Squint and you might — might — see a change in Trump’s poll numbers since the verdict

Squint and you might — might — see a change in Trump’s poll numbers since the verdict

Polling industry insiders in the U.S. agree on one thing: The criminal conviction of Donald Trump has not had any obvious effect on the presidential election.

And they say there’s now enough data to assess the fallout — two full weeks after the precedent-smashing guilty verdict of the former president.

“Yeah, I think we can draw preliminary conclusions,” said Carl Bialik, vice-president of data science and U.S. politics editor at the YouGov polling firm.

What’s clear is that Trump being branded a felon has not had the dramatic impact that pre-conviction surveys suggested it might.

Those older polls suggested he might lose several percentage points, see swing voters flee, or have a staggering 16 per cent to 24 per cent of his supporters reconsider.

Those polls were dealing in hypotheticals. On May 31, reality struck when a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty 34 times of falsifying business records to pay off a porn star.

So in the real world, what was the impact?

Trump led most, but not all, surveys before the verdict; that hasn’t changed. If there has been an effect, it’s been so small that pollsters disagree on whether it’s actually happened — in other words, if it was a methodological rounding error.

Bialik’s assessment? Maybe “a point or two” of change — visible if “you kind of squint.”

Marc Trussler, director of data sciences at the University of Pennsylvania’s opinion-research centre, sees a slightly larger impact, a roughly two-point shift to Biden. 

But another pollster dismisses all of it. “Absolutely no movement whatsoever,” said Patrick Murray, director of the polling centre at Monmouth University.

Here’s what the latest surveys actually say.

The New York Times found a two-point shift toward Biden after the verdict. YouGov also found Biden with his first lead in months. 

On the other hand, Biden’s lead disappeared in YouGov surveys when the survey questions included third-party candidates. To boot, Trump was back ahead in YouGov’s latest poll. In fact, Ipsos even has Trump with his best numbers in months.

Another reputable pollster, the Marist Poll, just found Trump up two points in crucial Pennsylvania.

Put it all together and what you get is — maybe, at the very most — some movement within the statistical margin of error. And that movement might be durable — or maybe not. 

“There might have been a statistically insignificant bump for two days after the verdict,” said Murray, who says one- or two-point shifts happen in every poll, and can’t be attributed to any one event.

“But if there was anything it’s already evaporated.”

Now here’s where most of these analysts will pause to add a critical caveat about American elections: They are notoriously close. A battle of inches. And in such contests, every inch of data, every methodological scrap, might matter. 

The margin of victory in the swing states Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in 2020 was less than 1.5 percentage points in every case.

Every shift is big when the electorate is divided 50-50, Trussler said, noting that even a half-point shift would have doubled Biden’s victory margin in Wisconsin in 2020.

Critical group, wavering support

Trussler sees one specific result in the Times polling to think this shift is significant; a sudden dip in Trump’s support from a key sliver of the electorate.

A reason Trump has been leading most surveys is that, in recent months, less-engaged voters have shifted his way — people who don’t usually follow politics, only vote sometimes, and who overwhelmingly favoured Biden in 2020, but not anymore.

Among respondents from previous polls who’d said they backed Biden in 2020, but had switched to Trump, the Times found a staggering one-quarter had suddenly reverted to Biden.

“That group is really critical,” Trussler said.

He says the reason these voters matter is they’re persuadable, certainly more than most political news junkies who are generally attached to one party.

What Trussler finds most telling about this is it signals soft support for Trump from this group, who are about to be bombarded by political ads and news entering the campaign season.

These voters might be dissatisfied with the economy, and with Biden, but they really haven’t spent much time thinking about the pros and cons of Trump.

The verdict is a rare chance to grab their attention, and the initial indications are that it has made them reconsider, Trussler says.

“It’s easy [for them] to think about supporting Trump when not faced with the actual Trump — the real version of Trump,” he said. 

“I would expect them to move back toward Biden, remembering why they didn’t support Trump [in 2020].” 

Unpredictable side-effects

One thing the analysts agree on is, with five months left until election day, Trump’s conviction may feel like distant news by then. Other events will have unfolded, from the debates and conventions to inevitable surprises. Trump won’t learn his sentence until next month.

In the meantime, the conviction can still play out in unpredictable ways.

To Republicans’ benefit, it has stoked their fundraising. 

To their potential detriment, it has triggered a reaction on the right that has unnerved some moderates. To protest the conviction, Republicans are now talking about systematically blocking government appointments in the Senate, stalling spending bills and defunding prosecutions — with no telling how that ultimately plays with voters. 

Again, Murray doubles down on his doubts. He’s far from convinced there’s been any impact with the less-engaged swing voters.

His own survey work shows a two-point shift toward Biden from April, before the verdict, to June, after the verdict, among voters who dislike both major-party candidates. This is not statistically meaningful, he added.  

As for the pundits and politicos who speculated feverishly after the verdict about whether it might move voters, he says they could have spared themselves the suspense.

