A new Morning Consult poll found that 54% of voters agree with the jury’s decision to convict Donald Trump.
Read: The Republican Presumptive Nominee for President is A Convicted Felon
Morning Consult provided their survey results to PoliticusUSA, and here are a few highlights:
-53% of registered voters have seen, read or heard “a lot” about the New York jury’s decision to convict former President Donald Trump, on par with voters who said the same immediately following the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7.
– Over half (54%) of registered voters “strongly” or “somewhat” approve of the Jury’s decision, while 34% disapprove.
– 76% of Republican voters said the verdict made them less confident in the U.S. criminal justice system. Although 52% of voters believe the verdict was based on evidence that Trump committed a crime, 77% of Republican voters and 43% of independent voters believe the conviction was driven by motivation to damage his political career.
The Morning Consult Poll was an online survey, which is notoriously unreliable, but it did have a large sample size of 2,200 respondents.
Post Verdict Problems For Trump
Suppose these numbers are accurate that barely a majority of the country has heard a great deal about the trial and verdict. In that case, this is terrible news for Trump because Democrats and their aligned outside organizations have hundreds of millions to a billion dollars on hand to spread the word that Trump is a convicted felon.
The fact that a majority of Independents aren’t buying Trump’s claims that the trial and verdict are politically motivated is potentially devastating for Trump because he has not united the Republican Party. Trump can’t win the election with Independents, and if the majority of those voters think he is guilty, that is a huge problem for his campaign.
Trump still hasn’t unified the Republican Party, as Morning Consult also found that 15% of Republicans want Trump to end his presidential campaign. The percentage of Republicans who don’t support Trump has stubbornly remained at 15%-20%, and Donald Trump can’t win without the Republican Party united behind him.
In what is going to be a very close election, there is no early sign that Trump’s messaging on the verdict is getting through to anyone outside of his base in the GOP, but there is evidence that Democrats and their allies can use the verdict to make Trump unelectable.
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Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelorâs Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association