Since his Nov. 15 announcement that he plans to make a third run for the presidency, his legal problems have increased; his handpicked candidate, Herschel Walker, lost the Senate runoff in Georgia; he’s endured widespread criticism over his public association with racists and antisemites; and a growing number of Republican figures have started to say publicly what they used to whisper in private:

Trump is a liability for their party.

Just after the midterms, I wrote that the results probably would undermine the former president within the GOP. Now, a raft of new polls show that has happened: Trump’s once-solid support among Republicans has cracked, and his approval within his adopted party has fallen to levels not seen since he first won its nomination in 2016.

No one should count the former president out. If we’ve learned anything in the more than seven years that he’s dominated public attention, it’s that Trump has formidable survival skills and that Republican elected officials have little stomach for battling him. But for now, and perhaps for longer, the midterm results have shaken his hold on the party in a way that previous events — even the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol — failed to do.

A fading star

The evidence of a Trump fade could be almost as unwelcome at the White House as it is at Mar-a-Lago: President Biden and his aides have been planning a reelection campaign in large part around the argument that Trump poses a singular threat to American democracy. The former president’s recent social media post in which he called for the “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” in order to place him back in office could serve as Exhibit A.

If Republicans nominate someone else, Democrats will argue that the new candidate still poses the same threat. But that’s a more difficult case to make to voters, especially if whoever emerges as the GOP nominee keeps a distance from Trump.

In this year’s midterm elections, candidates who closely tied themselves to Trump and his lies about the 2020 election, such as gubernatorial hopefuls Kari Lake in Arizona, Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania and Tudor Dixon in Michigan, all lost. But voters seemed perfectly willing to cast ballots for less Trump-oriented Republicans, like Govs. Brian Kemp in Georgia and Mike DeWine in Ohio.

The evidence for a Trump fade comes from multiple surveys by both partisan and nonpartisan pollsters. Here’s a sampling:

The most recent Wall St. Journal poll found Trump trailing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis 52%-38% in a hypothetical primary matchup. Perhaps worse for Trump, only 71% of Republicans had a favorable view of him. That’s down from 85% in March and the 90% or higher that polls typically found through most of Trump’s presidency.

At the same time, the share of Republicans who see Trump negatively has increased. The Economist/YouGov poll, for example, reported this week that 28% of Republicans had an unfavorable view of Trump — the worst rating for him since their tracking began at the start of his presidency. Most of the change took place since August, they found.

A Suffolk University poll conducted for USA Today found just 47% of Republicans wanted Trump to run again, compared with 45% who did not. The share that wants him to run dropped from 56% in October and 60% in July.

It’s possible that all these polls have caught Trump at a temporary low from which he’ll rebound. He has been through a month of steady negative publicity and currently has a rival, DeSantis, who benefits from not yet having been tested in a national campaign.

But those negative headlines aren’t likely to go away any time soon.

Some of the most damaging stories for Trump have resulted from his own actions, including his decision last month to have dinner with Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and Nick Fuentes, two of the country’s best-known antisemites. Some of Trump’s supporters blamed the dinner on the former president’s staff and said that in the future, aides would more diligently screen his visitors, but he’s never taken well to such efforts to control him.

On Wednesday, Trump posted on social media that he had a “major announcement” scheduled for Thursday. It turned out to be the launch of a line of digital playing cards featuring cartoon versions of his image. That’s hardly as damaging as dinner with racists, but it’s not the sort of action likely to calm Republicans who worry that their former standard-bearer isn’t truly focused on the task ahead.

Then there are Trump’s legal problems.

Between now and the first primaries of 2024, Trump could face trials in three civil cases: New York state Atty. Gen. Letitia James has accused him and his company of financial fraud involving inflated claims about the value of his assets; the writer E. Jean Carroll has accused Trump of raping her in the 1990s and then defaming her after she made her allegations public; and investors who lost money in what they allege was a pyramid scheme by a company called American Communications Network have sued Trump and his adult children for promoting the plan in television ads and public appearances.

