Trump popularity holds strong

CASPER – Former President Donald Trump’s popularity continues to hold strong in Wyoming, a new poll from the University of Wyoming shows. 
The survey also found that a majority of Republicans in Wyoming prefer Trump as the Republican presidential nominee rather than another candidate. 
The poll, which was published Monday, found that nearly three out of every five Wyomingites rated Trump’s presidential performance as either good or excellent.
Trump’s popularity has remained basically the same in Wyoming for the past four years. In 2018, he had a positive rating of 56%. Two years later, his rating stood at 59%. In the most recent survey, his rating was 58%. 
The minor differences can be attributed to the margin of error in the polls, explained Jim King, a University of Wyoming political science professor and the survey’s director. 
The results aren’t surprising, given that Trump remains deeply popular among Republicans, and Wyoming remains a crimson red state. 
Trump’s positive rating among Wyoming Republicans stood at 82%, the UW poll found. It dipped to 42% among independents. Nearly 90% of the state’s Democrats considered his performance poor. 
The former president is considerably more popular in Wyoming than the country as a whole. 
His national favorability rating has hovered near 40% this year, according to monitoring performed by YouGov. 
Trump announced plans for another run the week after the general election, which saw Republicans perform worse than many pundits and observers expected. The GOP failed to take the Senate and only won a slim majority in the House.
In the aftermath, some Republicans appeared to be moving away from Trump as the leader of their party and presidential nominee. 
Wyoming’s Sen. Cynthia Lummis, after loudly backing then-President Trump when she ran for office in 2020, appeared more tepid when asked recently whether she’d endorse a 2024 Trump bid. 
“I don’t think that’s the right question,” Lummis told a reporter from Politico. “I think the question is who is the current leader of the Republican Party. Oh, I know who it is: [Florida Gov.] Ron DeSantis.” 
A Lummis spokesperson did not offer further comment when contacted by the Star-Tribune. 
A spokesperson for Sen. John Barrasso, meanwhile, only said that he would support the Republican nominee for president — whoever that ends up being. 
The UW survey was conducted in the weeks and days leading up to the election. 
It found 54% of Republicans would back Trump if he ran again. Another 32% said they favored a different GOP candidate, while 14% were uncertain. 
“There is no question that Republicans will rally behind Trump should he win the Republican presidential nomination — 82 percent of Republicans in the survey indicated that they would cast their ballots for Trump over the Democratic Party’s nominee, including a majority of those preferring another Republican for the nomination,” King said in a statement. 
To conduct the poll, the Wyoming Survey and Analysis Center’s Survey Research Center spoke by phone with 524 randomly selected Wyoming residents. The poll has a margin of error of 4.3%.
 
This story was published on Nov. 29, 2022.