Former President Donald Trump is facing jury trials in four separate jurisdictions where vastly different juries could decide his political future, as well as his freedom.
Mr. Trump is headed to trial in New York City, Washington, and Fulton County, Georgia, all of which are Democratic strongholds. He also faces criminal charges in southern Florida, which is a mixed bag because the jury pool will vary depending on which courthouse ultimately hosts the trial.
“Washington, New York and Georgia will have the least favorable jury pools, but the Florida jurisdiction has a much more even distribution of Republicans and Democrats, which makes it the most promising for Trump,” said Richard Gabriel, a jury consultant who worked for the defense teams that won acquittals in the murder trials of O.J. Simpson and Casey Anthony.
But jury experts say Florida, where Mr. Trump faces 40 federal felony counts related to the storage of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, is no slam-dunk acquittal for the former president. The location of the trial and the cut-and-dry nature of the charges could be two strikes that undermine a slightly more favorable jury pool.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the case, has been holding pre-trial hearings in Fort Pierce, Florida, where her chambers are located. If she decides to keep the trial in Fort Pierce, jurors would be selected from four red counties that are solid Trump country, and one swing county where Mr. Trump barely eked out a victory over President Biden in 2020.
But Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump in 2020, has left open the possibility that the trial could be moved because of the small jury pool available in those counties. The counties combine for a total of 18,000 eligible jurors, one of the smallest jury pools in the region.
In a recent order, Judge Cannon said the trial’s location could be part of “modifications” that could “be made as necessary as the matter proceeds.”
That means the trial could potentially be moved to Miami, Fort Lauderdale or West Palm Beach, which would have a much larger pool of prospective jurors. Those counties turned out heavily for Mr. Biden in the last presidential election — Mr. Trump lost Palm Beach County to Mr. Biden by 13 percentage points in 2020.
John Anderson, a former U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, said the nature of the charges in the documents case could negate any potential advantage Mr. Trump could gain with a more favorable jury pool. He said the Florida case has a more coherent set of facts than the election interference cases brought in Washington and Georgia, where jurors will have the harder task determining Mr. Trump’s intent.
In Florida, Mr. Trump is accused of thwarting the government’s efforts to retrieve the documents he moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, including allegedly erasing videotapes that showed the documents being moved around his residence.
“His efforts to delete the surveillance tapes very much undercuts the advantage of a more favorable jury because the prosecution is going to come in and say, ‘regardless of what you think of the former president, the facts are cut and dry,’ Mr. Anderson said. “The election cases are going to be more about what was going on in his mind.”
In Georgia, the jury will be drawn from Fulton County, where Democrats have long held sway. Mr. Biden won the 2020 election there by capturing nearly 72% of the vote, and four years earlier, Hillary Clinton beat Mr. Trump there by more than 40 percentage points.
But there is a glimmer of hope for Mr. Trump’s legal team in Georgia. The jury pool will be drawn from Atlanta as well as its suburbs, which are politically and economically diverse. Of the ten seats representing the county in the state senate, four belong to Republicans.
That should bring some comfort to Mr. Trump’s lawyers, who are aware that it only takes one vote to result in an acquittal or hung jury.
“In Georgia, Trump’s team should look for one to three strong personalities,” Mr. Gabriel said. “People who are going to stand their ground in deliberations. A lone ranger who can hang the jury. Those people are harder to reach, but you can find them.”
Legal experts suggest that Mr. Trump might try to move the case to federal court, which broadens the potential jury pool to include a greater swath of Atlanta’s suburbs, where more of his supporters reside.
“At the federal level, Trump will be able to get a larger cross-section of folks with a greater mix of viewpoints,” Mr. Anderson said.
Jury experts say all four of the cases will likely turn the traditional juror model on its head. Typically, prosecutors look for white middle-class conservatives who are pro-law-and-order for criminal cases. But such a juror may lean more heavily toward Mr. Trump, focing prosecutors to search for jurors who have far more liberal outlooks.
In New York and Washington, Mr. Trump lost resoundingly in the 2016 and 2020 elections. And recent polling shows he’s even more disliked in those regions than he was when he was president.
“I think Trump’s lawyers have to be concerned,” said Valerie Hans, who teaches a course on juries at Cornell University Law School. “If anything, things have gotten worse because now you have convictions in the E. Jean Carroll [sexual abuse and defamation] and the Trump Organization cases, and Trump’s behavior as a candidate consists of attacking the courts. I think in some ways there is a hardening of views towards him.”
Concerns for Mr. Trump’s legal team go beyond election results. Recent legal cases in New York and Washington underscored the difficulty of finding jurors in those cities who don’t have strong views against the former president.
At the Washington-based trial of Michael Sussmann, an attorney for Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign, prosecutors struggled to find jurors who did not donate to the Clinton campaign or other Democrats.
One potential juror told the court she had always been “on the same side” as Mrs. Clinton. A man slammed the Sussmann case as a political prosecution, and a woman said her husband worked for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign.
Roughly one-third of the potential jurors screened by prosecutors and defense attorneys in the D.C. courtroom said they had donated to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign in 2016 or had strong opinions about Mr. Trump.
In New York, a man summoned for jury duty in a tax-fraud trial of Mr. Trump’s international real estate company was excused after telling a judge that the former president made him sick to his stomach.
“I don’t feel like it’s a very healthy thing for me to be here,” the man said, adding that his feelings about Mr. Trump “turned into a very visceral feeling in my gut.”
Another man told the court that Mr. Trump is “a narcissist” and two women said they objected to how he ran the country. All three were still sworn in after promising they could be impartial.
But the demographics underscore Mr. Trump’s challenges in those regions.
In Washington, where Mr. Trump is charged with four federal criminal counts in connection to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol, the former president remains deeply unpopular.
In the 2016 presidential election, Mr. Trump garnered a mere 4% of the vote in the city, and his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, won a commanding 91%.
Four years later, Mr. Trump won 5% of the vote and Joseph R. Biden won 93%. Mr. Biden’s 88-point margin of victory was the largest secured by any major party’s presidential candidate in any jurisdiction since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s landslide win in 1936.
Mr. Trump in 2016 recorded the lowest popular vote and the lowest share of votes in the District since it was granted electors in 1961. Yet he was more unpopular among D.C. voters when he left office than when he was elected. A Morning Consult poll found that Mr. Trump’s approval rating in the city dropped to 26% in 2021.
Mr. Trump is also facing state criminal charges in Manhattan over hush-money payments to two women who alleged affairs with him. He faces 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide the payments.
In 2016, Mr. Trump captured a mere 10% of the vote in Manhattan, his home county, while Hillary Clinton won a commanding 87.2% of voters’ support. He improved slightly in 2020, when he won 12.3% of the vote compared to Mr. Biden’s 86.8%.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.