About a third of Americans say the US government was wrong to indict Donald Trump over the classified documents he took from the White House and about three quarters of likely Republican primary voters view the charges as politically motivated, according to polls published Sunday.
Asked whether the charges unsealed Friday influenced their view of the former president, 61% in a CBS News/YouGov poll said it wouldn’t. That poll of likely GOP primary voters also found that 76% concerned that the charges are politically motivated.
While 48% of respondents in an ABC News/Ipsos poll said the Justice Department was right to charge Trump, 35% said he shouldn’t have been.
The surveys suggest that Trump, the front-runner for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination, is weathering the immediate fallout from the 37-count indictment among his core voters at least for now. The former president dismissed the charges at a Republican state convention in North Carolina on Saturday, telling the audience he was “indicted over nothing.”
Still, the ABC poll found that more respondents view the federal charges against Trump over the documents he took to his Mar-a-Lago residence as serious than those filed against him in New York over hush money allegedly paid to a porn star.
While 21% of Republicans in the poll said in April that the New York charges were serious, 38% said that last week’s federal indictment was.
Independent voters split roughly by half on whether Trump should have been charged in the federal case, whether the charges are politically motivated and whether he should suspend his campaign.
ABC News/Ipsos polled 910 adults on Friday and Saturday with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points. The June 7-10 CBS News/YouGov poll of likely Republican primary voters has a margin of error of plus or minus 5.5 points.
--With assistance from Gregory Korte.
