Tipsheet

So Far, Little Movement in Post-Conviction Public Opinion — But...

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  June 03, 2024 10:01 AM

Former President Donald Trump was convicted on 34 counts by a New York City jury last Thursday, a verdict that I analyzed here.  In that piece, I discussed the outcome's impact on public opinion, writing that "polling suggests it could all be a relative non-event for voters, net-net.  But perhaps the stark reality of it, rather than the hypothetical nature of it, will change that.  There are several plausible scenarios -- from Trump negative, to Trump positive, to neutral.  I just don't know, and I'm skeptical of confident predictions about if and how public opinion will move."  Indeed, an NPR survey released just prior to the verdict found that the overwhelming majority of voters said the trial's result wouldn't impact their voting decision in November at all.  Seventeen percent did say a conviction would make them less likely to support Trump, but nearly as many -- 15 percent -- said it would make them more likely to do so.  A relative wash, at least in theory.  

What's unclear is how many of the 'less/more likely' respondents were already hard partisans deciding that Trump being found guilty would only harden their partisanship, versus persuadable voters either being turned off by the notion of supporting a 'convicted felon' or being so outraged by a perceived miscarriage of justice that they were pushed in the direction of its target.  We are now getting some post-trial polling in, and the top-lines look mixed:


I'm not sure how much stock to put into these immediate polls.  I'll be much more eager to see how the averages look in late June.  But based solely on these findings, it appears as though President Biden has benefited ever so slightly from the conviction of his opponent, but these margins aren't anything to write home about.  Remember, Biden beat Trump in the national 'popular' vote by more than four percentage points in 2020, and still only won the electoral college thanks to very thin victory margins in a small handful of states (44,000 votes flipping the other direction, spread across Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin could have produced a Trump win).  Biden being narrowly up, tied, or even down in initial post-conviction polling isn't reassuring news for his campaign.  In fact, take a look at this new ABC survey result: 

These men have extremely similar favorability ratings, both of which are bad.  The numbers are more or less unchanged since March for Biden, but Trump has actually seen a bit of a bump in this department.  It's interesting to note how the pollster framed its findings, as opposed to its media partner:


Is anyone surprised that approximately half the country agrees with the verdict and wants Trump gone?  The bigger surprise might be that felony convictions had "minimal impact" on people's views of the presidential race.  The Morning Consult result mentioned above shows that more than two-thirds of voters think the appropriate punishment for Trump is...a fine, which may actually make sense, given that the "crime" here was a series of victimless internal corporate bookkeeping mis-categorizations of entirely legal transactions:

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And for what it's worth, Trump's pollster -- who is a respected professional, I should note, but consider this with a grain of salt nonetheless -- says their internal ballot test data across the seven key battleground states did not show really any meaningful movement at all from Wednesday night (pre-verdict) to Thursday night (post-verdict):


Bottom line: Until we have a few weeks' worth of high-quality polling at the national and state levels, and we can see the impact on polling averages after May 31, fixating on any of these polls is likely not a terribly fruitful exercise.  But from what we've seen in the data above, this is so far looking like an overall shrug from voters, with perhaps a very small uptick for Biden.  I'll leave you with this, from the son of George Soros (who bankrolled Alvin Bragg's anti-Trump campaign):