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The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House
The criminal convictions of Donald Trump and Hunter Biden have done little to change voters’ minds heading into November’s US presidential election, according to new polls showing a gridlocked electorate.
A Monmouth University poll out on Thursday found voter intentions had barely budged since Trump’s trial in Manhattan. Just over four in 10 registered voters nationwide said they would “definitely” or “probably” vote for President Joe Biden, with similar numbers for Trump. The results were virtually unchanged since Monmouth started asking the question last autumn.
The Monmouth poll comes a day after a Reuters/Ipsos survey found 80 per cent of registered voters said Hunter Biden’s conviction on criminal gun charges would not affect their likelihood of voting for Joe Biden.
The polling figures lay bare how fixed the American public is with less than five months left in a White House race that has been marred by legal battles.
Most surveys now show Trump and Biden in a tight race, leaving the election likely to be decided by a narrow sliver of the electorate in a handful of swing states.
Hunter Biden became the first child of a US president to be convicted of a crime earlier this week and also faces a separate trial on tax charges in California, which is set to being just two months before election day.
The Hunter Biden verdict came just weeks after Trump became the first ex-president to be convicted of a felony, when a New York jury found him guilty on 34 counts relating to “hush money” payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels.
Trump has accused the Democrats of weaponising the judiciary against him for political reasons. He still faces three other criminal trials relating to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and his handling of classified documents.
The latest Monmouth poll found that 57 per cent of voters, and 93 per cent of Republicans, thought the charges against Trump in the Daniels case were political. Just under half of voters, and nearly two-thirds of Democrats, said the Hunter Biden case was also politically motivated.
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