A Manhattan jury on Thursday found former President Donald Trump guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records, a felony crime, after the jury found that Trump falsified the records in an attempt to illegally influence the 2016 presidential election, which he narrowly defeated Hillary Clinton.
This was the first of four indictments against President Trump to go to trial.
Such a development would undoubtedly have been a much bigger shock in any other election. Even if guilty candidates were not booted out after being indicted, a guilty verdict would certainly have made them persona non grata. There would be hearings on how to remove them from the nomination or remove them from the ballot.
But this is the Republican Party in the Trump era. The former president has spent years defending himself from moments like this by casting any investigation into him as a “witch hunt.” Republican lawmakers have almost without exception followed Trump’s line in condemning the Manhattan trial and urging people to ignore the verdict.
So the question today is not whether the majority of Trump’s supporters will support him (they will), but whether a minority of them will hesitate. That, combined with undecided voters who may lose interest, will ultimately matter.
Here’s what can be said: If the polls are accurate and voters are honest with themselves, it’s clear that this ruling could change the trajectory of the 2024 campaign. Whether it ultimately does so is another matter.
Depending on how pollsters ask the question, more than 3 in 10 Republicans could say they would be hesitant if convicted.
But taking a step back is not the same as abandoning Trump. Far from it.
Let’s take a quick look at the latest polling data.
- An ABC News/Ipsos poll last month found that 20% of Trump supporters would at least “reconsider” a guilty verdict in the Manhattan case. 4 percent They said they would change their vote.
This suggests that the impact on people who already support Trump will be very small. Even if the election goes ahead, it would lose about 2 percent of the total electorate.
But when pollsters compare before and after a hypothetical conviction, they often find larger changes., Suggesting a larger impact:
- A Marquette University Law School poll last week showed Trump leading President Biden by four points, but among half of respondents asked how they would vote if Trump was convicted in the Manhattan trial, Trump was four points behind, a change of just eight points (i.e. Trump +4, Biden +4).
- A Reuters/Ipsos poll last month showed Biden’s approval rating would rise by just 2 points if Trump was convicted, but would rise by 6 points if Trump was jailed as a result. (Trump is due to be sentenced on July 11.)
- Previous polls had suggested that if Trump were convicted in either case, his approval rating would shift by 5 to 14 points toward Biden.
Notably, many of the biggest changes are occurring in older polls, which could mean they are a somewhat weaker factor for voters.
These polls suggest that at least some Trump supporters are simply “Rethink” would also be inclined to abandon Trump if given the choice. And even if the change was only by a two-point margin (the low point in current polling), it would mean a lot: after all, our last two presidential elections were decided by roughly one percentage point in key states.
But these things are always subject to change.
Perhaps a guilty verdict will clarify a dilemma Americans haven’t really considered, because few have been following Trump’s legal woes closely: If it came down to it, would half of Americans really vote for a convicted felon?
(A relatively small number of Americans, fewer than 4 in 10, are inclined to believe Trump’s claims of legal persecution. This would mean that a significant majority of Americans would now challenge the court rulings they had not previously given up on.)
There’s also the issue of people who don’t currently support either Trump or Biden — undecided voters or those who support a third-party candidate. These voters are likely to gravitate toward one of the major party candidates (third-party candidates tend to lose popularity over time) but haven’t yet chosen Trump, so Thursday’s ruling could affect their vote.
Perhaps the impact will ease over time — five months is a long time to keep people worrying about something they never really cared about before.
And the sentence is very likely to be imposed. (Read more here.) If Trump is not jailed, it may send a signal to those who are wavering. This wasn’t a big deal in the first place.
What is clear is that we are at an unprecedented moment in American history, and in a remarkably stagnant presidential campaign where nothing seems to be able to truly shake anything, we have, for the first time, encountered the powerful possibility of something doing just that.
Or maybe this is just the latest example of how President Trump’s numerous controversies are causing 45 percent, or even half, of the US population to shrug.
But if a sense of apathy is the result of a criminal conviction, then we have arguably crossed a new line in polarization.
That’s the percentage of Trump supporters who agreed in a December Fox News poll that “things are so off the rails in America that we need a president willing to break the rules and laws to set it right.”
(Only 15% of Democrats said the same.)
Trump supporters have essentially nominated for president in 2024 a man who was convicted in an illegal scheme to win the presidential election in the first place.
