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Donald Trump is now the first former US president to be convicted in a criminal trial – but it is far from certain that this black mark will sink, or even weigh down, his bid to unseat President Joe Biden.
Recent polls suggest the guilty verdict could affect how major voting blocs view Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
But any changes may not be enough to alter the trajectory of the presidential race, according to the latest poll that finds only a small fraction of non-Democratic voters would be less likely to vote for Trump if he were found guilty in the secret trial . .
Nearly three-quarters of registered independents said a guilty verdict against Trump would make no difference to their vote, according to the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey released Thursday morning.
Just 11% of respondents said this outcome would make them less likely to support Trump in November, while 15% of the group said a guilty verdict would make them more likely to support him.
Among Republicans, 25% say they will be more likely to vote for Trump if he is convicted in New York, compared with 10% who say they will be less likely to do so.
These responses echo the results of a recent Quinnipiac University poll, in which only 6% of Trump voters said they would be less likely to vote for him if convicted, while nearly a quarter said they would be more likely to vote for him.
However, 23% of registered independent voters in that poll said a conviction of Trump would make them less likely to support him.
“It’s a strange situation where a criminal conviction probably doesn’t make a difference” politically, Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, said in an interview.
Most people, on both sides of the political spectrum, have already made up their minds about Trump, the professor said.
“The only thing that could hurt Trump at this point would be if someone had a TikTok of him kicking a cat,” he joked.
Compared to a Politico Magazine/Ipsos poll from March – which found that 36% of independents would be less likely to vote for a convicted Trump – the results of the most recent survey suggest a diminishing potential impact of the silence verdict.
On the one hand, the poll results indicate that the outcome of Trump’s trial will not sway the vast majority of voters.
But in a consistently tight race with two well-known candidates targeting a small but important slice of influential voters, any change in opinion resulting from the guilty verdict could have an outsized effect.
Yet few events in this unusual presidential rematch have so far had a clear, measurable impact on the state of the contest.
Although weighed down by numerous lawsuits, dozens of criminal charges and a steady stream of scandals and gaffes, national polls show Trump is in an extremely close national race with Biden and is slightly ahead in states keys to the battlefield.
The White House and Biden’s re-election campaign, meanwhile, have grappled with consumer concerns over inflation — one of voters’ top concerns — despite their efforts to spread a more positive message about inflation growth. American economy.
NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist surveyed 1,261 U.S. adults May 21-23 with a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points. For the 907 registered voters surveyed who intend to vote in the November 5 elections, the margin of error amounts to 4.1 percentage points.
Quinnipiac surveyed 1,374 registered U.S. voters between May 16 and 20, with a margin of error of 2.6 percentage points.
The Politico Magazine/Ipsos poll of 1,024 U.S. adults was conducted March 8-10. It has a margin of error of 3.3 percentage points.
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