How Trump's conviction will — and won't — impact his 2024 chances

Donald Trump looking somber in a blue tie

June 1, 2024 3 AM PT

WASHINGTON — For months, political analysts, oddsmakers and partisan strategists have speculated about how a criminal conviction of former President Trump might affect the presidential race.

Now, after a New York jury found Trump guilty on 34 counts connected to the payment of hush money to a porn actor, we’re about to find out.

Here are a few thoughts on what to expect and what to look for.

Be skeptical of hypotheticals

In the weeks leading up to Trump’s New York trial, a lot of polls asked voters how they would respond if Trump were convicted. Those polls suggest what common sense would tell you — President Biden would gain, at least somewhat.

In the primaries, Trump benefited from his criminal indictments because they rallied his supporters and shielded him from criticism by rival candidates.

But in a general election, a criminal conviction is still a problem, even for Trump.

Beware of taking the poll numbers too literally, however. Voters aren’t good at predicting how they will react to a hypothetical event — the human mind doesn’t work that way.

The value of those polls is mostly directional. They suggest that a conviction will cause Trump to lose some support — maybe enough to matter in a close race — but that voters don’t necessarily switch over to siding with Biden. Instead, they mostly shift to undecided, as Nathaniel Rakich showed in a recent analysis on the 538 site.

The conviction will surprise many voters

The sort of news that has the biggest impact on people’s votes involves events that they didn’t expect to see. This qualifies: Most voters were not expecting Trump to be convicted.

The most recent New York Times/Sienna College poll, for example, found that only 35% of voters in battleground states expected Trump to be convicted. Just over half expected him to be found not guilty.

Other polls found similar results: Most Americans said they believed Trump had violated the law, but most also thought he would get away with it — after all, he always has.

The fact that a jury has now found him guilty will come as a surprise to a lot of voters. That’s especially true of those who don’t pay much attention to news. And surprises can have a big impact, especially on people who don’t already have strong feelings about the candidates.

Low-information voters matter a lot

Trump’s conviction probably won’t change very many minds among people who regularly watch MSNBC, Fox or CNN.

The sorts of voters who pay a lot of attention to politics and public affairs — the people who know who Michael Cohen is and how David Pecker figures into the hush money case — are overwhelmingly the types of people who have strongly partisan views. That’s why they pay attention.

They’re not the voters who decide close elections.

Those who do — the people who can swing back and forth between the parties — are mostly folks who tune out politics and public events in general.

Political strategists refer to them as low-information voters because they don’t have a great deal of knowledge of who the candidates are or what they stand for. That doesn’t mean they’re unintelligent or ignorant. It means they’ve chosen to focus their attention on other aspects of life.

But many still vote — especially in presidential races. They’re the voters to watch in the weeks to come.

Don’t expect big shifts

The race between Trump and Biden was very close before Trump’s conviction. It’s almost surely going to be close afterward.

A lot of people — especially many liberal Democrats — consistently have had trouble wrapping their minds around that basic fact.

Ever since Trump first entered electoral politics almost nine years ago, some of his ardent opponents have believed that a single event — the “Access Hollywood” tape, the Mueller investigation, the chaotic response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a criminal case — would disqualify Trump in the minds of most voters.

That hasn’t happened and almost certainly won’t now.

We live in a highly polarized political era in which partisans on both sides vote against the other party as much as — sometimes more than — they vote for the candidate on their own side. That’s doubly true with Trump, who inspires deep loyalty from his supporters and intense loathing from his foes.

The vast majority of voters in this election — well over 80% — made up their minds long ago.

It’s hard to know what could change their vote; this won’t.

When to look at what to look for

Don’t expect reliable numbers overnight or over the weekend. Swing voters not only don’t pay a lot of attention to news, they’re also hard to poll. Moreover, when a big event hits, it affects who will respond to polls. In this case, Democrats likely will be enthusiastic and more likely to respond while Trump supporters may refuse to participate.

Compensating for that problem, what pollsters refer to as non-response bias, takes time and is tricky.

So reliable numbers about the effect of Thursday’s conviction probably won’t be available until at least late next week.

When the polls come, expect to see some improvement in Biden’s numbers — not a huge shift, but something measurable.

If nothing changes, that will be a very bad sign for the Democrats. It would indicate that swing voters have such reservations about Biden that even a major shock isn’t enough to change their votes.

Whether any improvement for Biden will last is another question. Perhaps voters upset over inflation or Biden’s age will drift back to Trump over time. For now, however, Trump’s conviction should set a new baseline that will prevail until the next major event — the scheduled June 27 debate on CNN.

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