For more than a year, Donald Trump’s narrow but consistent lead over Joe Biden in the polls has been accompanied by an invisible asterisk. Dozens of indictments against Trump have done little to hurt his campaign in 2023, but polls suggest a criminal conviction could change the race.
For example, in early April, the polling firm YouGov asked what was then still a hypothetical question: Should a convicted felon be allowed to become president? More than two-thirds of respondents (including a majority of Republicans) said no. In the same poll, more than a third of Republicans said they would not elect a felon as president “under any circumstances.” Another poll found that a conviction would cut Trump’s 1-point lead to 5 points.
Or maybe not. The Republican who said he wouldn’t lose voters if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue is now convicted of 34 felonies and has lost only a small amount of support. In the weeks since a New York jury found Trump guilty of hush-money fraud, Biden may have gained a point or two in some national polls, but experts say the ruling has had virtually no effect on the race. “It had virtually no impact in any meaningful way,” says Drew Linzer, executive director and co-founder of Civiqs, an online polling company.
Pollsters said they weren’t surprised by the small impact of the conviction, largely because public views of Biden and Trump were already so deeply entrenched. In fact, polling averages were more stable throughout the campaign than in previous elections (though Biden’s widely criticized performance in last week’s debate threatened that stability).
The Biden campaign initially made little mention of Trump’s conviction, which came on May 30. But as the race leveled off in the weeks that followed, Biden shifted his strategy. “The only person on this stage with a criminal record is the one I’m looking at right now,” the president told Trump during the debate, one of the most cleanly delivered lines of the night. Biden may be able to remind voters of Trump’s conviction, but it will be much harder to get them to vote because of it.
Relying on hypothetical questions in polls is tricky, Taylor Orth, YouGov’s head of survey data journalism, told me. “You have to be healthy skeptical about what people say they will do, and not treat it as a prediction of what’s actually going to happen,” she said. “People’s views can change.”
Relying on hypothetical questions about a major presidential candidate being a convicted criminal is trickier because historical comparisons are hard to come by. The closest example might be Bill Clinton's impeachment 25 years ago. When a CBS News poll in late 1998 asked whether Clinton should remain in office if the House voted to impeach him, 41 percent of respondents said he should resign. But according to an analysis by pollster Mark Blumenthal, that number dropped to 31 percent if the Republican-controlled House actually impeached him.
Clinton and her Democratic allies succeeded in convincing many voters that impeachment was a partisan exercise. Trump pursued a similar strategy. With the near-total support of Republican leaders, he worked tirelessly to discredit himself and the prosecutors who brought the charges, falsely accusing Biden of orchestrating the whole thing. “He indicted me because I was his opponent,” Trump said during the debate.
Trump’s conviction changed views about the criminal justice system more than about him. In the days after the verdict, YouGov asked again: Should a convicted felon be allowed to become president? This time, less than a quarter of Republicans said no, and only 14% said they would never vote for a felon. Republicans were also more likely to say Trump’s actions were acceptable and legal, and more likely to express doubts that the wealthy and powerful get fair trials. In contrast, YouGov’s polling on the election itself barely moved.
In a close race, even small changes in the polls matter, and Biden saw a slight uptick after Trump was convicted. The New York Times The paper conducted a poll immediately after the conviction, re-interviewing people it had surveyed before the conviction. Overall, Trump's lead shrank from 3 points to 1 point. Five Thirty EightAccording to an average of national polls, Biden briefly surpassed Trump for the first time this year, trailing him by about 1.5 percentage points in the weeks after the conviction (but before the debates).
Likewise, a poll by Canadian firm Leger conducted before the conviction showed Trump ahead of Biden by one point. A poll released last week had Biden ahead by a narrow margin, 45 percent to 43 percent. “That’s not a huge margin overall,” said Andrew Enns, Leger’s executive director. “But the way the last two elections have gone, you don’t need that much of a margin.” A Fox News poll showed Biden improving even more, but a Quinnipiac University poll found that Biden had improved even more. The New York Times/Siena College found that after President Trump was convicted, the scandal began to catch up with him.
The damage Trump has suffered from the verdict may be temporary. The reaction to Thursday night’s debate immediately overwhelmed the coverage of his legal troubles. Democrats are bracing for a plunge in Biden’s popular support, but it may be more stable than they feared, for the same reason Trump’s conviction did not reset the race. Just as most voters already considered Trump’s failures as a husband and businessman, they already thought Biden was too old, and told pollsters as much.
Last month, Biden’s reelection team announced a $50 million ad campaign to highlight the convictions. In one TV ad, a narrator calls Trump a “convicted criminal” and is meant to highlight other legal charges against Trump, such as the alleged sexual abuse of columnist E. Jean Carroll. “What the Biden campaign is probably hoping is that by doing it over and over again, they’ll actually teach people to associate Trump with a convicted criminal,” said Chris Jackson, director of polling at the nonpartisan research firm Ipsos.
An aggressive ad campaign may be the best Biden can do to remind voters of Trump’s conviction first and foremost. But pollsters say the effect, like the verdict itself, is likely to be minimal. “Almost every American knows what they think of Donald Trump, and they know whether they believe he’s a criminal or not,” Jackson said. “And I don’t think the verdict actually changes that much.”