald Trump a boost in the 2024 polls.
The court ruled Tuesday that Trump is disqualified from holding the presidency because his actions in the wake of the 2020 election violated Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which forbids individuals who have “engaged in insurrection” from seeking federal office.
The decision — which will be stayed until January 4, pending an appeal to the Supreme Court — is likely to rally his supporters, just as his Manhattan indictment on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records did earlier this year.
The decision “will add 5%+ points to @realDonaldTrump already runaway polls,” Eric Trump predicted on X. And New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman says those close to Trump see the ruling as “a gift.”
New Hampshire–based GOP strategist Jim Merrill told me that, in the short term, the ruling is likely to cause the same “rallying around Trump effect” that prior legal proceedings have had both among his base and others in the Republican Party.
“It’s just going to create that much more intensity to make sure they get out and support him in the early primary and caucus states,” he said of Trump’s supporters. But he predicted there won’t be a huge increase in the polls for Trump since it will only cement support among his fans but likely won’t attract new voters.
And as we near the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, the ruling will make it harder for the other candidates to get their message out, Merrill said.
“It makes it more of a challenge and ensures that most of every conversation — whether it’s with media or with voters, Trump is going to be part of that conversation,” he said.
The court’s decision is more likely to affect the results in Iowa than in New Hampshire (if it affects either), he suggested, because Iowa voters torn between Trump or DeSantis could choose to rally behind the former president in the face of this latest ruling.
Steve Scheffler, Iowa’s RNC committeeman, told NR the decision “only strengthens Trump’s hand in a fall election if he’s the nominee.”
“I think people understand that this is not what you do in a free society,” he said. “It’s beyond insanity.”
Chris Ager, New Hampshire GOP chairman, also suggested the decision will help Trump. “People see this as politically motivated persecution, not prosecution.” The ruling is a distraction and “not good for the other candidates and for the process.”
“If people don’t like what President Trump did on January 6 — and it’s been very well documented — then they won’t vote for him. But give people that choice,” he said, noting that the state GOP successfully helped push back against a similar 14th Amendment–based challenge to Trump’s candidacy in New Hampshire.
It wouldn’t be the first time Trump’s legal woes gave him a boost in support.
At the time of the Manhattan indictment, Trump’s support had seen a dip in the wake of the 2022 midterms. But Trump, claiming the indictment was nothing more than politically motivated election interference, saw a bump in the polls.
“It really seemed like that first indictment gave Trump something to sort of rally the base around him in a way he hadn’t really had in the last couple of months leading up to that,” Ipsos senior vice president Chris Jackson told me earlier this year. “So it did help his position in a way.”
That bump held solid through the spring, but it began to deflate after Trump was charged with 37 federal felony counts as part of an investigation into his handling of classified documents. Trump’s margin in Ipsos/Reuters polling fell from a 30-percentage-point advantage for Trump in mid spring down to a 20-point advantage after the second indictment.
However, many pundits and legal experts saw the second indictment as a more damning case. And still, not all of the polling from the time supported the Trump-decline narrative. A Quinnipiac University poll conducted after the second indictment but ahead of Trump’s arraignment found that Trump was losing “very little if any ground.” Trump notched 53 percent support in that poll, while DeSantis trailed 30 points behind at 23 percent.
A RealClearPolitics polling average currently has Trump at a whopping 63 percent, more than 51 points ahead of Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, who are effectively tied for second place.
And a new poll from the New York Times finds subsequent indictments failed to weigh Trump down.
Sixty-two percent of Republican primary voters believe Trump should be the party’s nominee, even if he’s convicted after winning the primaries. Just 32 percent said he should not be the nominee in that case.
Additionally, 79 percent of GOP primary voters do not believe Trump will receive a fair trial. Sixty-eight percent of Republicans believe Trump has not committed any serious federal crimes, and 83 percent believe the charges against him are mostly politically motivated.
Trump’s appearance on the ballot is facing lawsuits in at least 13 states, including Texas, Nevada, and Wisconsin.
The Minnesota supreme court dismissed one such case in November, holding that there “is no state statute that prohibits a major political party from placing on the presidential nomination ballot, or sending delegates to the national convention supporting, a candidate who is ineligible for office.” But the court’s ruling said that the body would not ban a challenge to Trump’s eligibility from appearing on the state’s general-election ballot.
Trump’s 2024 Republican challengers spoke out against the Colorado court’s ruling on Tuesday.
