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Donald Trump suffers triple polling blow in 48 hours after guilty verdict (www.newsweek.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago

YouGov and Morning Consult's polls are outside the realm of "useful" in terms of political reporting.

Thing about court cases is it doesn't matter what the public thinks about a jury decision. That's what elections are for; here, the determinations of exactly 12 people are all that counts.

Here's the one useful graf in the entire story:

A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted between Thursday and Friday found that 5 percent of Republicans and 21 percent of independents said they are much less likely to vote for Trump because of the jury's ruling. Meanwhile, 30 percent of Republicans and 13 percent of independents said the verdict made them much more likely to vote for Trump. However, the majority of Republicans (55 percent), independents (58 percent), and Democrats (58 percent) said the verdict didn't change their minds on whether or not to vote for the former president.

Given the narrow outcomes in swing states in 2020, that 5% drop in GOP support is much larger than it sounds. Like, more than 11,000 votes that will need to be "found."

That said, national polls are functionally useless for presidential elections on account of the Electoral College. All registered Republicans in California could abandon Trump without moving the needle on the election outcome; how that 5% is distributed among states and territories is the news, but with this sort of sample size, further breakdowns would have minimal or zero confidence.