Experts at Boston University are watching to see whether the historic outcome of Trump’s hush-money trial—an outcome that cemented him as the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes—will influence that small sliver of undecided voters come November. Photo by Seth Wenig/AP

Politics

A Jury Found Trump Guilty. Will Voters Care?

In an exceptionally tight presidential race, a few thousand voters could mean the difference for Trump or Biden. BU political scientists weigh the impact of the verdict in Trump’s hush money trial

A jury found former president Donald J. Trump guilty of felony crimes last week, returning guilty verdicts on all 34 charges related to a scheme to cover up hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels in a trial in New York. Now, voters face an important question as the 2024 presidential race, already considered razor-thin, heats up: how much do they care?

In this calcified environment, “no one event is ever going to move the needle that much,” says Lauren Mattioli, a College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of political science at BU. “What we’re interested in is: does it move the needle for the people that matter, and in the places that matter? By which we mean swing voters in swing states—which at this point is such a small part of the country.” 

In what is proving to be an exceptionally tight presidential race, a few thousand voters in a couple of key states could mean the difference between four more years in the White House for either Trump or for President Joe Biden. Experts at Boston University are watching to see whether the historic outcome of this trial—an outcome that cemented Trump as the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes—will influence that small sliver of undecided voters come November. 

The verdict against Trump, announced on May 30, arrived in what is already a polarized political climate. Large swaths of eligible voters are already set on who they’ll support in this rematch of the 2020 election. Most polls conducted in the weeks leading up to the verdict showed Trump and Biden in a neck-and-neck race, volleying back and forth in a lead of one to two percentage points. 

It’s difficult to measure exactly how small that slice of the electorate actually is, for a number of reasons. Most (but not all) pollsters and political scientists believe there are still truly undecided voters, but there’s limited demographic or otherwise quantitative data about how many people that encompasses, according to Data for Progress, a progressive think tank polling firm that released a guidebook on swing voters at the end of May. The “swing voter” label also applies to voters who flipped between parties in different elections—folks who voted for Barack Obama in 2012, then Trump in 2016, for example. And this year, there’s a third group of potential swing voters: people who went for Biden or Trump in 2020 and are now considering a third-party candidate such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., instead of either Biden or Trump. 

“It’s really difficult to identify these people, and even harder to get them on the phone,” Mattioli says. Even then, people unwittingly harbor biases that make them unreliable judges of their own future behavior. Someone might want to believe that a felony conviction would change their mind about who to support in the 2024 election, and even say as much to a pollster. “But when it comes down to it in November, they usually go with their preconceived preferences, which are their party leanings or their ideological leanings,” Mattioli says. 

So, “there are a lot of compounding reasons that make it difficult to answer that question of whether this will move the needle,” she says. 

Still, if there well and truly are people in the United States who haven’t settled on a candidate yet, they stand to make a real difference in this race. 

Using the metaphor of a horse race, Mattioli describes these small pockets of voters as being akin to a sharp rock on the track, or perhaps a person yelling distractingly in the stands. On their own, neither obstacle is so great as to derail a horse that’s already several lengths ahead of its opponent. But in a race such as this, where the two horses are straining for any small advantage, momentarily stumbling over a rock or spooking at a loud yell might just be enough to lose the contest. 

For Jacob Brown, a CAS assistant professor of political science, the types of voters who may swing the election matter, too. 

“One area where we see Biden not doing as well as an incumbent president might have expected is among lower-information, moderate voters,” Brown says. This might include people who are generally tuned out of political news, or who are otherwise poorly informed about the salient issues in the race. 

He says that for those people, a series of stark headlines announcing Trump’s guilt may make a compelling impression. “‘Trump Guilty on 34 Counts’ is a much stronger signal than previous headlines which have said that he’s on trial or alluded to his alleged crimes, which can be murky or confusing,” Brown says. Such clear messaging may influence a small segment of voters—but enough to help Biden in the margins, he says. 

That clear messaging only lasts so long, though. Trump’s lawyers have already said they’ll appeal, and Brown says further court battles serve to muddy the water for voters who aren’t inclined to follow every twist and turn of the legal system. 

And with five months to go until Election Day, anything could happen.