President Trump’s aura appears to be fading fast among voters who might previously have been counted on to support him under almost any circumstances, according to the results of a poll commissioned by Mr. Trump’s former National Security Advisor, John Bolton.

Mr. Bolton, who was fired by Trump in 2019 and later penned a memoir of his time in the administration that painted the former president in a less-than-flattering light, said the poll suggests that Trump’s hold on the Republican electorate is “unraveling.”

“The trend lines across our polls are definitive – support for Donald Trump is tanking within the Republican party,” Mr. Bolton said in a statement. “For over a year, Trump has been telling anyone who’d listen ‘the election was stolen’ – now, when Trump says that voters shake their heads.”

The poll of 1,000 likely general election voters conducted earlier this month found that the number of voters describing themselves as “Trump Republicans” has halved since September to 14.6 percent, and the former president’s “very favorable” rating declined 11 points during the same period. Less than half of GOP primary voters now see the former president in “very favorable” terms.

The poll also suggests that an endorsement from the former president may not carry the same weight as it once did. The percentage of Republican primary voters who said they would “very definitely” vote for a candidate endorsed by Trump dropped from 28.8 percent in September to 12.6 percent now.

The data suggest that Mr. Trump’s endorsements “are becoming irrelevant at best,” Mr. Bolton said. “Our party is not dominated by Trump.”

The PAC’s polling has President Biden tied with Trump in a hypothetical general election, a slight rebound since September. Some 64 percent of Republican voters said they would not support Mr. Trump in a primary. Nearly 20 percent of those same voters said they would support Governor DeSantis of Florida in a GOP primary instead of Trump.

The Bolton Super PAC’s poll results show a steeper decline in Trump’s popularity than other major polls, which have shown the former president’s favorability rating hovering unchanged at around 42 percent since the spring of 2021. Just over 53 percent of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Trump according to FiveThirtyEight’s tabulations.

Despite the numbers, Republican politicians and the GOP party apparatus across the country have shown little inclination to shun the former president. Most have eagerly embraced Trump’s claims about the 2020 election, most recently at a rally in Arizona last weekend when his hand-picked candidates took to the stage and insisted that the election was stolen and that Trump is the duly elected president of the United States.

The results of the Bolton Super PAC poll suggest that the election fraud refrain may be wearing thin on GOP voters. Nearly 80 percent of all voters – and 67 percent of Republican voters – questioned for the poll said Biden is “legally president” and 56 percent of them said the GOP needs a “fresh face” to defeat Biden in 2024.

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Image: Reuters/Octavio Jones