A Morning Consult survey finds:
- Over half of voters (54%) approve of the 12 jurors’ historic decision to convict the former president on 34 felony charges related to a 2016 hush-money scheme with adult actress Stormy Daniels. A similar share believes Trump committed a crime.
- Our Friday survey showed that just 15% of Republican voters nationwide want Trump to drop his White House bid, a bit higher than the 8% of Trump supporters who said the same. That figure among the larger GOP electorate is in line with the share of potential Republican primary voters who supported his last remaining challenger, Nikki Haley, at the end of her campaign.
- Roughly half of voters said they would oppose the former president’s imprisonment for his 34 class E felonies. The most popular option (at 69%) would be fining Trump, followed by another 49% who would put him on probation.
To understand the significance of those numbers, I’d need to know their overlap with those who favored a candidate other than Trump before the verdict. There are, after all, a lot of people who simultaneously prefer someone other than Trump be the next President and yet plan to vote for Trump because he’s the only viable non-Biden candidate.
What we need to know—and, presumably, other polling will show this in time—is how many previously-committed Trump voters will now either stay home or switch their vote to Biden now that their guy is a convicted felon. My suspicion is that number is much, much lower than it should be in the abstract. Given how tight the margins are in the swing states, it might well nonetheless be high enough to make a difference.