Trump has survived many lawsuits over the decades, but now he also has exposure in at least three criminal investigations. The district attorney in Atlanta is investigating whether he violated Georgia laws with his telephone call on Jan. 2, 2021, pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” — the number he would have needed to overturn Biden’s victory in the state. And Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith is overseeing two federal investigations, one into the Jan. 6 attack and the other into the mishandling of classified documents and other records that Trump hid at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate.

Some Trump backers have suggested that if he were indicted in one or more of those cases, he could use the charges to rally Republican voters to his side. Perhaps. What the current polling suggests, however, is that bad news has encouraged many Republicans, including some inclined to sympathize with Trump, to look for an alternative candidate.

Right now, that’s DeSantis. Whether the Florida governor can maintain his high standing remains unknown — lots of candidates look great until the campaign begins. For now, however, he fulfills the need that many Republicans feel for a candidate who espouses Trump’s policies without his erratic personal behavior.

The Suffolk University poll found that 65% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said they wanted “Republicans to continue the policies Trump pursued in office, but with a different Republican nominee for president,” compared with 31% who wanted Trump to run again.

“Republicans and conservative independents increasingly want Trumpism without Trump,” said the poll’s director, David Paleologos.

But, as Paleologos also noted, the 31% who still back Trump could be enough to win Republican primaries in a multicandidate field, which is how Trump won in 2016.

And it’s possible that many of those who have stuck with Trump this far will remain with him. His remaining backers are disproportionately rural residents and white voters who did not go to college — groups that have been among his staunchest supporters since the 2016 campaign. DeSantis does better among groups of Republicans who were more skeptical of Trump to begin with, such as college-educated white voters.

If that pattern holds, it could set up a bitter primary fight that would divide Republicans along lines of class and culture. Since Trump first established his power in the party, Republican leaders have done everything they could — including tossing once-cherished political principles overboard — to try to avoid that sort of split. In the coming year, they may find that all they accomplished was to delay the inevitable.

The latest from the campaign trail

— In battleground states, candidates for offices that play key roles in election administration — secretary of state, governor and attorney general — made defending the electoral process against opponents who had helped spread misinformation a central part of their campaigns. Now they’re gearing up for the next challenge: running the 2024 presidential election, Arit John wrote. The 2022 election proved that election denial was “a losing strategy,” Arizona Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs told John. But, she added, “I don’t think that Democrats can take that for granted.”

The latest from Washington

— Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Monday she has every intention of serving the remainder of her Senate term and is still deliberating whether to retire in 2024. As Nolan McCaskill reported, the comments from California’s senior senator echo what she has said previously, but they could tamp down speculation that she would step down before her term ends and allow Gov. Gavin Newsom to appoint a temporary replacement.

— The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a last-minute plea from the tobacco industry and cleared the way for California to enforce a statewide ban on the sale of most flavored tobacco products, including menthol cigarettes. As David Savage reported, the court’s action, which came in a brief order with no dissents, upheld a measure passed by the Legislature in 2020, which in turn was approved by 63% of voters in November. It is due to take effect next week.

The latest from California

— California sharply reduced incentive payments for rooftop solar power Thursday, taking a sledgehammer to a program that helped 1.5 million homes and businesses put solar panels on their roofs and made the state a leader in fighting the climate crisis. As Sammy Roth reported, advocates for the solar industry say the vote by the state’s Public Utilities Commission will stunt progress toward renewable energy, but commissioners said the incentive program needs to change to keep up with the times. California increasingly has more solar power than it needs during the afternoon, but is short during hot summer evenings. The revamped incentive program will encourage more people to install batteries that can bank clean power for those hot nights, the commissioners said.

— Bob Hertzberg served eight years in the state Senate and, a decade earlier, six in the Assembly, where he was a successful speaker for two years. Now he’s out of office as a result of term limits. And that, a “prime example of why term limits are boneheaded,” George Skelton writes in his column. Yes, it’s true that term limits rid California’s Capitol of some sorry political specimens. Fresh blood is infused, and that’s good. But they also boot out productive lawmakers who are valuable because of their dedication, legislative know-how and acquired knowledge, Skelton says.

A correction

Last Friday’s Essential Politics newsletter gave the wrong year for Glenn Youngkin’s election as governor of Virginia. He was elected in 2021, not 2019.

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