Polling Shows Most Americans Think Trump is a Criminal & GOP Voters Don't Care
The 2024 race is still closer than it should be
The findings of a recent Quinnipiac poll illustrate how challenging it is to understand public opinion when it comes to politics. Horserace polls are easy for people to choose. Issue or character polling is quite different. This survey has both.
In the Quinnipiac poll, 57% of Americans, including 55% of Independents, think criminal charges against Trump should disqualify him from running for president again. This survey also asked voters some horserace questions. Despite 57% thinking Trump should be disqualified from even running, Biden gets just 48% of the vote against Trump, who gets 46%. What gives?
Issue polling is not helpful with candidate preference. There are a number of reasons why. The most important might be that candidates are not single-issue entities. Voters may disagree with a candidate on, say, gun control, but like her positions on abortion and taxes. However, wouldn’t thinking someone is a criminal and should be disqualified from running cause a voter to not vote for that person? Apparently not. It’s possible that quite a number of the respondents in the Quinnipiac poll really think the criminal charges against Trump are disqualifying, but if he’s on the ballot they will choose him over Biden. Even though it sounds unprincipled, it is a pragmatic view of politics in our duopoly.1
Second, voters do poorly in attributing candidate positions. Why would a working class voter who sincerely wants to see more help to workers rather than tax cuts for corporations vote for Mitch McConnell or Donald Trump? It may be because other issues are actually more important to this voter, but we have seen enough to know that many voters cannot - or simply will not - make the effort to ensure their actions are consistent with their stated preferences.
Activists often see political success in issue polling that supports their issues, even though we have plenty of evidence that what people say about issues does not translate into political action at the polls – and not just with candidate elections, in which the reasons for supporting one person over another can be very complex, but with ballot questions that put the issue polling to the test.
You can read more about why issue polling does not always translate into support at the polls for either candidates or ballot questions here and here.
In other related polling news, we can see that how the criminal charges against Trump in New York are impacting public opinion of the former president as he attempts to regain the job. Former Attorney General Bill Barr said in a Fox News interview that “savvy” Democratic operatives are cheering the indictment because they know it will be good for Trump. Other Republicans had “warned” ahead of the indictment that it would be good Trump politically. The reason, according to Barr, that these savvy Democrats are cheering something that they believe will help Trump is that they – and Barr, apparently – believe Trump will lose the general election if he’s the GOP nominee. We know have polling evidence that the indictment is both good and bad for Trump.
Since the indictment, Trump has gained ground on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his only serious challenger for the nomination at the moment. If the 2024 primaries were held today, Trump would almost certainly win the nomination. It appears the indictment has solidified support for Trump among GOP voters. The problem for Trump, however, is those votes are not enough for him to win the general election and those voters are the only ones rushing to his side.
ABC News/Ipsos released a poll this morning that shows Independents have moved significantly to the position that Trump “should have been charged with a crime” since his arraignment (from 40% on April 1 to 54% today) and that 57% believe that he “intentionally did something illegal.” Overall, Trump’s approval rating is 25%! While this poll does not contain any horserace questions, we can extrapolate that there should also be a trend away from supporting Trump in the general election from this data.
Interestingly, nearly half of Independents in this survey think the charges against Trump are politically motivated – as do 16% of Democrats. Yet, many of these voters also think Trump did commit crimes and should be charged with them. What this tells me is that voters are not as dumb as pundits often assume they are. They understand that two seemingly contradictory things can be true – which they can be (although personally I don’t think Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s decision to indict Trump was done for political motives; my guess is he would rather not have to deal with this at all).
What the Ipsos findings suggest is that a criminal indictment – even one that a lot of voters think is politically motivated, yet legally warranted – is a serious political problem for Trump. When the outcomes of the Georgia and DOJ grand juries occur, this can only make things worse for Trump.2 While it may turn out to be the case that folks begin to tune out the indictments and criminal behavior, it doesn’t seem likely. No matter what he does, Trump’s supporters will support him. It is a cult; and the more we learn about Trump and the stronger his base supports him, this label becomes more and more accurate to describe the MAGA phenomenon. The problem for Republicans is that they cannot win without the support of Independents. And the chances for that support – which have been low since the 2018 midterms – seems to be evaporating.
The only certain way to disqualify Trump from running again under the US Constitution is through impeachment and conviction. It is possible that states could refuse to place his name on the ballot under the anti-insurrectionary clause (section 3 of the 14th Amendment), but that is both unlikely and legally unclear - despite a North Carolina court ruling the state had the authority to do so in the case of former Rep. Madison Cawthorne. Aside from either of those things happening, Trump can run and hold the presidency even if he is incarcerated.