We can see this in a national poll conducted by YouGov for CBS News. Pollsters conducted interviews in mid-May, then re-interviewed many of the same people after the verdict. Change? Not a lot.
In the first poll, respondents were asked if they thought Trump was guilty. In the most recent case, they were asked if they thought the jury returned the guilty verdict correctly. In the first poll, 56 percent of respondents said they thought Trump was guilty; in the new one, 57 percent said the verdict was correct. Democrats and independents each thought he was guilty and the jury was right; most Republicans disagreed.
Nearly a fifth of Republicans said the jury reached the verdict correctly, which can be accounted for in several ways. The first is that about a fifth of Republican primary voters voted for other candidates, despite – or because of – Trump blocking his party’s nomination. Another reason is that about a fifth of Trump supporters indicated in March that they already believed he had committed a serious crime. This intersects with another important consideration: thinking the verdict was correct doesn’t mean Republicans won’t support it against Biden. Many Trump voters have long viewed him as the best of the bad options.
This minority should also not obscure the fact that most Republicans accept Trump’s arguments that the trial was biased against him. Opinions about the fairness of the trial are closely tied to opinions about the verdict, with most Republicans saying they considered it unfair.
When asked why they considered this unfair, almost all Republicans with this view said it was because the trial was political — the central argument made by Trump and his allies.
Most Americans told YouGov they think Trump’s crimes are serious, including a quarter of Republicans and a slight majority of independents.
The new CBS poll also asked respondents whether they thought Trump was fit to serve as president following his conviction. A majority said no, including half of independents.
Again, this is a striking result, outside the context of recent history. In 2016, however, polls repeatedly revealed skepticism about Trump’s fitness to serve as president. This did not prevent him from being elected president.
It is certainly easy, given recent developments in electoral history, to assume that nothing will affect Trump’s political standing. This poll certainly doesn’t provide many starting points for those seeking to argue otherwise. Isn’t it significant, one might ask, that 10% of Republicans think Trump is unfit to be president?
Maybe. And maybe not. In 2020, 5% of Republican voters supported Joe Biden, for example, reminding us that internal dissension should be expected. (Four percent of Democrats supported Trump that same year.) Those voters could stay home, which would reduce the number of votes Biden needs to win in a state. Or, as the campaign unfolds, these voters might decide that Trump may be in better shape than Biden.
(It’s early to read too much into national polls; it takes a while for high-quality polls about elections to be conducted and released. But there is no indication at this point that there has been any change after the verdict.)
We also probably shouldn’t read too much into the finding that many Republicans said it was important for them to be loyal to the former president after the verdict. Many of Trump’s allies have made arguments along these lines, that the verdict bolsters support for Trump in ways that will hurt the left. But this loyalty to Trump has been at the heart of his support from the earliest days of his political career.
There’s one other finding from the CBS survey that’s particularly worth singling out: the number of Republicans who said the verdict made them lose faith in the criminal justice system. In fact, a plurality of respondents overall said they had less trust in the system after the verdict (although most respondents said their trust in the system was unaffected or increased ).
It also reflects attitudes that existed before the verdict: Trump spent years instilling a sense of skepticism among his base about law enforcement and the justice system. From the outside, this is obviously selfish; he’s been under investigation for years, and it serves him well for his base to view those investigations as biased.
But just because it’s normal doesn’t mean it’s not a striking result. Such questions, about the effects of a story, often simply reflect pre-existing views. This means that many of those who say they feel less confident in the justice system simply reflect a distrust that Trump worked so hard to build in the first place. This, in turn, is one of the main reasons why so many Republicans view the trial as unfair and, again, believe the verdict was wrong.
Trump and his lawyers had a month to persuade jurors not to find him guilty, working under the constraints imposed by a criminal trial and by the judge. He did, however, have years to influence the Republicans, and it worked very well.
washingtonpost
