Replies

Biden Stakes Re-Election Campaign on Reviving Bad Memories of Trump

The recent past offers little suggestion that Biden’s approach can succeed. Trump is universally known, and many voters believe there is nothing new to learn about him. “Everyone knows he’s a cad. I don’t think it’s new information,” said Republican pollster Greg Strimple, pointing out that many who believe it are voting for Trump anyway.

Biden himself expressed uncertainty about how the conviction would play, telling a reporter who asked if it would help Trump: “I have no idea.”

Senior Trump campaign advisers, in a memo dated the day before the verdict was announced, wrote that their polling showed the outcome would have little effect on the race. “The impact of the New York trial, what little there has been, is already ‘baked into the cake’ and voters have by-and-large already formed their opinions on the trial and President Trump’s actions,” they wrote.

As president, Trump survived two House impeachments (with the Senate acquitting him both times), a federal investigation into his 2016 campaign and many other politically jarring events—with barely a dent in how Americans viewed his job performance. His approval ratings generally hovered just above 40%. They never moved beyond a 9-point range in Wall Street Journal/NBC News polling, compared with a 62-point swing in approval ratings for George W. Bush and a 21-point range for Barack Obama, both of whom served two terms.

Even more challenging for Biden’s strategy is that views of Trump’s presidency have grown more favorable since he left office, hovering just below 50% approval in Journal polls for the past year-and-a-half, well above Biden’s ratings and higher than Trump’s job approval as he left office.

And Thursday’s jury verdict could also prove to be the last straw for many Americans who believe that Trump has been targeted for prosecution to stop his presidential campaign and his “Make America Great Again” movement, setting a dangerous precedent of using the criminal-justice system for political ends. That could reanimate the voters that swept him into office in 2016.

“Some voters may think, ‘I didn’t like Trump, I wasn’t sure about him, and now the guy was railroaded.’ So, you may have potentially made him into a more sympathetic figure,” Newhouse said.

John Anzalone, who polled for the Biden campaign in 2020, said the recent past shows that the jury verdict can in fact shift voter opinions, inflicting the kind of damage that hurt Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic opponent in 2016, when then-Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey announced days before the election that fall that he was reopening an investigation into her use of a private email server for government business.

“It changed the dynamic of the race. It made her just as big a risk as Trump, and they went with someone new,” he said. In focus groups, voters told the campaign they believed that a Clinton presidency would be tied down with investigations.

“Voters are risk-averse,” Anzalone said. “They’ll think Trump is going to be in a quagmire of problems—new impeachment, trials—and all they’re going to care about is that, and that the real work is not going to get done, and so I think this is a tremendous problem for him.”

Polling has suggested that some voters would reconsider backing Trump if he were convicted of a felony, but it isn’t clear that they feel the same way now that the jury has given its verdict. The felony conviction of a former president is such an unusual event that many voters might not have know their reaction until the event actually occurred. And the expected millions of dollars in campaign ads yet to come, intended to shape voter views of the conviction, could have an effect.

In one recent survey, an NPR/Marist/PBS poll in late May, some 7% of Trump supporters and 11% of independents said they would be less likely to vote for Trump if he were convicted in the hush-money trial.

Among voters overall, most believed they would shrug off a Trump conviction. More than two-thirds of voters, including 74% of independents, said a guilty verdict in the trial would make no difference to their vote in November.

Write to Aaron Zitner at aaron.zitner@wsj.com and Catherine Lucey at catherine.lucey@wsj.com