Donald Trump’s hush-money trial has attracted an avalanche of media attention over the last six weeks, and for obvious reasons: There is a decent chance that in the coming days the presumptive GOP nominee for president will be a convicted felon, a historic first. 

But, according to pollsters and plugged-in campaign professionals, it’s unlikely that the outcome of the trial will have a decisive impact on voter perceptions of a man who has dominated American media for the better part of the last decade.

“Polling is not a good vehicle for getting voters to anticipate their reaction to events that haven’t occurred yet,” says Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster at North Star Opinion Research. He pointed to the Access Hollywood tape ahead of the 2016 election, when many voters told pollsters in the immediate aftermath of its release that they couldn’t possibly vote for Trump before voting for him anyway.

What is clear, Ayres added, is that 81-year-old Joe Biden is the weakest incumbent president since Jimmy Carter, his poll numbers are toxically low, and the vast majority of Americans — including a massive chunk of his 2020 coalition — think he is far too old to serve effectively in a second term. This underdog status bears out in the polls, with the presumptive GOP nominee still narrowly leading Biden in most battleground-state surveys.

“It would take a very gifted politician to overcome his current polling numbers,” Ayres added. “And Joe Biden is no Bill Clinton.”

Earlier Tuesday, twelve Manhattan jurors began closed-door deliberations over whether to convict former President Donald Trump on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to a $130,000 hush-money deal to a porn star ahead of the 2016 election. The jury could take days or even weeks to reach a verdict.

If the jury finds Trump guilty of falsifying records with the intent to commit another crime, the phrase “convicted felon” will likely end up in scores of Democratic ads and fundraising emails in the lead-up to Election Day. If he’s acquitted, or if there’s a mistrial, Trump and his allies will likely spend every waking moment taking a victory lap and accusing Democrats of trying to rig the election in Biden’s favor.

“It seems like Republicans and Democrats already have their minds made up. Republicans believe he’s innocent, Democrats believe he’s guilty, and independents and unaffiliated and undecided voters are just kind of in the middle of this whole thing,” says Jeanette Hoffman, a GOP strategist. She doubts the outcome of the Manhattan trial will tip the scales in either direction because she thinks “voters just kind of have fatigue over all of these court cases.” 

Trump has already begun the expectation-setting game, telling reporters on Wednesday that “Mother Teresa could not beat these charges.” 

Meanwhile, the Biden campaign has spent recent weeks dipping its toes into the political discourse surrounding the hush-money trial, even selling official campaign T-shirts for $32 a pop that say “Free on Wednesdays” — a jab at Trump, who has spent four days a week locked in a courtroom since the beginning of April.

On Tuesday, the same day jurors heard closing arguments, the president’s 2024 campaign team took the extraordinary step of holding a press conference outside of the Manhattan courthouse spearheaded by Robert De Niro — one of the most recognizable actors in Hollywood — who railed against Trump as someone who “wants to destroy not only the city but the country, and eventually he could destroy the world.” 

The actor’s message wasn’t subtle. “The fact is whether he’s acquitted, whether it’s hung jury, he is guilty — and we all know it,” said De Niro, flanked by retired police officers Harry Dunn and Michael Fanone, who were at the Capitol on January 6 and have spent the past three years criticizing Trump for his role in the riot. “I’ve never seen a guy get out of so many things, and we all know this. Everybody in the world knows this.”

Politico reported last week that Biden will wait until the jury settles on a verdict to formally speak about the trial, and that he will do so in a White House setting to demonstrate that his address “isn’t political.” 

Yet the campaign’s decision to hold a press conference outside the courthouse the day before the jury was set to begin deliberations risks playing into the Trump campaign’s own theory of the case — that Biden and his allies are weaponizing the justice system against him and are hoping a guilty verdict can boost the president’s electoral odds. 

“We’re not here today because of what’s going on over there,” Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler told the reporters outside the courthouse Tuesday. “We’re here today because you all are here.”

