Former President Donald Trump’s popularity streak seems to have gone kaput, according to a new poll.

The Emerson College poll, released earlier Monday, shows Trump with the lowest level of support since the pollster started tracking the 2024 GOP primary race last summer, Newsweek reports. This is the first time Trump’s polling numbers have slid this low, but even so, he still maintains the majority support among Republican voters with 50 percent backing him and he’s still way ahead of his competitors with a 38 percent lead over his closest rival.

When Trump entered the presidential race, his backing rate stood at 55 percent, beginning in June 2022 and continuing through to February 2023. Surprisingly, his campaign launch in November didn’t change this much. But at the same time, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was climbing upwards in the polls, from 20 to 29 percent between June 2022 and January 2023.

April proved to be a good month for Trump, as his support zoomed up to 62 percent, but then it began to decline slowly, to 59 percent in June and 56 percent earlier this month. However, both figures are still higher than what he started out with.

The last poll was released on August 19, prior to the Republican National Committee hosting its first primary debate. Trump didn’t appear at the debate, perhaps because he was busy getting his mugshot right around the same time. This marks the first time in U.S. history that any president has had a mugshot taken. He has, of course, been indicted in three separate cases but no mugshots were taken in these instances.

“Trump’s indictments have had a more positive impact among Republican voters than skipping the debate,” Spencer Kimball, executive director of Emerson College Polling, told Newsweek. “The share of Republican primary voters who say Trump’s indictments make them more likely to vote for the former president has remained at 56 percent before and after Trump was taken into custody.”

The fact that a sizable number of Republicans are still willing to support Trump despite his being indicted four times tells you something about Republican voters, now doesn’t it?

Trump’s campaign told Newsweek that even though his numbers have dipped, Trump still leads the GOP field and claimed that the poll also showed Trump with a 2 percentage point advantage in a hypothetical rematch with President Joe Biden. If you can believe anything these people say, that is.

“In addition to President Trump crushing all of the other primary candidates by a dominant margin, he is now leading Joe Biden in the general election,” said Steven Cheung, Trump’s campaign spokesperson. “This further proves that President Trump is the only person who can win back the White House, supercharge the economy, secure our border, safeguard communities, and put an end to unnecessary wars.”

That is exactly what he promised to do when he was elected in 2016 and failed to do during his administration. If he wins a second time I doubt he’ll accomplish any of these goals. The only thing he’s good at doing, other than lying, is failing.

At any rate, his small decline in Monday’s poll is likely the result of a boost in the polls for other Republican 2024 candidates. This includes newcomer Vivek Ramaswamy, who saw 9 percent support. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and former Vice President Mike Pence each received 7 percent support. The numbers didn’t look so great for Haley in the August 19 poll, where she received only 2 percent support. Pence received 3 percent support.

DeSantis was the closest GOP contender to Trump, with the backing of 12 percent of Republicans, a 2 percent increase from the last survey.

And these recent numbers show that Trump may have been clobbered in the polls because he decided not to appear at the debate last Wednesday. In lieu of duking it out with six other GOP White House hopefuls, Trump sat down for an interview with ex-Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, which aired at the same time as the debate.

“A vast majority (74 percent) of Republican primary voters did want the president to participate in the debate,” Kimball said. “Following the debate where he did not participate, 20 percent of Republican primary voters say the debate skip made them less likely to support Trump, while 38 percent say it makes them more likely, and a plurality, 42 percent, say it had no impact on their vote.”

Ramaswamy picked up a plurality of voters who thought he won the RNC debate (27 percent), while 21 percent put their confidence in DeSantis. Another 12 percent said Pence “, while 11 percent said Haley won, per Monday’s poll.

The new poll also found that 43 percent of Republican primary voters said there’s a chance they could change their minds and vote for another contender — that’s a 5 percent increase from the poll released earlier this month.

“There appears to be a softening of support for Trump since last week’s survey, where 82 percent of Trump voters said they would definitely support him, compared to 71 percent after the debate,” Kimball noted in a press release. “DeSantis’s support also softened from 32 percent who definitely support to 25 percent, while Ramaswamy support remained consistent from 47 percent to 45 percent.”

“While Trump saw a slight dip in support, the question from this poll is whether this a blip for Trump or if the other Republican candidates will be able to rally enough support to be competitive for the caucus and the primary season,” he noted.

The survey of 1,000 nationally registered voters was conducted between August 25 and 26 and has a margin of error of +/-3 percentage points.

Obviously, it’s difficult to tell how much damage Trump did himself by not appearing at the debate and I think we learned from the last election that polls can vary widely. And as Trump’s legal problems continue to multiply, who knows how all of this will play out?

It’s anyone’s guess.