If Joe Biden and his ruling Democrats had intended to discredit President Trump through their showy Mar-a-Lago raid, a new poll suggests they have failed miserably.

They've actually accomplished the opposite of what they set out to do.

According to the highly reputable and accurate I&I/TIPP, Trump has lost not a whit of popularity with Republican voters since the FBI raid.

In fact, he's actually gained.

What do the numbers say about Trump, who, between those two polls, endured the FBI’s raid, which has no precedent in U.S. history?

In August, 53% of Republicans said they would vote for Trump. In September, that number rose to 54%, a small gain. But Trump has a majority of his party, while Biden barely ekes out a third of the Democrats.

And, the important point, he lost nothing from the Mar-A-Lago raid. If anything, he gained support, while other potential challengers slipped.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who received 17% in the August poll, dipped to 15% in September, while former Vice President Mike Pence dropped from 10% to 8%. No other GOP challenger received more than 2% in September.

Trump has the support of more than half his party with that 54% popularity figure commonly characterized as landslide territory.

Biden by contrast has the support of only one out of three Democrat voters, and though the numbers show that Biden's "popularity" rose from 30% to 34% among Democrats, that's a chump-change figure, given that so few of them support him at all.

It looks as though that broad effort to smear, criminalize, and discredit President Trump through the Mar-a-Lago FBI raid has actually backfired badly on Democrats.  They've actually made him more popular.

What it tells us is that voters are no longer being fooled by Joe Biden and his politicization of law enforcement.

To start, the legal premises of the raid were nonsense: presidents are the prime consumer of the nation's intelligence apparatus's "products" (which is secrets) and have the complete power to classify or declassify documents.  Nobody screamed when President Trump declassified his phone call transcript with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky in the run-up to the first time congressional Democrats impeached and attempted to convict him.

Two, presidents of all stripes have classified documents within their personal papers for their presidential libraries.  AT contributor Christopher Knight wrote an excellent piece a couple days ago describing how President Obama presidential records — twenty truckloads of it — are sitting in a Chicago warehouse with a lot less security than Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate.  You can just guess what the Clinton presidential records, wherever they are, would look like.

Three, something was "off" about the whole raid, given that Trump had been cooperating and handing the lawmen access to his premises in the run-up to the August 8 raid, and the series of leaks about the danger of the documents floated around were notably false, with phony claims of nuclear secrets, and the year-long stretch between the supposed imminent danger and the actual raid sure did show that the government acts slowly.

Four, the indiscriminate dragnet nature of the raid, with agents tossing the entire household instead of just going for the documents they knew they wanted, raiding the kid's room, taking incredibly irrelevant stuff such as articles of clothing, flinging the papers around haphazardly so a photo could be taken and Joe Biden could tell 60 Minutes he'd never seen anything more "irresponsible," pretty well told everyone all he needed to know about the public relations staging of the matter.

Five, the disgusting behavior of the raiding agents, who apparently pawed through Melania Trump's underwear drawer and fluffed through her closet, with some reports saying they actually tried on some of her clothing and shoes for selfies so they could show all their little friends, only served further to say that this was an abuse of power, not a recovery effort to save the nation from the loss of its national security secrets.

Six, there was the news, disclosed in a judge's ruling about a "special master" to review whether the raiders had any business taking the documents, that Joe Biden knew all about the plans to raid Mar-a-Lago.  This stands in stark contrast to Biden's denials to knowing about the matter, but it does show what the plan was in this raid: Biden, after all, plans to run for re-election presumably against President Trump, and it would be handy to knock out such a rival before the matter could be put to a vote.

In light of this disgraceful show, is it any surprise that the American public just wasn't buying it?  It only served to show the public that Trump was the victim here, not the perpetrator, and Joe Biden was abusing the power of the state.

The fact of the matter is that the Mar-a-Lago raid was a show raid, done for the television cameras for Joe Biden's public relations purposes, and with zero regard for either precedent, or any rule of law.

Apparently, Biden's been to that well once too often, and now the public is on to him, rallying around President Trump as a result.  Prior to the raid, Trump had seen his popularity begin to dissipate in favor of other fine GOP candidates such as Florida's Gov. Ron DeSantis, but Biden has managed to give Trump his momentum back.

It's of a piece with Democrats' efforts to promote MAGA Republican candidates in the primaries in the hopes that they will be unelectable in the general election.  Instead, it has just made them more popular.

This is the mother of all backfires, an own goal for Democrats, Joe Biden stepping on another rake.  As President Obama once said: "Don't underestimate Joe's ability to f--- things up." 

Well, with the Mar-a-Lago raid intended to discredit President Trump, he has.

Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.