Hullabaloo Tue, 19/03/2024 - 09:00

Created
Tue, 19/03/2024 - 09:00
Updated
Tue, 19/03/2024 - 09:00
Ankush Khardori at Politico takes a look at some polling on Trump’s legal problems: Eight months out, we had questions. Among them: If Trump is convicted of a crime, how will it affect his chances of returning to the White House? What do Americans make of his claim that he should be immune from prosecution even if he actually perpetrated a criminal scheme to steal the last election? Does the public trust the Supreme Court to decide that issue fairly? To find out, we worked with Ipsos to poll the American people — and we discovered some surprising answers to all of these questions, and several more. The bottom line is that a conviction in Manhattan may not doom Trump, but it would do real damage. More than a third of independents said a guilty verdict would make them less likely to support Trump’s candidacy. In a close race, that might matter. It also cuts against the conventional wisdom, as analysts have sometimes doubted the political impact of the prosecution in Manhattan, which concerns Trump’s alleged falsification of his company’s business records in connection with a hush-money payment to the adult film star Stormy Daniels. The trial, which was set to start March 25, was delayed on Friday by at least three weeks to allow more time to review records from federal prosecutors. As for Trump and the Supreme Court, the results are legitimately remarkable in a time of intense political polarization and distrust of the justices. A whopping 70 percent of the country rejects…