Poll: Federal indictment hasn't hurt Trump — even though most Americans think he's guilty

Nearly 6 in 10 Americans (57%) now think former President Donald Trump should be found guilty of federal crimes in the classified documents case, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll.

Roughly the same number (58%) say Trump should not “be allowed to serve as president again” if convicted.

Yet Republicans are still just as ready to renominate Trump for president as they were before his most recent indictment, with more than half (53%) favoring him over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (33%).

The survey of 1,626 U.S. adults, which was conducted from June 16 to 20, dramatically underscores the paradoxical, split-screen politics of Trump’s mounting legal peril. On the one hand, most Americans believe that mishandling classified documents and obstructing the government’s repeated efforts to recover them are “serious crimes” that should disqualify Trump in 2024. On the other hand, Trump is not losing any support within his own party as a result.

Regardless of what crimes the former president is charged with, it seems, America has made up its mind about him.

Trump’s numbers haven’t changed since indictment

Across every measure of his popularity and political standing, the former president’s post-indictment numbers match his pre-indictment numbers from the first half of 2023.

Four out of five potential Republican primary voters — registered voters who identify as or lean Republican — now have a favorable impression of Trump (80%); just 19% have an unfavorable opinion. That’s identical to his average rating since January.

And while Trump got a small bump in the Yahoo News/YouGov survey conducted in late May, his support for the GOP nomination against the full field of 2024 Republican candidates (48%) — or against “someone else” (49%) — is exactly the same as it was before that.

Likewise, President Biden (46%) continues to hold a slight edge over Trump (42%) among registered general-election voters — but that margin has remained essentially unchanged (with Trump averaging 42%) for the last year and a half.

Most Americans believe Trump is guilty of serious crimes

Yet the new Yahoo News/YouGov poll also makes it clear that most Americans approve of the indictment, believe Trump is guilty and consider the underlying crimes to be serious. According to the survey:

• Far more Americans approve (50%) than disapprove (34%) of Trump’s indictment in the classified documents case (15% are unsure).

• 57% of Americans say that Trump should be found guilty, with slightly less than 40% saying he should be found guilty on all charges and slightly less than 18% saying he should be found guilty on just some charges. Only 29% do not think Trump should be found guilty.

• Essentially the same number of Americans (58%) consider “taking highly classified documents from the White House and obstructing efforts to retrieve them” to be “serious crimes.”

When asked if five specific allegations contained in the indictment qualify as “serious crimes,” reactions among Americans are similarly lopsided:

• 62% say it’s a serious crime to retain “hundreds of classified documents” that include sensitive military information.

• 61% say it’s a serious crime to share a “top-secret map of a military operation in a foreign country with someone ... who did not have security clearance.”

• 58% say it’s a serious crime to suggest that his lawyer “pluck” documents out before returning material to investigators.

• 57% say it’s a serious crime to keep “boxes of top secret national security documents ... in easily accessible places such as a shower” and to direct “an assistant to move 64 boxes of documents hours before his lawyers came to search for them.”

So why is Trump still the GOP frontrunner?

The new Yahoo News/YouGov poll suggests that there are three reasons why Trump’s rising legal jeopardy has yet to upend the 2024 campaign.

The first reason is that less than a third of potential Republican primary voters are willing to say that any of the allegations in the indictment would qualify as “serious crimes” — and even fewer currently believe that Trump actually committed the offenses he’s been accused of, such as “withholding or concealing documents from investigators” (21%) or “conspiring to obstruct justice” (13%).

The second reason the indictment hasn’t damaged Trump is that his supporters simply dismiss the charges as unfair. Asked whether the indictment was motivated more by “a genuine desire to hold Trump accountable” or “political bias,” a staggering 93% of his general election supporters and 96% of his primary supporters say the latter.

Finally, consider the “everyone does it” rationalization. Asked about Biden’s own classified documents incident — in which “lawyers for President Biden alerted the National Archives earlier this year that they had found some classified documents” in Biden’s home and former office — 91% of Trump’s general election supporters say Biden’s actions are either just as serious as Trump’s (56%) or more serious (35%), even though Biden has fully cooperated with authorities.

A small sign that views could shift

To test whether learning specific details about the case might alter Americans’ broader view of Trump, half of respondents were asked whether they approve of the indictment and whether Trump should be found guilty before they were asked about each specific allegation in the indictment; the other half were asked after.

Remarkably, the order in which respondents answered questions had no impact on their approval of the indictment or their judgments about Trump’s guilt. Again, minds are made up.

But there were two instances in which the order of the questions did make a difference: opposition to Trump being allowed to serve as president if convicted in the documents case, and disapproval of Trump continuing to run from “behind bars” if convicted and sentenced to prison. Both numbers were significantly higher — 61% vs. 54% in the first scenario, and 65% vs. 59% in the second — among respondents who received specific details from the indictment beforehand.

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The Yahoo News survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,626 U.S. adults interviewed online from June 16 to 20, 2023. The sample was weighted according to gender, age, race, education, 2020 election turnout and presidential vote, baseline party identification and current voter registration status. Demographic weighting targets come from the 2019 American Community Survey. Baseline party identification is the respondent’s most recent answer given prior to March 15, 2022, and is weighted to the estimated distribution at that time (32% Democratic, 27% Republican). Respondents were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel to be representative of all U.S. adults. The margin of error is approximately 2.7%.