As Donald Trump reported to the courtroom for the start of jury selection in his hush money trial Monday, new polling shows he could lose support among independents and some Republicans if he’s convicted.
This comes as he’s set to go up against Joe Biden in November.
According to the Ipsos/Reuters poll, 24% of Republicans said they would not vote for him if he’s convicted of a felony by a jury and a majority of independents, 60%, also said they wouldn’t support him.
Overall, if the election were held today, Biden leads 37% to Trump’s 36% with support among independents pretty evenly split: Biden 33% and Trump32%, according to the poll.
It also shows 38% of independents said they are either somewhat or much less likely to vote for Trump because of the criminal cases against him, along with 15% of Republicans. On the flip side, 40% of Republicans or either somewhat or much more likely to head to the polls and support Trump because of the criminal cases.
It’s the first criminal trial of any former U.S. commander-in-chief and the first of Trump’s four indictments to go to trial. Because he is also the presumptive nominee for this year’s Republican ticket, the trial will produce the head-spinning split-screen of a presidential candidate spending his days in court and, he has said, “campaigning during the night.”
Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
Prosecutors say he was trying to conceal an alleged effort to keep salacious — and, he says, bogus — stories about his sex life from emerging during his 2016 campaign.
The charges center on $130,000 in payments that Trump’s company made to his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen. He had paid that sum on Trump’s behalf to keep porn actor Stormy Daniels from going public, a month before the election, with her claims of a sexual encounter with the married mogul a decade earlier.
Prosecutors say the payments to Cohen were falsely logged as legal fees in order to cloak their actual purpose. Trump’s lawyers say the disbursements indeed were legal expenses, not a cover-up.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Matt Arco may be reached at marco@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @MatthewArco.
