Former Trump voters are abandoning him this time around

Former President Donald Trump is facing a backlash from some of his supporters in one of the country’s most important battleground states according to an August 25th report. 

Trump may be leading the race for the Republican presidential nomination by a gigantic margin but that doesn’t mean he’s still pulling support from some conservative voters. 

One reason for the dissension among former Trump voters seems to be because of the four indictments and 90 criminal charges the former president is facing for his behavior a Newsweek report noted. 

Reuters spoke with fifteen former Trump supporters in Arizona to take the pulse of those who previously cast a vote for the former president in a state that will be key to victory. 

Mark Clarcq is an independent voter who previously chose to vote for Trump in 2020 but soured on the former president because of his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

"He's delusional. He's still saying the 2020 election was fraudulent,” Clarcq explained to Reuters before he went on to detail why the former president has lost his vote forever. 

Clarcq explained that he believes Trump was trying to add votes in the election he didn’t have, saying: “That's an illegal process. Absolutely I support the Georgia indictment.”

The 77-year-old former Trump supporter told Reuters reporters that he hoped the justice system would play out and added that the former president shouldn’t be pardoned for his actions. 

Anthony Scaramucci was Trump’s White House Director of Communications while the former president was in office and he told CNN’s John Berman in June that the former president’s crimes would catch up with him and that his support would begin to vanish. 

Scaramucci explained that “Trump wants asymmetrical loyalty, he wants to be reckless and do things that are borderline criminal if not over-the-edge of criminal, adding that he also asks people to “defend him religiously.”

The former White House communications chief said that those who loved the country needed to speak out against Trump’s wrongdoings and that Trump deserved his day in court for the allegation he was facing in his mishandling of classified documents case. 

"Ultimately the dam will break here, John, and the American people, the MAGA voters, hopefully, they'll look for a different solution and not him," Scaramucci said according to a Newsweek report of his comments. 

However, despite Scaramucci's theory that the former president's support damn would break, Trump seemed to be more popular than ever as the GOP presidential nomination pushed on with every new indictment giving the former president a boost in the polls among Republican loyalists. 

BBC News tried to explain this phenomenon in early August and tapped the expertise of Clifford Young, the President of US Public Affairs for the global affairs and public opinion research firm Ipsos. Young said the reason for the bump was mostly political perception. 

Trump supporters saw the moves to indict Trump as “politically motivated,” noting that those who defend him did so because they “see the world through his eyes.” Moreover, Yung added that the former president’s supporters believed he was wronged. But this view might be changing. 

Recent polling from ABC News and Ipsos Polls done between August 15th and the 17th showed that Trump did not receive the same sort of bump in the polls he had after previous indictments, which might signal that his case in Georgia is far more serious. 

"I'm glad he's been indicted," former 71-year-old Arizona Trump voter Susan Aitken told Reuters."He was already talking about overturning the election even before he lost. Anybody else would be in jail by now."