An overwhelming majority of Americans believe Donald Trump should stand trial before the 2024 election, according to a new Politico Magazine/Ipsos poll published Friday.
Roughly 3 in 5 people, or 61 percent of poll respondents, think the federal trial on Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election should take place before the general election in November 2024.
The poll, which surveyed 1,032 Democratic, Republican, and independent adults, is more bad news for the Republican Party’s frontrunner. Trump has thus far spun his indictments as a “witch hunt,” and painted himself a victim, not a perpetrator.
In the new poll, nearly 90 percent of Democrats want an early trial date for Trump, while a third of Republicans agree. But what’s really damning are the responses from independents, a group Trump sorely needs to secure the presidency.
Sixty-three percent of independents said that Trump should stand trial before the general election, a sharp increase from the 48 percent who responded to a similar question Politico/Ipsos asked in June, following Trump’s indictment in the classified documents case. This shows that independent voters are taking Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election quite seriously.
There are other damning numbers for Trump as well. The poll found that a majority of Americans believe that the federal 2020 election subversion case was based on fair evaluation of the evidence, including 64 percent of independents. Additionally, roughly one-third of independents said that a conviction in the Department of Justice’s election case would make them less likely to support Trump.
The poll also showed that about half of the country (51 percent) believes that Trump is guilty in both the Justice Department’s case on the 2020 election and the case out of Fulton County, Georgia, on overturning that state’s election results. A slightly higher 52 percent of respondents believe Trump is guilty in the Justice Department’s classified documents case.