Anyone who was asking about the verdict’s impact on voters, he said, “and who didn’t have an inkling that the answer was, ‘Absolutely nothing,’ has not been paying attention to American politics for the past nine years.”

If the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol didn’t “move the needle, then there’s nothing else that’s going to move the needle at this point.”

Murray acknowledges that, in a close election, minuscule shifts matter. Including the scant number of votes that might shift from this verdict.

Just don’t expect to see it in a poll, he said.

Published at Fri, 14 Jun 2024 20:54:54 +0000

Trudeau, Modi meet for first time since Canada publicly accused India of Sikh leader’s assassination

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi have met for the first time since Trudeau publicly accused Modi’s government of involvement in the assassination of a Canadian Sikh activist.

Modi posted a photo to his 98 million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter, of the two leaders shaking hands on Friday on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Italy.

“Met Canadian PM @JustinTrudeau at the G7 Summit,” he wrote.

A spokesperson for the Prime Minister’s Office said the two leaders had an “interaction on the margins of the G7.”

“The prime minister congratulated Prime Minister Modi on his re-election and the leaders had a brief discussion on the bilateral relationship,” Ann-Clara Vaillancourt said in a media statement. “Of course there are important issues between our two countries right now. You can appreciate that we won’t be making any further statements at this time.”

Last met in 2023

Earlier on Friday, Trudeau and Modi were both around the same G7 table during an outreach session. They were positioned about six seats away from one another, according to video footage.

India was one of the countries invited to observe this year’s annual summit of the leading advanced democratic economies. It is not a member of the G7.

Modi held bilateral meetings with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, French President Emmanuel Macron and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday, but did not have an official meeting with Trudeau.

The last time Trudeau met with Modi in person was during the fraught G20 summit in India in September 2023. That same month, after returning from the trip, Trudeau rose in the House of Commons and accused India’s government of involvement in the brazen shooting of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

Earlier this month, Trudeau congratulated Modi on his re-election win.

“Canada stands ready to work with his government to advance the relationship between our nations’ peoples — anchored to human rights, diversity and the rule of law,” he said at the time.

A few days later, Modi responded on X, thanking Trudeau for the congratulatory message.

“India looks forward to working with Canada based on mutual understanding and respect for each others concerns,” he wrote.

Modi government has denied allegations

Nijjar was brazenly shot and killed by masked gunmen in his pickup truck in June 2023 in the parking lot of a Sikh temple in Surrey, B.C. 

Nijjar was a supporter of a Sikh homeland in the form of an independent Khalistani state. He had been deemed a “terrorist” by India’s government and accused of leading a militant separatist group — a claim his supporters denied.

“Canadian security agencies have been actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India” and Nijjar’s killing, Trudeau said.

Four Indian nationals — Karan Brar, Kamalpreet Singh, Karanpreet Singh and Amandeep Singh — were arrested last month and charged in connection with Nijjar’s killing.

Modi’s government has denied ordering killings in Canada. Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar initially called Canada’s allegation “absurd” and accused Canada of harbouring violent extremists.

Report warned of India’s political meddling in Canada

The allegations hurt an already shaky bilateral relationship between India and Canada that got even rockier last week. 

A bombshell report written by an all-party committee of Canadian parliamentarians about foreign interference said India is the second biggest foreign threat to Canadian democracy after China. 

The report contained the starkest warnings yet about India’s attempts to meddle in Canadian politics. 

“India seeks to cultivate relationships with a variety of witting and unwitting individuals across Canadian society with the intent of inappropriately exerting India’s influence across all orders of government, particularly to stifle or discredit criticism of the Government of India,” the report said.

The heavily redacted report also said there’s intelligence that suggests “India has an active proxy, who has proactively looked for ways to further India’s interests by monitoring and attempting to influence politicians.”

One note says the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) has information indicating an Indian proxy claimed to have “repeatedly transferred funds from India to politicians at all levels of government in return for political favours, including raising issues in Parliament.”

Are relations improving?

In a media briefing on Wednesday ahead of the G7, India’s Foreign Secretary Vinay Mohan Kwatra did not say whether Modi and Trudeau would have a bilateral meeting at the summit.

“I think the main issue with regard to Canada continues to be the political space that Canada provides to anti-India elements, which advocate extremism and violence, and we have repeatedly conveyed our deep concerns to them, and we expect them to take strong action,” he told reporters.

One expert said Friday that the leaders’ meeting may be a sign that relations between India and Canada are improving.

“That they spoke given what has happened over the past year suggests that there is progress in repairing the relationship,” said Tristen Naylor, an assistant professor of history and politics at Cambridge University.

Roland Paris, a former foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and an international affairs professor at the University of Ottawa, said relations between the two countries are “strained for obvious reasons.”

“It’s also important for Canada to keep the channels of communication open with India because India remains an important partner in other areas,” he told CBC News in an interview before the summit.

Published at Fri, 14 Jun 2024 13:51:15 +0000