The Biden campaign has good reason to run ads drawing attention to Trump’s criminal conviction:
President Joe Biden’s campaign had been restrained in its attacks on Donald Trump’s New York criminal conviction for weeks until the campaign said internal polling and focus groups showed the verdict turned off voters.
The result, hitting TV sets across the country on Monday, was the campaign’s unleashing of its sharpest attack ad yet, depicting Trump as a “convicted criminal who’s only out for himself.” And the campaign says it’s just the start. Biden advisers say they plan to hammer Trump over the coming weeks — aiming to both set up a favorable narrative ahead of next week’s debate and keep Trump’s felony conviction top-of-mind for voters who haven’t yet fully tuned into the election.
“We’ve seen in polling since the conviction that the more the conviction is front and center in voters’ attention, the worse it is for Trump,” said a Biden campaign pollster granted anonymity to describe internal polling because they were not authorized to do so publicly.
The pollster said their research concluded that Trump’s conviction could effectively be used in a broader depiction of Trump as being self-centered and unwilling to take responsibility for his actions.
“Trump has dug his own hole deeper on the convictions,” the pollster said, “and we’re seeing him pay the price for that in the polling.”
Twenty-one percent of independents surveyed by Politico and Ipsos said they believe the verdict is an important issue in determining their vote and that they are now less likely to support Trump.
Among other independents who consider the conviction an important factor, 10% said it would not impact their vote while 5% said it would make them more likely to back Trump. Sixty-five percent of independents said the verdict is not important to how they will vote.
While Republican voters have largely continued to express support for Trump since the verdict and Democrats have remained critical, the poll sheds light on how independents — the all-important swing voters the candidates are vying for — view Trump today.
Among all voters, a plurality of 38% say Trump’s conviction is unlikely to affect their support for the presumptive Republican nominee. But about twice as many respondents — 33% — said they are less likely to support Trump than those who said they are more likely to support him — 17%.
It’s a problem for him, no doubt about it. And it’s not just the conviction. It’s the message that he cares more about himself than he cares about the country, which is obvious. When you put that explicitly as we hear him whining incessantly about how unfair everything is and his ongoing denials of ever doing anything wrong, it just has the ring of truth.
Republican voters know that, they just can’t admit it. They bought the line of a criminal conman and that’s really hard to come to terms with.