Lawyers, pollsters, and politicos weigh in on how they think the New York jury’s decision will affect the 2024 presidential race.
The outcome of former President Donald Trump’s New York records-falsification trial is most likely to influence undecided voters—a sliver of the electorate that could exert an outsized impact on the Nov. 5 presidential election.
“This is a pivotal moment in the 2024 race,” American political history professor Jeff Bloodworth told The Epoch Times as jurors began deliberations on May 29.
Mr. Bloodworth, who teaches at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania, said suburban college-educated voters probably would allow the trial’s outcome to influence their votes.
The former president was convicted of 34 business-records falsification charges; an appeal is almost certain, legal experts said.
Polls have shown that a conviction was poised to sway some voters away from President Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. Trump campaign pollsters predict the effect on votes will be minimal.
However, it appears that the verdict is having a big immediate effect on fundraising. Several online commenters said they made donations to the former president, but many visitors overwhelmed the website, causing it to crash temporarily and having to be restored several times.
Yet a small percentage of voters could make the difference between winning and losing the 2024 election. Polling consistently has shown a razor-thin margin separating the two major candidates: President Trump and the incumbent Democrat President Joe Biden.
Many voters are unwilling to change their declared allegiance to President Trump, President Biden, or a third-party candidate, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Still, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released on May 22, about one-fifth of voters say they are open to reconsidering.
Many of those people are “double-haters,” Mr. Bloodworth’s term for voters who dislike both President Trump and President Biden. These voters care deeply about the outcome of the New York case, and they’re very likely to turn out and cast their ballots, he said.
He predicted that a guilty verdict against President Trump would drive those people “back into the Biden camp, like they were in 2020.” That election “was decided on the margins,” Mr. Bloodworth said, resulting in President Trump’s ouster. Now in the thick of his third run at the presidency, President Trump still says he believes he was the rightful winner—a claim that mainstream media and many Democrats reject.
By Janice Hisle
