Former President Donald Trump has grown even more popular among Republican voters for the 2024 nomination in the wake of his federal indictment this month.
Charges of willful retention of classified documents and obstruction of justice related to his possession of top-secret materials at his Mar-a-Lago estate helped Mr. Trump expand his lead over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in an NBC News poll released Sunday.
The survey showed that 51% of Republican primary voters chose Mr. Trump as their top candidate, with Mr. DeSantis trailing at just 22%. The results mark a 5 percentage-point increase for Mr. Trump and a 9 percentage-point decrease for Mr. DeSantis compared to a similar NBC News poll in April.
A Real Clear Politics average of recent polls show Mr. Trump is in the lead by more than 30 percentage points, at roughly 52%, compared to Mr. DeSantis’ 21.5%.
Mr. Trump pleaded not guilty in a Miami courthouse this month to the 37 charges related to his handling of classified documents after leaving office.
The 2024 White House hopeful bragged over the weekend about those charges and others he received earlier this year in a separate case in Manhattan related to alleged financial crimes from hush-money payments to women before the 2016 election to shield extramarital affairs.
Mr. Trump called the dozens of charges against him a “great badge of courage” during an event Saturday in Washington with conservative Christian activists.
“I’m being indicted for you, and I believe the ‘you’ is more than 200 million people that love our country,” he said.
The NBC News poll was conducted June 16-20 among 1,000 registered voters with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. The margin of error among the survey’s 500 Republican primary voters was plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.
Source:Washington Times
