Disengaged Voters Did Not Immediately Respond to Guilty Verdict by Abandoning Trump
But then again, they’re not engaged.
A big question is looming after Donald Trump’s felony conviction in a scheme to hide hush money payments to pornographic actress Stormy Daniels: Will it break through to so-called low-information (or disengaged) voters, who don’t follow current events closely? Trump’s support among these voters has been strong recently, but there was reason to believe that they were more likely to change their preference in response to a guilty verdict than were voters who were already plugged in to the news.
As of Monday afternoon, three national polls of registered voters, conducted entirely after the verdict, have been released.
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Reuters/Ipsos found Biden leading Trump 41–39, a slight shift from the 40–40 tie it reported three weeks ago. (With a margin of error of +/- 2.1 percentage points, that’s still basically a tie.)
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Forbes/HarrisX found Trump leading 51–49, a slight shift from the 50–50 tie it found in late March. (The poll’s margin of error is +/- 3.1 percentage points. The reason those numbers are higher than Reuters/Ipsos’ is that they include “leaners,” who aren’t fully certain of their candidate choice.)
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Morning Consult’s postverdict survey found Biden leading 45–44, a shift from the result of its previous weekly tracking poll (a 44–42 Trump lead) but still effectively a tie.
Add everything together, and Trump’s lead over Biden in the RealClearPolitics polling average has moved ever so slightly from 0.9 percent on the morning of the verdict to 0.5 percent as of Monday afternoon. What a roller coaster!
These polls, as well as others that are focused on just the verdict, have found that most Americans believe that the jury’s decision was justified. ABC News/Ipsos found that 50 percent of respondents said that it was the “correct” verdict, as opposed to 27 percent who said that it wasn’t (and 23 percent who said they didn’t know). Morning Consult respondents “approved” of the result of the trial by a margin of 54–34, and a CBS News poll, which didn’t allow respondents to answer “not sure,” found that 57 percent felt that it was the right verdict, against 43 percent who felt that it was the wrong one.
Long story short, American voters find it quite plausible that Donald Trump committed the crime that the jury convicted him of. This has translated into a teensy-weensy sliver of a polling shift away from Trump and toward Biden, a trend that may continue as word of the verdict seeps out to low-info voters via watercooler conversations, social media memes, and carrier pigeons. (ABC/Ipsos found that 45 percent of respondents said they’d been following Trump trial news “not so closely” or “not closely at all.”)
The incumbent president’s bigger problem remains that many swing voters think of him as a 6-foot-tall walking manifestation of inflation—although, on that front, Walmart and McDonald’s did just announce that they’re planning to cut prices on certain items. Moral values or value-meal prices: Which are more important to the United States electorate? (The answer is value-meal prices.)
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