Opponents of Donald Trump who've been patiently waiting for Republicans to turn on the businessman and GOP front-runner will just have to keep waiting.
New polling conducted in the aftermath of violent clashes that canceled a Trump rally in Chicago suggests the incident did little or nothing to sour GOP voters on Trump.
In a Monmouth University survey released on Monday, just 11 percent of Florida's Republican voters said the recent unrest at Trump's Chicago rally made them less likely to vote for him. Twenty-two percent said they'd be more likely to support Trump, and 66 percent said it won't have any impact.
A separate Monmouth poll in Ohio found similar results, with two-thirds of respondents saying the conflict wouldn't affect their vote.
Generally, there's a limit to the usefulness of questions about whether an event or political position makes voters more or less likely to support a candidate. People aren't great at explaining the factors that go into their decision-making processes.
Plus, many voters have already made up their minds to the degree that nothing would influence their support. The majority of respondents, who say the confrontations won't have an impact, includes Trump's stalwart supporters -- but it's equally likely to comprise people who never intended to vote for him in the first place.
Even so, the results suggest that most Republicans don't see the violent incidents as a major negative for Trump, and a small but significant fraction view them as a reason to support him more.
“Those people come to get punched,” one attendee at a Cleveland rally for Trump told The Huffington Post's Igor Bobic last week. "Those people come to object to what’s going on. We didn’t ask for them to come. We’re here having a meeting. And they want to come disrupt it? They deserve what they get."
Monmouth surveyed 293 Republican voters in Florida and 324 Republican voters in Ohio on March 12 and 13, using live interviewers to call both landlines and cell phones.
Editor's note: Donald Trump is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist, birther and bully who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims -- 1.6 billion members of an entire religion -- from entering the U.S.
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