{"id":476,"date":"2024-06-07T10:30:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-07T10:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/?p=476"},"modified":"2025-02-21T19:19:31","modified_gmt":"2025-02-21T19:19:31","slug":"trumps-felony-conviction-has-hurt-him-in-the-polls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/07\/trumps-felony-conviction-has-hurt-him-in-the-polls\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s felony conviction has hurt him in the polls"},"content":{"rendered":"
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These headlines seem to have had an impact. | Andrew Lichtenstein\/Corbis via Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Donald Trump has been a convicted felon<\/a> for a little over a week and he has already lost a small but significant chunk of support, according to the polls. <\/p>\n

In recent days, the New York Times and Sienna College recontacted 2,000 voters who had taken their surveys previously and found Trump\u2019s advantage among that sample had declined by one point<\/a> following his conviction for falsifying business records. The presumptive GOP nominee had led Joe Biden by three points before the jury\u2019s verdict, but now bested the president by just two. <\/p>\n

A similar recontacting study<\/a> by the Republican firm Echelon Insights yielded the same basic result, with respondents giving Biden a two-point lead over Trump after previously splitting their support evenly between the two candidates. A Reuters\/Ipsos poll<\/a> taken immediately after Trump\u2019s conviction showed Biden leading with 41 percent of the vote to his rival\u2019s 39 percent. The last survey taken by the pollster before the jury\u2019s verdict had shown the race tied. <\/p>\n

These shifts were not outside the margins of error in the Reuters\/Ipsos and Echelon Insights surveys, while the Times\u2019s pollsters said that they could not calculate such a margin for their recontacting survey. Nevertheless, the fact that the same shift was recorded across three different surveys lends credence to its validity. <\/p>\n

RealClearPolitics\u2019s polling average<\/a>, meanwhile, shows a smaller but non-negligible dip in Trump\u2019s support: On the day of the verdict, Trump led Biden by 0.9 percent; by June 6, that had dropped to 0.5 percent.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s good reason to think that Trump has taken a hit from several days of headlines about his criminal efforts to conceal an affair with adult film actress Stormy Daniels. But it\u2019s less clear whether this shift toward Biden will fade or snowball in the months between now and Election Day.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, major news stories often trigger polling spikes that dissipate when a new shiny object captures the media\u2019s attention. And historically, this has been especially true of scandalous headlines about Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, Trump\u2019s lead over Biden has long rested on a shaky foundation<\/a>: In many polls, the Republican has owed his advantage to unusually high support among politically disengaged, Democratic-leaning voters. There\u2019s always been cause to suspect that these voters would eventually find their way back into Biden\u2019s camp, and the available data indicates that Trump\u2019s conviction might have served as a catalyst for returning this bloc to the Democratic fold.  <\/p>\n

Previous Trump scandals damaged his political standing only temporarily<\/h2>\n

Trump\u2019s invincibility to the taint of scandal is often overstated. He is unusually unpopular<\/a> for a Republican politician and underperformed his party in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, when House Republicans\u2019 share of the vote nationwide far exceeded Trump\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, it is the case that Trump has repeatedly seen his approval decline in the immediate aftermath of a reputationally damaging event, only to regain this lost ground in fairly short order.<\/p>\n

Consider the Access Hollywood<\/em> tape. One month before the 2016 presidential election, the Washington Post published a video<\/a> in which Trump told a host of that TV program that when he saw attractive women, \u201cI don\u2019t even wait. And when you\u2019re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab \u2019em by the pussy. You can do anything.\u201d In the audio, the Christian right\u2019s champion also touted his attempts to seduce a married woman.<\/p>\n

On the day that tape was published, Trump trailed Clinton by 4.7 points in RealClearPolitics\u2019s polling<\/a> average. A little over a week later, Clinton\u2019s lead had swelled to 7.1. <\/p>\n

And yet, by Election Day, Clinton\u2019s polling advantage had declined to 3.2 points, and her actual margin in the popular vote was just two. It\u2019s plausible that the rapid decline of the Access Hollywood<\/em> tape\u2019s salience reflected the reopening of the FBI\u2019s investigation into Hillary Clinton\u2019s email server on October 28, 2016, as well as Wikileaks\u2019 release of emails linked to her campaign chairman John Podesta on October 7. But this just underscores the fact that emerging news stories can erase the political relevance of older ones.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s political rebound after January 6 might be even more telling. On that day in 2021, Trump\u2019s net disapproval was 10.8 points in FiveThirtyEight\u2019s polling average<\/a>. Two weeks after he instigated an insurrection at the US Capitol, his net disapproval hit 19.3 points. But by June of that year, it was back down to 11.7. Today, Americans disapprove of Trump by a 12.3-point margin.<\/p>\n