In any case, while the save-our-democracy approach may help mobilize an unenthusiastic Democratic base, only a quarter of the country cares strongly about the issue, says Ipsos senior vice president Chris Jackson. “The problem for Biden — or for Trump, honestly — is that you need more than a quarter of the country to win an election.”

If Biden is targeting a third of Americans — the number of votes he won in 2020 — he’s missing out on the extra 5 to 10 percent of votes he needs from voters who “aren’t paying attention to that stuff and are really just focused on the economy and the cost of living.”

Complicating matters even more for voters is keeping track of the three other criminal indictments Trump is facing.

“You have even news pundits like Jake Tapper saying they can’t even keep track of the different indictments,” says Hoffman, the GOP strategist. “What hope is it for the average voter to even understand this stuff? Their eyes glaze over and they’re like, ‘What court trial is this?’” She believes the verdict in the hush-money trial is unlikely to significantly sway voters, unless Trump is sentenced to prison, which is an unlikely scenario. 

In a recent Quinnipiac poll, 68 percent of likely voters said a Trump conviction would not make a difference to their vote, while 6 percent said a conviction would make them less likely to vote for the former president. But that 6 percent could “tip the balance” in an extremely tight race, Quinnipiac polling analyst Tim Malloy notes.

Syracuse law professor Gregory Germain tells NR he believes the two most likely outcomes in the Trump trial — a hung jury or a conviction where he is sentenced to probation, not prison time — will have “very little effect on him.” 

Sentencing Trump to prison would be an “extraordinary thing to do” for first-time, nonviolent, Class E felony charges, he said. And despite some reporting to the contrary, Germain says it’s possible but unlikely that, if convicted, the judge would sentence Trump to prison time as punishment for the former president’s repeated violations of the gag order against him.

Still, Jackson, the IPSOS senior vice president, points out that it’s hard to say how any one verdict in the Trump trial will affect the election because it is such an “unprecedented” situation.

“Like historians and political experts of all stripes, pollsters look to the past to sort of think about how things are going to happen in the future,” he said. “We’ve never experienced this in American politics before.”

Around NR

• Some dirty tricks backfire, writes Ramesh Ponnuru in exploring whether Trump’s hush money trial has hurt or helped his electoral odds:

I’m not sure that Trump would be doing any better in the polls absent this trial. It helps him to shore up his support by illustrating and dramatizing his central theme of his victimization by weaponized government, and it lets him make the case that he’s being persecuted as a means of disfranchising his voters. 

• “There’s little value in appealing to voters outside the base if the candidate cannot conceal his contempt for them,” Noah Rothman says, after Trump did little to endear himself to libertarians while speaking at the party’s national conference last weekend:

“The Libertarian Party should nominate Trump for president of the United States,” Trump said in an address to the Libertarian National Convention over the weekend. The exhortation was met with a resounding chorus of boos and jeers. “What?” the former president asked, reeling from the hostile reception. “Only if you want to win,” he steadied himself. “Maybe you don’t want to win.”

• Democrats will blame America if Biden loses, Noah Rothman predicts:

Those among them who are inclined to externalize their despair will lash out at the parochial civic illiterates who didn’t vote against merely their own interests but the country’s as well. Should that be the outcome in November, this self-serving excuse for the failures of Democratic governance will have irresistible appeal. But it also risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not only does that outlook suggest that participation in the political process is a waste of time; it also lays the intellectual foundations for a moral relativism that encourages antisocial conduct.

• Jim Geraghty responds to Politico’s report that Biden intends to address the eventual verdict in the hush-money case “in a White House setting — not a campaign one — to show his statement isn’t political”:

Joe Biden is running for another term against Donald Trump. How on earth will Biden’s statement not be “political”? Do you think a single American will feel differently if Biden issues his statement from the Roosevelt Room rather than one of his Delaware homes? 

• Dan McLaughlin offers his take on the “real-time political science experiment” that we’re all currently living through:

There’s been a lot of punditry on what happens when and if Donald Trump gets convicted of a crime before the election. Much of it has been intelligent and well-informed — at least, as well-informed as it is possible to be on this topic. But as the old saying goes, “Nobody knows nothing.” We’re in completely uncharted territory here.

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