Welcome to The Campaign Moment, your guide to the biggest developments in a 2024 election that’s apparently going to be tough to budge.
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The big moment
It’s hard to believe — at least for me — but it’s now been almost exactly a week since former president Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts in his Manhattan criminal trial.
And after some waiting, we’ve got an increasing amount of quality polling to parse.
Which makes this as good a time as any to take stock. So let’s do that.
Americans sign off on the verdict
Americans didn’t buy into Trump’s claims of victimization that before the verdict. And they don’t afterward, either. In fact, more clearly think Manhattan got it right.
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An ABC News/Ipsos poll showed Americans think the verdict was correct, 50 percent to 27 percent. An Economist/YouGov poll pegged that split at 50-38. A Quinnipiac University poll in Georgia shows voters there agreed with the verdict, 50-44. And a New York Times/Siena poll that re-contacted voters from a previous poll showed they approved of the verdict, 46-33.
There aren’t strong majorities who approve; it’s mostly about 50 percent. But those people significantly outnumber those who view the verdict as an injustice. (A YouGov poll this week showed just 39 percent say Trump is treated more harshly by the justice system than other people.)
That suggests that it’s basically just strong Trump supporters who believe Trump is a victim here and that theories about a pro-Trump backlash are overblown.
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Even more think Trump was at fault
As interestingly: The numbers approving of the verdict actually appear to undersell the percentage who think Trump was at fault.
- A SurveyMonkey poll for the 19th News showed Americans said 49-34 that they agreed with the verdict, which is similar to other polls. But even more — 57 percent — said Trump’s actions were a crime.
- Similarly, a CBS News/YouGov poll that featured fewer undecided votes than other polls showed 57 percent agreed with the verdict.
- And finally, the Ipsos poll showed more than 6 in 10 said Trump either intentionally did something wrong (51 percent) or acted “wrongly but not intentionally” (12 percent).
All of which suggests the American people clearly think Trump was in the wrong, even if some voters might not think this is a huge deal.
A little but pretty evident shift toward Biden
The verdict has not overhauled the 2024 race nearly as much as Democrats hoped it would. But the totality of the evidence suggests it has dinged Trump a little. And as I’ve often said, a little could matter a lot in our exceedingly close elections.
The Times/Siena poll — perhaps the best measure given that it re-contacted voters from its April/May poll — showed a two-point shift toward President Biden. Three percent of Trump’s supporters shifted to Biden, while 4 percent went into the undecided camp. (Some voters also shifted away from Biden, but not as many.)
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Perhaps most encouraging for Biden, about one-quarter of voters who had previously gone from Biden 2020 to Trump 2024 are now back with Biden in 2024. And he gained especially with the young, non-White and disengaged voters — the very voters that have proved the most troubling for him.
Other polls conducted before and after the verdict suggest between no change and a two-point shift toward Biden.
The shifts are quite a bit smaller than pretrial polls suggested they could be. It’s also possible some of these shifts owe to other factors and/or won’t hold up over time. But in a close race like this, every inch matters.
The sentence looms large
We’ll find out July 11 what Trump’s sentence will be and whether he’ll actually go to prison.
On the one hand, the polls show a prison sentence would push more voters away from Trump than a mere conviction. On the other, Americans appear to lean against a prison sentence in this case — 51-46 percent in a Reuters/Ipsos poll and 45-38 in the CBS News/YouGov poll.
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It’s possible such a sentence could send a signal about the severity of Trump’s crime to those who haven’t paid close attention to the trial. It’s also possible voters could view it as overkill in a case they never regarded as being particularly serious.
The lesson, as always: Stay tuned. The potential 2024 impacts are hardly cemented.
Another moment you need to watch
While not strictly about the 2024 election, nobody should lose sight of what’s happening inside the Trump movement after the verdict. That’s because we saw on Jan. 6, 2021, how that can filter down and have serious consequences — political and otherwise.
To wit:
- Trump loyalists are pledging to prosecute Democrats and prosecutors in retaliation.
- The House GOP is stepping up its efforts to claim the “weaponization” of the justice system and the government — despite those efforts not having borne much fruit.
- Trump isn’t exactly discouraging them, despite Fox News host Sean Hannity on Wednesday night trying to not-subtly nudge Trump in that direction. In fact, Trump keeps suggestively citing how people might not take it anymore.
- The discourse in some corners of the MAGA movement is even more extreme, including allusions to “war” and unrest, and reported efforts to dox jurors and others involved in convicting Trump.
All of this comes after Trump recently falsely claimed the FBI targeted him for assassination. Former Trump White House lawyer Ty Cobb on Wednesday calling such claims “dangerous” and “incendiary,” adding “heaven forbid that somebody in law enforcement gets killed.”
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It’s difficult to see how that doesn’t boil over in some form. And it could be one of the more significant x-factors in the 2024 election.
A momentous chart
58 percent, 23 percent, 14 percent
The first number is the percentage of Republicans who said in April YouGov polling that a felon should not be allowed to serve as president.
The second is the percentage who said so as of this weekend, after Trump’s guilty verdict.
The third is the percentage who say so in the latest Economist/YouGov poll this week.
And that’s not the only issue on which Republicans have significantly shifted their views on Trump, presidents and crime. For more, see my piece here.
Take a moment to read:
- “A new poll shows why to be skeptical of voters changing their minds” (Washington Post)
- “Biden’s risky asylum crackdown gambit” (Washington Post)
- “GOP plans aggressive ‘weaponization’ investigations in wake of Trump conviction” (Washington Post)
- “A Republican Election Clerk vs. Trump Die-Hards in a World of Lies” (New York Times)
- “Trump’s VP search accelerates” (NBC News)
- “Merrick Garland was Biden’s consensus pick. Now everyone hates him.” (Politico)
