Having been convicted of 34 felonies, Donald Trump cannot own a gun, hold public office or even vote in many states
Having been convicted of 34 felonies, Donald Trump cannot own a gun, hold public office or even vote in many states.
But in 158 days, voters across America will decide whether he will return to the White House to serve another four years as the nation’s president.
Trump’s conviction in his New York hush money trial on Thursday is a stunning development in an already unorthodox presidential election with profound implications for the justice system and perhaps U.S. democracy itself.
But in a deeply divided America, it’s unclear whether Trump’s status as someone with a felony conviction will have any impact at all on the 2024 election. Trump remains in a competitive position against President Joe Biden this fall, even as the Republican former president now faces the prospect of a prison sentence in the run-up to the November election.
In the short term at least, there were immediate signs that the unanimous guilty verdict was helping to unify the Republican Party’s disparate factions as GOP officials in Congress and in state capitals across the country rallied behind their presumptive presidential nominee, while his campaign expected to benefit from a flood of new fundraising dollars.
Standing outside the courtroom, Trump described the verdict as the result of a “rigged, disgraceful trial.”
“The real verdict is going to be Nov. 5 by the people,” Trump said, referring to Election Day. “This is long from over.”
The immediate reaction from elected Democrats was muted by comparison, although the Biden campaign issued a fundraising appeal within minutes of the verdict suggesting that the fundamentals of the election had not changed.
“We’re THRILLED that justice has finally been served,” the campaign wrote. “But this convicted criminal can STILL win back the presidency this fall without a huge surge in Democratic support.”
There has been some polling conducted on the impact of a guilty verdict, although such hypothetical scenarios are notoriously difficult to predict.
A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found that only 4% of Trump’s supporters said they would withdraw their support if he’s convicted of a felony, though an additional 16% said they would reconsider it.
On the eve of the verdict, the Trump campaign released a memo from its polling team suggesting that the impact of the trial is “already baked into the race in target states.
