Amy Walter, The Cook Political Report:
Yes, I do think that if you think back to where we were back in January of 2001, the possibility of Donald Trump coming back into the White House seemed more than remote.
But I think there are three big things that happened. The first is just the passage of time. For some of us, four years ago doesn’t feel that long ago. I think for many four years ago was actually a pretty significant amount of time. So it fell out of the day-to-day conversation.
The second is the thing that Tam was talking about. We have a partisan and fractured media environment in which you get fed views that align with your own personal feelings, whether it’s about Donald Trump or other issues.
And I also think that we had the fact that the president wasn’t prosecuted. The former president was never prosecuted for this. There was not a case brought against him. So all of those things together, I think, helped to put this issue more on the back burner in the 2024 election than we thought it would be in 2021.
At the same time, I think it would be very dangerous for Republicans or for President Trump to assume that voters don’t think that these actions were problematic, that they support the pardoning. As you pointed out, only 33 percent really overall support pardoning these January 6 defendants, and that many voters went into the voting booth holding two thoughts at one time.
One, they really did not like Trump’s actions in the January 6 events. And at the same time, they really did think he was going to do a better job for them as president on their most salient issue. And for many of them, it was the economy.
