Just ahead of last week’s guilty verdicts for former President Donald Trump, I wrote that we were “finally moving away from possibility to hard and fast reality, which may look very different than the predictions based on polling.” The first batch of post-verdict polls are in and, well, I must admit that a lot of things are looking very much the same, with the race between Trump and President Joe Biden still neck and neck. That’s not to say things are entirely the same.
Importantly, a jury finding Trump guilty is the exact type of thing that can break through with the kinds of voters Biden needs to reach before November. An April NBC News poll found that only 64% of registered voters are “very interested” in the 2024 elections, the lowest at that point in the race than in any survey since the question was first asked in 2008. Tellingly, “only 36% of voters ages 18 to 34 rate themselves as highly interested in the election,” that NBC News poll found.