SAN DIEGO (KGTV) - A jury found former president Donald Trump guilty of falsifying business records nearly six months before the November general election.
So, it begs the question: What kind of early polling numbers can this verdict mean for the general election?
“I think in the short-term, [it's] sort of like the opposite of a convention bounce. I think you’ll see some dips in Trump’s numbers. I think Biden will remain fairly steady where he is,” Ken Alper, President of Survey USA, said.
Alper said Survey USA has been polling elections since the 1992 presidential election.
ABC 10News asked Alper how this verdict changes the aspects and dynamics of polling people as the November election approaches.
He said before the conviction, Survey USA asked people how it would affect their vote.
“And in a couple of different states, we’ve done this. And we see that roughly 15, 14, 13 percent of Trump supporters, in our research at least, said that they would maybe not vote for him,” Alper said.
Alper said they found that when asked forward-looking questions, people tend to answer them based on how the questions make them feel rather than what they're being asked.
“We think a lot of those people are really just saying they’re disappointed in this, but it doesn’t mean that it’s actually going to affect their vote,” Alpers said.
So, after an event like this, the goal is to keep the questions the same to get as consistent answers as possible.
“You want to be careful. If you keep asking people, ‘Does the indictment affect your vote,’ you’re sort of telegraphing to them that the right response is to say, ‘Yeah, yeah, I should be concerned about this.’ So you want to keep it separate, really,’ Alper said. “It’s really two separate pieces of research. It’s what do you think about this piece that in the news and the other is, without mentioning that, how are you going to vote?”
