A day after former President Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts in a hush-money case, Triangle voters looked ahead to November — with some unswayed by the verdict and others questioning how they’ll vote.
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, will face President Joe Biden in a rematch of the 2020 election. Trump beat Biden by a slim margin in North Carolina in 2020. And the convictions Thursday put some votes at risk. WRAL News polling in March showed that 13% of North Carolina voters who cast a ballot for Trump in 2020 would be less likely to vote for him in 2024 if convicted.
But a lot has changed since then, and Biden’s favorability has dipped in recent months due in part to stubbornly high inflation and views over the U.S.’s response to the Israel-Hamas conflict. And political scientists aren’t convinced Trump’s convictions will sway many voters in the end — and the Trump and Biden campaigns say the same.
Republican researchers have been surveying thousands of voters in North Carolina and other battleground states, according to a Trump campaign memo obtained by WRAL News.
“Most voters, especially our supporters, believe the case is politically motivated and a conviction would be the result of a biased show trial,” the researchers said. “Biden’s voters will believe President Trump is guilty no matter what. And those in the middle are largely unconcerned and their votes aren’t going to hinge on the results of the trial.”
That was the common thread Friday in Apex, a town with an almost equal share of registered Republicans and Democrats: they know who they want, come November.
Take Tim Tooley, a Trump supporter and retired software engineer, who spoke with WRAL News outside a sporting goods store in Apex on Friday. He’s not a Trump fanatic, but Biden hasn’t won his trust, either. So he plans to vote for Trump again.
“I hate Trump as a person,” Tooley said. “I can’t stand him as a person and I don’t like that he has an eight-word vocabulary, but I think Biden is asleep at the wheel. I don’t know who is running the country right now.”
Apex resident Elizabeth Gunn also plans to vote for Trump again.
“Wow, he was found guilty,” Gunn said during an interview in downtown Apex. “However, he still gets my vote in the fall.”
Gunn said the verdict, which Trump plans to appeal, has nothing to do with how she feels she’s suffered the last four years. “If we dug deep into everybody, we’re all a little guilty of some bad behavior,” Gunn said. “It just doesn’t bother me.”
Convictions threaten Trump's lead in North Carolina
The 2024 presidential election
Elections in North Carolina are notoriously difficult to predict in part because unaffiliated voters make up the state’s biggest voting bloc. In Apex, nearly 47% of registered voters identify as unaffiliated. Bill Marlow is among them. He plans to vote for Biden, adding that Thursday’s verdict against Trump “ was just confirmation of everything that’s been going on.”
Apex resident Kevin Synder said he can’t see himself casting a ballot for Trump. “I cannot vote for somebody that has 34 felony counts and three other indictments against him as well,” Synder said. “That’s just too much.”
Retired Apex resident Jim Herbst was unswayed, though. “I know what I’m doing before, and it wouldn’t have affected it one way or another,” he said.
Ditto for Apex resident and unaffiliated voter Ryan Garcia: “It does absolutely nothing,” Garcia said. “It’s the same choices we had four years ago.”
WRAL News polling showed that most voters are unhappy with a Trump-Biden rematch.
In their words: NC leaders react to former President Donald Trump's guilty verdict
What Trump’s guilty verdict means for NC voters
Recent presidential elections have been extremely close in North Carolina. Trump won the state in 2016 and 2020 — each time with just under 50% of the vote. In 2020, Trump beat Biden by just 74,483 votes out of the more than 5.5 million ballots cast.
About 13% of North Carolina voters who cast a ballot for Trump in 2020 said they’d be less likely to vote for Trump again if he were convicted of a criminal charge, according to a WRAL poll released in March. That means at least 350,000 votes could be at risk for Trump, based on state turnout in 2020. Meanwhile, about 49% unaffiliated voters in North Carolina said they’d be less likely to vote for Trump if he was convicted.
Ken Alper, who ran the poll for SurveyUSA, says now that conviction happened, those who said they’d be on the fence, really aren’t. “It's not that you're being untruthful when you say ‘yeah, you're less likely,’ but that doesn't necessarily translate to several months down the road actually voting for someone else,” Alper said.
Alper said despite the numbers, a lot can change between now and November.
“Memories are short and there’s always another story around the corner,” Alper said.
