The new national NBC News poll shows former President Donald Trump leading current President Joe Biden by 5 points among registered voters, 47 percent to 42 percent, in a hypothetical general-election matchup.
However, when the survey's final question re-asks voters what their ballot choice would be if Trump is found guilty and convicted of a felony this year, Biden narrowly pulls ahead of Trump, 45 percent to 43 percent.
As Florida attorney Adriana Gonzalez points out, "In 2024, legal issues will be a part of our voting preferences. Some voters draw their line at a conviction for their candidate of choice."
And for some, even a felony conviction wouldn't impact their choice of candidate, which is a difficult concept to wrap one's mind around. This not only highlights the complexity of voter decision-making but how voters perceive the seriousness of various factors that can influence electoral outcomes, including perceptions of candidates' legal standing.
Yet the NBC polling data goes beyond illustrating how dynamic the nature of voter preferences are, it speaks to the impact of political scandals on elections.
Research has shown that involvement in a scandal may decrease respondents' intention to vote for a political candidate. Scandals go beyond impacting the reputation of candidates, they damage political support, and negatively impact citizens' satisfaction with representative democracy.
However, the same research indicates that citizens may be accustomed to scandals, and additional scandalous information may not bring about changes in attitudes.
That's really what the new NBC poll indicates—that this ongoing layering of political scandals has resulted in what is essentially a dulling of our reactions to a political scandal. The more it becomes a prevalent factor of political life, the more of it we simply absorb before it impacts our vote.
This behavior runs counter to earlier studies indicating that voters actually do punish misconduct by politicians, with parties involved in corruption incidents losing a significant number of voters.
A study of the 2017 Austrian elections took a distinctive dataset gathered prior to and immediately following a significant scandal during the concluding stages of the election. This study "revealed a scandal-eroding effect particularly damaging a candidate's own base of supporters and leaving followers in disappointment."
In other words, February 2024 is both very close yet very far from the November presidential election. While the NBC poll is more than likely an accurate real-time look into our voting behavior, it doesn't take into account what may be an eventual breaking point if candidate Trump has major legal difficulties closer to the election.
The Austrian study essentially reinforces the intuitive notion that an individual's willingness to vote for a candidate with a felony conviction may decrease as the election approaches. It also revealed something important for November, that "negative candidate evaluations are not a necessary precondition for negative spillover effects on political trust more generally."
What this could mean for November is that some people now planning to vote might not vote at all because their political trust is shaken. They might still have a degree of trust in a candidate but lose trust in the process.
Finally, the research also found that how people take in information about the candidate they support isn't always logical or accurate. Voters often "simply view unfavorable information as belief-consistent, even though the information clearly contradicts their own beliefs."
This selective perception is where we are today. Back to the numbers of the NBC poll, if Trump's support would decrease by only 4 percent if he is found guilty and convicted of a felony this year, that could mean that some voters are viewing the unfavorable information of a felony conviction as being consistent with their belief that Trump is the best candidate.
This should shake us up a bit because alarming legal developments should trigger an alarm. As voters, we should be weighing political scandals such as felony convictions into our voting behavior because that's the kind of rationality we would like to believe we can expect of our fellow voters. When these alarms are silent, voting behavior becomes more difficult to predict and can leave us shaking our collective heads for years.
About Aron Solomon
A Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer, Aron Solomon, JD, is the chief strategy officer forAmplify. He has taught entrepreneurship at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania, and was elected to Fastcase 50, recognizing the top 50 legal innovators in the world. Aron has been featured in Newsweek, Fast Company, Fortune, Forbes, CBS News, CNBC, USA Today, ESPN, Today's Esquire, TechCrunch, The Hill, BuzzFeed, Venture Beat, The Independent, Fortune China, Yahoo!, ABA Journal,Law.com,The Boston Globe, and many other leading publications across the globe.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
