Independent pro-DeSantis group’s study finds moderate Republicans souring on Trump online

The Jan. 6 congressional hearings have damaged former President Donald Trump’s standing with a key group of independent and moderate Republican voters, according to a new study commissioned by a group urging Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to run for president.

The findings could bolster the view that, far from being a political dud, the recent litany of accusations about Trump’s connection to last year’s attack on the U.S. Capitol has already damaged any future presidential campaign of his — at least for the time being.

Impact Social, a group that tracks online conversations about political candidates, found a sharply negative turn in what voters were saying about Trump during the first two weeks of July, with a drop in the number of people saying positive things about him and a rise in the number of people who were critical.

The overall assigned score, a number achieved by subtracting the number of negative conversations about Trump from the number of positive statements, dropped from -30 in late June to -41 in mid-July, Impact Social found.

In all, 49% of its tracked conversations about Trump were negative, compared to just 8% that were positive. Forty-three percent were neutral.

“What’s happening here is you can clearly see that Jan. 6th, as the more and more revelations come out, more accusations or conclusions come out, the more they’re taking their toll,” said Phil Snape, co-founder of Impact Social.

The affected voters include moderate Republicans who have participated in past GOP presidential primaries, he added, meaning Trump’s challenge wouldn’t just be confined to a general election.

“It’s an awful lot for him to win these people over, and it’s getting rougher rather than getting better,” Snape said.

In the report, Impact Social said soft Republican voters rarely, if ever, discussed the 2020 election as stolen, as Trump has repeatedly and falsely claimed. In Snape’s view, they were tired of the “drip, drip, drip” of accusations against him.

Impact Social released the report for Ready for Ron, an independent group trying to persuade DeSantis to run for president in 2024 that has no affiliation with the governor or his political operation. DeSantis has said repeatedly that he is focused on running for reelection as governor this year, although his denials haven’t halted a flurry of national speculation about his political future.

Over the same two-week period in July, the report found that online conversation about the governor held at negative 6, the same as the previous two-week duration.

Snape cautioned that although Trump’s decline was significant, he had previously seen the former president rebound from past damaging revelations, after the news moved on and voters’ perception of him reset. Using social media to gauge a politician’s popularity is also a relatively untested process, compared to public opinion polling.

But some surveys conducted the old-fashioned way also found at least some cause for concern for Trump.

A Quinnipiac University survey released Wednesday, for example, found that 32% of independents said the Jan. 6 hearings had made them think Trump played a bigger role in the attack than they had previously believed, compared to 9% who said the accusations made them think he had less of a role. Half of the respondents said the hearings did not affect how they saw Trump’s role on that day.

Among all citizens, 37% said the hearing convinced them Trump played a bigger role, compared to 9% who didn’t. Forty-six percent said they made no difference with their opinion.

The Jan. 6 hearings have included testimony accusing Trump of pressuring election officials to overturn the results, pressuring top officials at the Department of Justice to assist in his effort, and effort from the president himself to appear at the U.S. Capitol concurrent with the group of people that eventually attacked police and forced their way into the building while lawmakers were attempting to certify the 2020 election.

Snape said Impact Social collected the results by monitoring a group of 40,000 people online it had identified as swing voters, assessing the organic digital statements they were making on social media services like Twitter and Facebook and determining whether they were positive or negative. The group breaks down its overall sample of voters into a series of subgroups, including “NeverTrumpers & Centrists,” “Obama-Trump voters,” and “Bernie/Far Left Supporters.”

Impact Social did find, however, that Trump was still leading DeSantis in one key metric: sheer volume of conversation. In its report, the group found nearly 10 times as many mentions of the former president as it did about the governor, even if the conversation about DeSantis was not as negative.

“But he has nowhere near, and presumably no one else will ever have, the pull that Trump does, the presence that Trump has,” Snape said. “And so, therefore, DeSantis is nowhere near as famous, nowhere near as well-known, nowhere near as respected, or disrespected, as Trump is.”