‘Rally Around Trump Effect’: MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki Shows How Trump Indictments Took GOP Primary From Competitive to a Blow Out

MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki worked his whiteboard on Thursday and recapped the GOP presidential primary polling throughout 2023, which saw former President Donald Trump solidify his lead.

“So first of all, who’s going to be the Republican nominee, presumably against Joe Biden? At the start of 2023, this seemed like a very up-in-the-air question,” Kornacki began, adding:

You could see the trend line for the candidates. And remember, at the start of ’23, Republicans were coming off a pretty rough midterm. Candidates who’d been closely aligned with Donald Trump had lost key races in 2022.

At the start, at ’23, Ron DeSantis was running pretty close in the poll average to Donald Trump. And then look what happened. It just exploded here for Trump and went the other way for DeSantis. What happened right around here in the calendar, That was when the first indictment of Trump came down, the one from the Manhattan district attorney.

“It almost seems to have triggered a rally around Trump effect among Republicans,” he then argued.

“And that’s just held all year through all of the legal drama and everything else that’s happened. And here we are at the end of the year. And in the average Trump just, you know, lengths, open lengths ahead of Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and Ramaswamy and Christie, too, for that matter,” he concluded noting that Trump’s rival remain far behind in national polling. Haley has seen her fortunes rise in New Hampshire in recent polling, but Trump still has a commanding lead in every state.

Watch the full clip above via MSNBC.