A second attempt on Donald Trump’s life may give the Republican presidential candidate much-needed respite after a difficult week in which his debate performance was heavily scrutinised and mocked.

Secret Service agents foiled a second alleged plot on Trump’s life while he was golfing at the weekend, although he faces a different playing field from the ascendent nature of the July assassination attempt that left him wounded and leading Joe Biden in polls.

David Smith, an associate professor at the United States Studies Centre, said the assassination attempt may help the former president by resetting the media cycle.

“There’s been a lot of talk about how poor his debate performance was. All this stuff about migrants eating pets, which he’s still defending and a feeling that he failed to take any opportunity available to him in that debate,” he said.

“His campaign has really suffered from a lack of discipline, but we are back to people taking shots at Trump, outpourings of sympathy and Democrats talking about how violence is not acceptable.”

The Republican candidate’s most vocal allies quickly placed the blame on the Democratic Party, like they did following the previous assassination attempt earlier in the year.

As in July, the truth is even stranger, with an X account belonging to the man arrested by the FBI revealing a bizarre pattern of politics, voting and advocacy.

Ryan Routh, a 58-year-old construction worker from North Carolina with no military experience, has since been charged with illegally buying weapons, but not for the alleged assassination attempt.

Assassination bump?

Smith said Trump experienced movement in polling after the assassination attempt in July, but it is difficult to disentangle from the impact of Biden’s debate performance and the Republican National Convention.

“The assassination attempt gave Trump a one to two-point boost in the polls that was also coming off the back of his debate performance against Biden,” he said.

“This time, you don’t have the drama of the last attempt, you don’t have the image that has become central to his campaign, and you don’t have the focus on him as someone tough enough to survive an assassination attempt and walk away.”

He increased his favourability [approval rating] by 4 per cent and decreased his disapproval rating by the same margin following the July shooting, pushing him to his highest approval total in Wall Street Journal polling.

At the time, Trump was running against a flailing Biden with momentum on his side, although this was quickly washed away once Biden dropped out and Kamala Harris changed the equation.

Historically, Ronald Reagan, the last candidate to be shot during an election campaign and hospitalised after an attempt on his life in 1981, saw his approval rating improve from 60 per cent to 68 per cent.

Just nine months later, however, his approval rating had dropped to below 50 per cent after an economic downturn.

Winding race

Trump’s approval rating, however, has decreased significantly faster than Reagan’s did, owing to his unpopularity with voters.

Smith said the impact of the assassination attempt and Harris’s performance during the debate are yet to materialise in polling fully.

“We haven’t seen a lot of good swing-state polling since the debate,” he said.

“There have been a couple of really interesting polls that would give the Harris campaign a lot of hope in states where she probably won’t win.”

He said that high-quality polls have Harris 5 per cent behind Trump in Alaska and 4 per cent in Ohio.

“Alaska was a state that Trump won by 10 points in 2020 and 15 points in 2016,” Smith said.

“A highly regarded poll in Iowa, called the Selzer poll, found Harris only trailing by four points, suggesting that Harris did well in the debate, even in states that she can’t actually win.”

Trump won Ohio by a margin of 8 per cent in 2020.