Poll: Majority of voters would support disqualifying Trump under 14th Amendment

A majority of voters are willing to support an effort to disqualify former President Donald Trump from the 2024 ballot, according to a new POLITICO | Morning Consult poll.

After a series of questions about the Constitution and Trump’s conduct after the 2020 presidential election, 51 percent said the 14th Amendment prohibits Trump from running again because he engaged in insurrection, compared with 34 percent who said the opposite.

A strange-bedfellows coalition of liberal activists and conservative attorneys have argued that the former president is ineligible to run again based on an interpretation of the 14th Amendment, which reads that those that “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States or “given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” are disqualified from holding public office.

The nascent effort is still mostly theoretical, but the controversy could come to a head in the coming months as Trump files paperwork to appear on primary ballots in states across the country.

The headline result came following a series of questions in the POLITICO | Morning Consult poll on the constitutional amendment, which was adopted in the wake of the Civil War to block former Confederates from being sent to serve in Washington.

The first question asks if Americans “support or oppose” that section of the amendment. Broadly, voters agree with it — 63 percent said they either strongly or somewhat support it, which includes a majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents. Just 16 percent said they somewhat or strongly oppose it.

But as Trump is introduced in the following questions, respondents separate into their partisan camps. When asked if they believed Trump “engaged in insurrection or rebellion,” 51 percent said either definitely or probably yes, and 35 percent said definitely or probably no.

That number is divided sharply on party lines: 79 percent of Democrats — and 49 percent of independents — say that he did, while just under a quarter of Republicans agree. The margins are similar for an additional question that asked if Trump gave “aid and/or comfort” to those engaged in insurrection and rebellion.

The fourth and final question — on whether Trump should be disqualified under the 14th Amendment — roughly tracks with respondents’ opinions on whether he engaged in or aided an insurrection, and includes a similar partisan divide.

(Given Trump’s yawning margin in most primary horse race polls, the seemingly high percentage of Republicans calling for Trump’s disqualification may overstate his intraparty opposition, although few other public surveys have asked about the 14th Amendment push yet.)

Most legal experts expect the Supreme Court to eventually have to weigh in on the push to have Trump kicked off the ballot. A pair of liberal watchdog groups looking to have Trump disqualified — Free Speech For People and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington — have filed lawsuits in Minnesota and Colorado, respectively, looking to boot Trump off the ballot. And FSFP has also sent letters urging secretaries of state to keep Trump from the ballot.

By and large, secretaries of state — Democratic and Republican — have said that they don’t believe they have the authority to make that decision on their own, and that it should be up to the courts.

“The United States Supreme Court is the appropriate place to resolve this issue. The bottom line is it’s not about us at all. It doesn’t matter what a secretary of state does because we expect the Supreme Court to be the final arbiter,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, told POLITICO earlier this month.

Using the 14th Amendment to disqualify candidates has been rarely tested in modern times. A handful of attempts to block Republican members of Congress who voted against certifying the 2020 election from running in the midterms went nowhere — although CREW successfully had a Republican county commissioner in New Mexico disqualified by a state court after he was convicted criminally for his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot.

Secretaries have also raised practical administrative challenges to blocking Trump. Deadlines to get on primary ballots are fast approaching — some of the early-nominating states have October deadlines — and it takes election offices weeks to prepare, print and mail out ballots to voters in states.

In Minnesota, a Super Tuesday state, Democratic Secretary of State Steve Simon told the state Supreme Court this week that a decision is needed by no later than Jan. 5 so election workers have time to prep ballots, regardless of what the decision is.

Trump’s camp has also been dismissive of the 14th Amendment push. Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung previously said it was a “political attack” that was “stretching the law beyond recognition.”

The POLITICO | Morning Consult poll (toplines, crosstabs) was conducted Sept. 23-25, surveying 1,967 registered voters online. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.