Donald Trump has been a convict for more than a week, and he’s already lost a small but significant chunk of support, according to polls.
In recent days, the New York Times and Siena College re-contacted 2,000 voters who had previously taken their survey and found that Trump’s favorability had declined among the sample. by a point After his conviction for falsifying business records. The presumptive GOP nominee led Joe Biden by three points before the jury’s verdict, but now leads the president by just two points.
of the same kind Re-communicate the study The same basic results were found by Republican firm Echelon Insights, with respondents giving Biden a two-point lead over Trump after previously splitting their support evenly between the two candidates. A Reuters/Ipsos poll Taken immediately after Trump’s conviction, Biden was ahead with 41 percent of the vote to his rival’s 39 percent. The race was tied in the last poll taken by pollsters before the jury’s verdict.
Those changes were not outside the margin of error in the Reuters/Ipsos and Echelon Insights surveys, while The Times pollsters said they could not calculate such a margin for their re-contact survey. Nevertheless, the fact that the same migration was recorded in three different studies attests to its validity.
RealClear Politics Vote average, meanwhile, shows a small but non-negligible dip in Trump’s support: On Judgment Day, Trump led Biden by 0.9 percentage points; By June 6, that had fallen to 0.5 percent.
There’s good reason to believe Trump took a hit from days of headlines about his criminal attempt to cover up an affair with adult film actress Stormy Daniels. But it’s less clear whether this shift toward Biden will fade or snowball in the months between now and Election Day.
On the one hand, major news stories often trigger polling spikes that dissipate when a new shiny object catches the media’s attention. And historically, this has been especially true of scandalous headlines about Donald Trump.
On the other hand, Trump’s lead over Biden has long rested A shaky foundation: In many polls, the Republican owes his advantage to unusually high support among politically disengaged, Democratic-leaning voters. There was always reason to doubt that these voters would eventually find their way back to Biden’s camp, and available data suggests that Trump’s conviction could act as a catalyst to bring this bloc back into the Democratic fold.
Earlier Trump scandals temporarily damaged his political standing
Trump’s invincibility over scandal is often overstated. he Unusually unpopular for a Republican politician and his party underperformed in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, while House Republicans nationwide had a much larger share of the vote than Trump.
Nevertheless, it is the case that Trump has repeatedly seen his approval rating plummet in the immediate aftermath of a reputationally damaging event, only to regain this lost ground in fairly short order.
consider Access Hollywood Tape The Washington Post a month before the 2016 presidential election released a video Where Trump told a host of that TV show that when he sees attractive women, “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” .” In the audio, the Christian rights champion also recounts his attempts to seduce a married woman.
On the day the tapes were released, Trump trailed Clinton by 4.7 points Polling by RealClearPolitics A little more than a week after the average, Clinton’s lead had swelled to 7.1.
And yet, on Election Day, Clinton’s polling advantage dropped to 3.2 points, and her actual margin in the popular vote was just two. It is believable that the rapid decline Access Hollywood On October 28, 2016, WikiLeaks re-opened the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server, as well as the October 7 release of emails linked to her campaign chairman, John Podesta. Delete the political relevance of the elderly.
Trump’s political comeback after January 6 is even more telling. On that day in 2021, Trump’s net disapproval rating was 10.8 points FiveThirtyEight’s voting average. Two weeks after he incited a riot in the US Capitol, his net disapproval reached 19.3 points. But by June of that year it had fallen back to 11.7. Today, Americans disapprove of Trump by a 12.3-point margin.
Much less than he suffered after his conviction in support of Trump Access Hollywood tape or the January 6 Uprising. In fact, it’s so small that it might be illusory, a reflection of what pollsters call “nonresponse bias”: when bad news comes out about a politician, voters who oppose them often become more interested in discussing the policy (and thus accepting them. The likelihood is greater (pollster’s call) when voters who support a confused candidate are less interested in such discussions. This can lead to changes in polling that do not actually reflect changes in support.
Recontact surveys, such as those conducted by the Times and Echelon Insights, attempt to account for this by polling the exact same pool of respondents. Inevitably, however, some previously surveyed voters do not take the follow-up survey while others do. Grouping can potentially affect who is or is not in the sample.
That said, there doesn’t appear to have been any real movement toward Biden, but given the small scale of the change, it wouldn’t be surprising if it faded over time, especially if Trump manages to avoid a prison sentence. According to Republican pollster Christine Soltis Anderson, some Trump-leaning voters may Have a hard time Supporting a GOP candidate is serving a prison sentence more than someone whose crime only resulted in a fine.
Trump’s conviction has drawn some disgruntled Democrats back into Biden’s corner
There is another way to interpret the post-conviction vote.
Trump’s lead in national surveys rests on extraordinary levels of support from various Democratic-at-risk demographic groups. In 2020, Biden won among voters under 30 by 23 points, Hispanic voters by 35 and blacks by 79, according to the Democratic data firm. influencer. A recent Fox News poll found Trump leading Biden by 10 points among young voters, trailing him by just 36 points among black voters and just 5 points among Hispanic voters.
Trump’s support among these demographics is concentrated among the politically isolated. In a recent Times poll, Biden leads Trump by two points among voters likely to vote in 2020, while trailing him among them. Opt that out by 2 p.m. And the Biden 2020 voters who erred most in favor of Trump in the polls are those who pay relatively little attention to politics and Did not cast a ballot in the 2022 midterms.
This is not the strongest basis for a majority coalition. Beyond the fact that, by definition, low-propensity voters can’t be relied upon on Election Day, historically Democratic voters who say they support Trump but don’t pay much attention to politics seem especially likely to switch allegiances once. They actually tune. After all, such voters have long had no ideological or identity-based reservations about supporting the Democratic Party. And virtually all the reasons why a voter would prefer Biden over Trump in 2020 still apply in 2024.
So it’s not entirely surprising that, in a survey of Trump’s re-contact after his conviction, the Times found That shift toward Biden was “particularly pronounced among young, white and disaffected Democratic-leaning voters who have driven Mr. Trump to the lead in early polls.” Among respondents who previously told the paper they voted for Biden in 2020 but were going to support Trump in 2024, nearly a quarter said they now plan to vote for Biden in November.
Trump’s margin with young and non-white voters seemed somewhat dubious. It would be highly unusual for a party to garner so much support in just four years from a historically hostile demographic group. And it will be all the stranger in an election where both parties are running the same presidential candidates as last time.
Given that reality, there’s reason to doubt that the gains could last after Biden’s conviction, less because the conviction of the Republican nominee had a transformative effect on public opinion than because it prompted disaffected, disengaged Democratic voters to return to politics for a moment, and remember why. They dislike Donald Trump.
Ultimately, it’s impossible to know whether last week’s ruling will have a lasting impact on the 2024 race. Trump’s legal problems may lose salience in the weeks and months ahead as other concerns come to the fore. If Biden’s debate performance later this month confirms voters’ suspicions about his aging, it could restore Trump’s margin with historically Democratic skeptics of the president.
For the moment, though, it looks like Trump’s conviction has accelerated disgruntled, disaffected Democrats on the way back to Biden’s coalition.
