Q&A of the Day – What Will the Impact of Trump’s Guilty Verdict Be?

Q&A of the Day – What Will the Impact of Trump’s Guilty Verdict Be? 

Each day I feature a listener question sent by one of these methods.     

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Today’s Entry: Numerous listeners, family members and friends hit me up after the Trump verdict with variations of today’s question. What will the impact of Trump’s guilty verdict be?  

Bottom Line: Before jumping into analysis of the potential political impact of former President Trump’s guilty verdict on the presidential race let’s start with the knowns. 1) Sentencing is scheduled for July 11th. 2) The Trump legal team will appeal the decision of the New York state criminal case. That takes us to the current unknowns... 1) How exactly this will play out for Trump’s freedoms day-to-day until sentencing (if it gets there) and 2) How quickly might a court take this case up on appeal and what court might take this up on appeal. The two current avenues are the New York Court of Appeals and the United States Supreme Court. The Trump team is likely to petition both. The point is this. A lot can and potentially will change between now and Election Day regarding Trump’s new status as a convicted felon. Now for the analysis.  

Let’s start with this headline. According to the betting markets Donald Trump is still the favorite to win. Immediately following the guilty verdict betting markets began to reflect the impact of the verdict and the news as you might have expected wasn’t good for Donald Trump. Bettors who made moves on the verdict moved away from Donald Trump and towards Joe Biden...but not by much. Prior to the verdict coming in Donald Trump’s odds of winning were priced at 53%. Following the news he was priced with a 48% chance to win. But that’s better than it sounds. President Biden is still only being given a 37% chance of winning. Trump, even as a convicted felon, is still favored over Joe Biden by 11%. So that’s one piece of instant analysis, what the people who put money on this stuff think. Now let’s look at the polling that came in on this but first a couple of questions. 

Do you know who you will vote for, for president this year? Did the outcome of Trump’s New York state case potentially lead to you changing your vote? When you think of it like that it makes perfect sense that the latest PBS/Marist polling released yesterday showed that two-thirds of people said that a guilty verdict wouldn’t impact their vote while 17% say that they’d be less likely to vote for Trump with a guilty verdict while 15% say they’d be more likely to vote for him. There are a couple of ways of looking at that polling result. On the one hand you could say that it’s bad news that up to 17% of voters would be less likely to vote for him while a smaller 15% would become more likely to vote for him. In reality when you drill down on the polling results what you see is that essentially all of the people who say they they’re less likely to vote for Trump already weren’t going to vote for him anyway while essentially all of the people who say a conviction would make them more likely to vote for Trump already have their MAGA signs in place. The case is high drama given the legal stakes of the case and frankly what’s to become of this country if this miscarriage of justice is allowed to stand but perhaps likely not so much regarding the outcome of the presidential race. Who might this guilty verdict matter to? The 5%.  

On this date four years ago 9% of voters didn’t know who they intended to vote for. Eight years ago, 13% of voters hadn’t yet made up their mind. But right now, in an average of all current accredited national polling with third-party options provided only 5% of voters say there are uncertain of who they intend to vote for. That’s the lowest total of undecided voters at this stage of a cycle since the onset of the polling age in the 1930’s. Given that this is a presidential rematch featuring a former president that almost all Americans have strong opinions about this isn’t surprising. Given the consistency of presidential polling over the past seven months, which shows that this race has remained essentially the same over that time, it really does appear that only about 5% of the voting population is really in play, meaning that the upside or downside of this conviction is certain to be mostly muted. That’s not to say a 5% swing – if seemingly all of the undecided voters were to break one way wouldn’t be significant. It certainly would. But it’s also unlikely the historically small pool of undecided voters would break all one way regardless. So yeah, this case does appear to matter to the extent that it impacts the 5% (that is if it impacts their eventual votes at all).