Stubborn GOP voters still back Trump despite his polling collapse

President Donald Trump’s hold on independent and non-affiliated voters keeps shrinking, but CNN analyst Harry Enten says Trump is as popular and powerful as ever among Republican voters.

Enten looked at this week’s results in the Indiana primaries, where a majority of Republican state lawmakers who opposed the president’s push for redistricting were voted out of office.

“As Indiana goes, so goes the nation when it comes to Republican voters and Donald John Trump,” Enten said. “He absolutely still has the juice, and when you’re a Republican and you go against Trump, you get voted off the island.”

Enten extrapolated that result to the rest of the country, saying that Indiana “is emblematic of what we see nationwide with Republicans.”

“I think there’s this myth that’s going on right now that, oh, ‘Trump is really losing support among Republicans.’ But compared to other midterm cycles, he’s just as popular with Republicans as he has ever been at this point in midterm cycles,” he said

Enten found that at this point in his first term, in 2018, Trump’s approval rating among his GOP base was 85 percent. Now, it’s 84 percent.

“That 85 looks a whole heck of a lot like this 84 percent right here,” Enten said. “The bottom line is this: Donald Trump still absolutely has juice with Republican voters.”

“You saw it in Indiana, and I think that you’ll see it down the line, as well, if any Republicans try and go against the President of the United States, who is still very much beloved by Republican voters nationwide.”

Enten says that the core Republican base “really loves Donald Trump.”

“The people who really love him, they’re the ones who are absolutely juiced up to go out and vote.”

“They would go over hot coals to vote in those primaries,” Enten observed, “and you saw that in Indiana, where the clear majority of those representatives who went against Trump on redistricting, well, they’re no longer gonna have a job come the next session.”

Enten continued, saying that “support among Republicans is just as strong as it was going into the 2018 midterm cycle.”

“So it’s not just that Republicans really like Donald Trump — it’s they want their leaders to follow Donald Trump, and when they don’t, as I said at the beginning, you get voted off the island.”

But while the distillation of far-right Trumpists works well in GOP primaries, the primary winners will soon have to face voters who are not nearly so accommodating in November.