Former President Donald Trump has had a scandal swirling around him since his first presidential election in 2016. But on Thursday he was officially sentenced after being found guilty on all charges in a New York hush-money case. Will this revelation trump all other headlines and change the course of the 2024 election?
At first glance, there is evidence from polls that a guilty verdict would significantly damage Trump's support: A CNN/SSRS poll in April found that 76% of Trump supporters said they would support him anyway, while 24% said they “might reconsider” their support if Trump was convicted. And a May Emerson College poll found that 25% of New York voters said a guilty verdict would make them less likely to vote for Trump.
Several pollsters have also in recent weeks posed two versions of the standard “Who will you vote for?” question: one simple, and another that asks respondents who they would vote for if Trump were convicted in New York. On average, Trump led by one percentage point in these polls that don't take into account a conviction, but fell behind by six points if he were convicted.
But Democrats would be wise not to get too excited about these numbers. Look again at the wording of the CNN/SSRS poll: 24% of Trump supporters say they “might reconsider” their vote. This is not the same as “definitely changing” their vote! Given this certainty, many Trump supporters may simply be unsure about their vote without fully switching to President Joe Biden.
This is basically what another ABC News/Ipsos poll found. Like CNN/SSRS, they asked Trump supporters what they would do if Trump was convicted in the New York case, but they also gave them the options “reconsider” and “stop supporting” them. Sixteen percent said they would reconsider their support for Trump, while only four percent said they would stop supporting him. (Like CNN/SSRS, 80 percent said they would continue to support Trump.)
Similarly, one should always be cautious about polls like the Emerson poll, which ask Americans whether something would influence their voting behavior in a particular way. Respondents often do not take these questions literally, but rather use them as a proxy for whether they agree or disagree with the thing being asked about.
In fact, more than three-quarters of those who said they would be “less likely” to vote for Trump if Emerson was convicted also said they would vote for Biden in a separate question. In contrast, only 11% of Trump voters said they would be “less likely” to vote for Trump if he was convicted. This means that the potential impact on actual support for Trump is much smaller than initially thought.
Other polls also support the theory that a guilty verdict won't cause a mass defection to Biden. The horse race polls I cited above don't actually show many Trump supporters switching their votes to Biden. Instead, most of the support Trump lost is going to the undecided column, or to some unnamed, hypothetical “someone else.”
On average, Trump's approval rating drops by 6 points when a conviction is taken into account, while Biden's increases by only 1 point. “Someone else” or undecided increases by 5 points. This is consistent with the idea that the conviction will make some Trump supporters uncomfortable voting for him and will stop identifying as such for a while. But most of them will not go so far as to vote for Biden.
And that may signal that Trump's decline in approval ratings will be short-lived. Sure, those who abandoned Trump supporters after the conviction could abstain from voting or vote for third-party candidates. But since past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, it's entirely possible that they'll eventually get over their discomfort and come back to Trump's side. Especially considering there are still five months until Election Day, that's plenty of time for Trump to spin a narrative that helps voters overcome their reluctance to vote for a convicted felon.
We don't have to look far to find precedent for this. In October 2016, the Trump campaign was blindsided by the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women. Polls at the time suggested that the tape made some Republicans uneasy about supporting Trump, and Trump's approval rating in an average of 538 polls at the time dropped by about a point. But Trump's approval rating quickly recovered: within three weeks of the tape's release, his approval rating was higher than it was before the tape was released.
That said, even if most of Trump's defectors go “undecided” only to eventually revert, that doesn't mean a conviction would have no impact on the race. A one-point average increase for Biden is no small thing. In a close race (which is likely in 2024), it could be the difference between winning and losing. But it's also important not to overestimate the impact of a conviction. If the hush money trial were to decide the outcome of the presidential election, it would be because the race was close anyway.
Irena Li contributed to the research.