“The Left invokes ‘democracy’ to justify its use of power, even if it means abusing judicial power to remove a candidate from the ballot based on spurious legal grounds. SCOTUS should reverse,” Florida governor Ron DeSantis wrote in a post on X.
Nikki Haley told reporters, “I will tell you that I don’t think Donald Trump needs to be president. I think I need to be president. I think that’s good for the country. But I will beat him fair and square. We don’t need to have judges making these decisions, we need voters to make these decisions.”
“I want to see this in the hands of the voters,” she added. “We’re going to win this the right way, we’re going to do what we need to do but the last thing we want is judges telling us who can and can’t be on the ballot.”
Vivek Ramaswamy vowed to withdraw from the Colorado GOP primary and called on the other GOP contenders to do the same.
“This is what an *actual* attack on democracy looks like: in an un-American, unconstitutional, and *unprecedented* decision, a cabal of Democrat judges are barring Trump from the ballot in Colorado,” Ramaswamy said in a post on X.
“Having tried every trick in the book to eliminate President Trump from running in this election, the bipartisan Establishment is now deploying a new tactic to bar him from ever holding office again: the 14th Amendment.”
“I pledge to *withdraw* from the Colorado GOP primary unless Trump is also allowed to be on the state’s ballot, and I demand that Ron DeSantis, Chris Christie, and Nikki Haley to do the same immediately – or else they are tacitly endorsing this illegal maneuver which will have disastrous consequences for our country,” he added.
Chris Christie, for his part, said Trump “should not be prevented from being President by any court. He should be prevented from being President of the United States by the voters of this country.”
Asa Hutchinson, though, said the court’s ruling is “what I raised as a concern in the first presidential debate in Milwaukee.”
“The factual finding that he supported insurrection will haunt his candidacy,” he said.
Audrey Fahlberg contributed reporting.
Around NR
• It’s time for Chris Christie to drop out of the race, NR’s editors say:
The latest polling out of Iowa and New Hampshire has confirmed how slim the odds are that Donald Trump will somehow be denied the Republican nomination, but that’s no reason for candidates supposedly opposed to Trump acting to make it even easier for him to win. Yes, we are looking at you, Chris Christie. (We’d also look at Asa Hutchinson, but he has not been seen in months.)
• The resignation of Jeff Roe, the top political consultant on the pro-DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down, “suggests an organization in complete disarray,” Audrey Fahlberg writes:
These departures would not have garnered nearly as much media attention had the super PAC staffers not elevated themselves so early on in the race as the chief organizers of DeSantis’s advertising strategy and ground game. As the Washington Post notes, the formation of Never Back Down marked “the first time a major campaign ceded so much of its operations to an entity it could not legally control.” You’d better believe 2028 presidential aspirants are taking notes.
• Though still an unlikely scenario, Noah Rothman says a pathway for Haley to a competitive race with Trump is now visible:
None of this is especially likely to happen. The polling suggests that Republican voters affirmatively like Trump. If they believe what they’re telling pollsters, the GOP believes the former president is a lock to beat Biden next November. They think Trump got a raw deal in 2020 and throughout his first term, and they want to see him vindicated. But among many Republicans, these are loosely held convictions. The qualms they’re quietly nursing could become something more threatening to the former president’s position if he is revealed to be weaker at the ballot box than public polling has indicated.
• But Rich Lowry finds Trump is still dominant:
Four out of the last five Iowa polls have Trump above 50 percent. We haven’t seen anything like that polling strength in a competitive Iowa race before. The problem for Haley is that there’s no sign that she’s moving up in Iowa, and the problem for the anti-Trump cause generally is that DeSantis is moving up only at the margins, while his super PAC melts down. If Trump wins Iowa going away, it’s going to be very hard to beat him in New Hampshire.
• Political conditions are favorable to Republicans right now, but the GOP is blowing its moment, Charles C. W. Cooke writes:
The Democratic Party — which won the presidency in 2008, 2012, and 2020 — is weak, crazy, and directionless. Their president is unusually unpopular, their economy is broadly loathed, the border is out of control, and the world seems more dangerous than it has for years. Meanwhile, thanks to an excellent run of elections between 2010 and 2014, the Republicans have a large number of appealing candidates who are able to make the case for the change. For the GOP, these ought to be salad days; instead, it’s scraping by. It will come to regret it.
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