The dip in Trump\u2019s support since his conviction is much smaller than those he suffered after the Access Hollywood<\/em> tape or the January 6 insurrection. Indeed, it\u2019s so small that it could be illusory, a reflection of what pollsters call \u201cnonresponse bias\u201d: When bad news comes out about a politician, voters who oppose them often become more eager to discuss politics (and thus more likely to take a pollster\u2019s call) while voters who support the embattled candidate become less interested in such discussions. This can produce shifts in polling that don\u2019t actually reflect changes in support. <\/p>\n

Recontact surveys like those conducted by the Times and Echelon Insights try to account for this by polling the exact same pool of respondents. Inevitably, though, some previously polled voters don\u2019t take the follow-up survey while others do. Partisanship can potentially influence who does or doesn\u2019t stay in the sample.<\/p>\n

This said, it seems more likely than not that there has been some genuine movement toward Biden, but given the small scale of the shift, it would not be surprising if it faded over time, especially if Trump manages to escape a prison sentence. In the estimation of Republican pollster Kristin Soltis Anderson, some Trump-leaning voters might have a harder time<\/a> backing a GOP candidate facing a prison sentence than one whose felony merely resulted in a fine. <\/p>\n

The Trump conviction brought some disaffected Democrats back into Biden\u2019s corner<\/h2>\n

There is another way to interpret the post-conviction polls. <\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s lead in national surveys has rested on an extraordinary degree of support from various Democratic-leaning<\/a> demographic groups. In 2020, Biden won voters under 30 by 23 points, Hispanic voters by 35, and Black ones by 79, according to the Democratic data firm Catalist<\/a>. A recent Fox News poll showed Trump leading Biden by 10 with young voters, trailing him by only 36 with Black voters, and by only 5 with Hispanic ones.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s support within these demographics has been concentrated among the politically disengaged. In the Times\u2019s most recent polling, Biden leads Trump among voters who cast a ballot in 2020 by two points, while trailing him among those who sat out that election by 14<\/a>. And the Biden 2020 voters who\u2019ve been most likely to defect to Trump in the polls have been those who pay relatively little attention to politics and did not cast a ballot in the 2022 midterms<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t the sturdiest foundation for a majority coalition. Beyond the fact that, by definition, low-propensity voters can\u2019t be relied on to turn out on Election Day, historically Democratic voters who say they support Trump but aren\u2019t paying much attention to politics would seem especially likely to switch allegiances once they actually tune in. After all, such voters have no longstanding ideological or identity-based reservations about supporting the Democratic Party. And virtually all the reasons for a voter to prefer Biden over Trump in 2020 still apply in 2024. <\/p>\n

It therefore isn\u2019t entirely surprising that, in its recontact poll following Trump\u2019s conviction, the Times found<\/a> that the shift toward Biden was \u201cespecially pronounced among the young, nonwhite and disengaged Democratic-leaning voters who have propelled Mr. Trump to a lead in the early polls.\u201d Of those respondents who had previously told the paper that they voted for Biden in 2020 but were going to back Trump in 2024, roughly a quarter said that they are now planning to vote for Biden in November.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s margins with young and nonwhite voters looked a bit suspect. It would be extremely unusual for a party to gain so much support from historically unfavorable demographic groups in just four years. And this would be all the stranger in an election where both parties were running the same presidential candidates as last time.<\/p>\n

Given that reality, there\u2019s reason to suspect that Biden\u2019s post-conviction gains may stick, less because the Republican nominee\u2019s conviction has had a transformative impact on public opinion than because it prompted discontented, disengaged Democratic voters to tune back in to politics for a moment and remember why they dislike Donald Trump. <\/p>\n

Ultimately, it\u2019s impossible to know whether last week\u2019s verdict will have a durable impact on the 2024 race. Trump\u2019s legal woes could lose salience in the weeks and months ahead while other concerns come to the forefront. If Biden\u2019s debate performance later this month affirms the electorate\u2019s suspicions about his senility, then that may restore Trump\u2019s margins with the president\u2019s historically Democratic skeptics. <\/p>\n

For the moment, though, it looks as though Trump\u2019s conviction may have hastened disaffected, disengaged Democrats along their path back to Biden\u2019s coalition.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

These headlines seem to have had an impact. | Andrew Lichtenstein\/Corbis via Getty Images Donald Trump has been a convicted felon for a little over a week and he has already lost a small but significant chunk of support, according to the polls.  In recent days, the New York Times and Sienna College recontacted 2,000…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":478,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trump-investigations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":479,"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476\/revisions\/479"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/audiomateria.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}