Democrats aren’t guaranteed victory if Trump is convicted
Former President Donald Trump is continuing his best run of polling in the nearly nine years he has been running for office six months before the election, but Democrats have long expected a criminal conviction to erase his lead.
Democrats may want to start thinking about Plan B in case even this result fails to derail the Trump train.
That’s not to say with any certainty that Trump would survive a conviction in the hush money case or any other prosecutors are able to sneak in ahead of November. There are plenty of polls that support the theory it would be a campaign-altering event, including one by the New York Times and Siena College last year that found a quarter of his own voters thought Republicans shouldn’t nominate him if he is found guilty of a crime.
“Convicted felon” would likely replace “former president” in front of Trump’s name in every Democratic attack ad.
But the polling since Trump’s New York trial began should introduce some doubt. He has led or been tied with President Joe Biden in five of six national polls released in that time frame. Trump is ahead in the RealClearPolitics polling average nationally and in every battleground state. Surveys also suggest people are tuning out the Trump trial.
Trump’s leads aren’t particularly big, either nationally or in most of the battlegrounds (though Democrats should be concerned he might be pulling away in the Sunbelt states). But they have been consistent and fairly durable, no matter what else has happened in the campaign.
This is a race between two candidates who have already been president. It’s possible hardly anything that happens between now and Election Day will matter much.
Trump’s poll numbers have also survived multiple adverse legal outcomes already. It is well known that the indictments boosted him with Republican primary voters. It is also true that the E. Jean Carroll verdict, the judgment that he inflated his asset values, and other unfavorable judicial rulings have been handed down without making him less competitive in the general election.
Then there was the recent CNN poll that found four out of five Trump voters who might desert him if he’s convicted said they would not consider voting for Biden. That’s not much of a windfall for the Democrats.
This is consistent with an NBC News poll earlier this year, which showed Trump leading by 5 points among registered voters nationally. When asked about a Trump conviction, the result flips to a 2-point Biden lead.
Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1 points in 2016, and we all remember how that turned out. That’s also assuming the result would even hold if the hypothetical became reality.
“Republican pollster Bill McInturff, the GOP half of the bipartisan group of pollsters who conduct the NBC News survey, cautions that the sliver of voters who shift on these two ballots — 55 in total out of 1,000 interviews — hold overwhelmingly negative opinions about Biden, and they also prefer a Republican-controlled Congress by more than 60 points,” the network’s Mark Murray writes.
Trump has already been impeached twice, lost the 2020 election, and presided over — some would say instigated — the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Yet he keeps on ticking.
Every Republican who challenged Trump for the nomination was to some extent betting on his legal situation to take him off the board. It did not happen.
Democrats would be wise to take a less passive approach than Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) or, until quite late, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.
It’s possible that no one can predict how voters would respond to a Trump conviction, perhaps least of all the voters themselves. Such an unprecedented event might have to be experienced to be understood. The fact of his conviction or the staring down the possibility of incarceration could be a watershed event.
Surely Trump’s prospects are better if this trial ends in an acquittal.
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Nevertheless, Trump has survived numerous things that would have ended virtually anyone else’s political career. Contrast Trump’s electoral standing with that of indicted Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), whose own party is ready to move on.
Trump, who famously boasted he could shoot people on Fifth Avenue without losing votes, could bring new meaning to the phrase “conviction politician.”
