The startling results of a new poll have revealed that over 80% of Democrats believe that former President Donald Trump should be removed from 2024 presidential ballots. The poll comes despite the fact that Trump has not been formally charged with, much less convicted of, a crime that would constitutionally disqualify the leading Republican presidential contender from running.
The CBS News/YouGov poll found that 81% of Democrats want Trump off of state ballots, while also noting that 90% of Republicans want him on the ballot. Independents were more evenly divided, with 44% saying the former president should be off of ballots and 56% saying he should remain on them.
The poll was released as a major legal battle is brewing at the U.S. Supreme Court over the former president’s election viability. On December 19, a divided Colorado Supreme Court ruled in a 4-3 decision that Trump is barred from appearing on the state’s Republican primary ballot for his role in the January 6, 2021 riot that occurred at the Capitol, charging that the former president allegedly violated the 14th Amendment by inciting and supporting an “insurrection.” A week later, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (D) also disqualified Trump from appearing on the state’s ballot due to his alleged “support” of the January 6 attack.
Trump’s legal team swiftly appealed both the Colorado and Maine decisions. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the Colorado appeal and will hear oral arguments for the case on February 8.
Over the weekend, 27 Republican state attorneys general filed a “friend of the court” brief with the Supreme Court supporting Trump in the Colorado case. The state AGs argue that Colorado court’s decision “will create widespread chaos” that “casts confusion into an election cycle that is just weeks away.” (The nation’s first presidential caucus is scheduled for January 15 in Iowa.) “Beyond that, it upsets the respective roles of the Congress, the States, and the courts,” the AGs write.
A number of other legal experts have expressed grave concerns about the constitutional implications of the rulings to bar the nation’s leading Republican presidential candidate from state ballots, along with another lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania that attempts to remove Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) from the ballot for his 2024 congressional race for allegedly violating the 14th Amendment by “disrupting” the transfer of power following the 2020 election. Last week, Samantha Dravis, the former general counsel of the Republican Attorneys General Association and the current principal of Acts Advocacy, joined “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” to discuss the legal tactics being used by the Left.
“If you want to talk about the 14th Amendment, there’s another provision of the 14th Amendment called the Due Process Clause,” she explained. “And President Trump and Congressman Perry are absolutely being denied due process. When you unilaterally have a rogue partisan official removing them from the ballot without [Trump or Perry] having even been so much as charged or convicted for the crime of insurrection, using a 155-year-old provision that was written after the Civil War and was meant to address an actual insurrection in which people actually took up arms against the United States. So these are very thin, patently absurd legal theories.”
Dravis continued, “I think we’re in very dangerous, uncharted territory. The Democrats have decided that they’ll use any means necessary to stop President Trump from beating Joe Biden. They’re seeing that Joe Biden has historically low approval numbers, and they’re willing to misinterpret our own U.S. Constitution, erode the rule of law, which is one of the bedrock principles of our democracy, and weaponize and abuse the justice system. [Is] our democracy built to withstand that? I guess we’ll see, because we are in completely uncharted territory here.”
Dravis went on to observe that one of the central issues in Trump’s legal case will be how an alleged violation of the 14th Amendment can be legally enforced. “President Trump’s legal team, and as well as the Colorado Republican Party, are arguing in their petition for a writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court, is that section three of the 14th Amendment has to have an enforcement mechanism, and that that enforcement mechanism can only come from Congress alone. … [T]hat will be one of the key legal arguments that I expect the Supreme Court will take up. [S]omething like 15 states are considering removing President Trump from the ballot, and so this is a key constitutional question that I hope the court will weigh in on very quickly.”
As the fight over the 2024 election plays out in the courts, a simultaneous battle is occurring to improve election integrity as November approaches after the irregularities that occurred in 2020. On Friday, Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project joined “Washington Watch” to give an update on current efforts to secure elections in the states.
“Florida has actually removed a significant number of outdated registrations pursuant to a new law that they just adopted to make that process easier,” he noted. “… Florida also created a unit to allow it to investigate potential election malfeasance, and that’s something which more states need to be doing, because all too often, potential election crimes go uninvestigated and unprosecuted.”
Snead further pointed to Georgia as a state that has taken the initiative in improving the security of its elections. “Georgia has also shown us how important it is to make iterative changes every single year to the election system, not changes for the sake of change, but changes because every time you hold an election, you learn something that hasn’t gone correct and you need to fix it. … This year, Georgia is considering some additional changes to their … absentee system. … It’s important to protect vulnerable mail votes and ensure that if you are choosing to cast a ballot by mail, that you can ensure that that ballot is actually going to be properly counted and that it isn’t going to be tampered with or interfered with by vote trafficking or other operations.”
“We have to get elections right, and we have to keep our eye on the ball,” Snead concluded. “It’s a lot easier to keep a reputation of trust and honesty than to regain it if you lose it. And right now, unfortunately, trust in our democratic process is fragile, so we should always be doing everything that we can to make it easier to vote, but also harder to cheat.”
Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.
