Former US President Donald Trump speaks during a 2024 election campaign rally in Waco, Texas, March 25, 2023.
Suzanne Cordeiro | AFP | Getty Images
A majority of Americans consider that Donald Trump needs to be disqualified from running for president again if he’s criminally charged in any of the multiple federal and state investigations he faces, a recent Quinnipiac University poll found.
The survey found that 57% of respondents said Trump needs to be disqualified from looking for the White House if he’s criminally charged, compared with 38% who said he shouldn’t be barred from doing so.
Even so, Trump saw relatively strong support within the Quinnipiac poll amongst Republicans and Republican-leaning voters.
A majority of that group said they’d vote for him in a GOP primary, by a ten percentage point margin over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the one other Republican who registered anything near significant support. DeSantis has signaled he could seek the presidency but has not yet launched a campaign.
Republicans and Republican-leaning voters also by a large margin, 75% to 23%, believed that Trump shouldn’t be disqualified from looking for the presidency if he’s criminally charged.
Amongst Democrats, 88% said charges should disqualify him. Fifty-five percent of independent voters agreed such charges should prevent Trump from running.
The poll questioned 1,788 adults over the past week. It had a margin of error of two.5 percentage points.
Trump in November announced his candidacy for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
He’s under criminal investigation by a special counsel for the Department of Justice in two separate probes, and by local district attorneys in Recent York and Georgia.
Within the Manhattan DA’s case, Trump is being eyed in reference to a hush money payment his then-lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen gave to porn star Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 presidential election.
Trump is under investigation for the way that payment to Daniels was classified in business records by the Trump Organization. It reported his reimbursement to Cohen for the payment as being for “legal expenses.”
The Quinnipiac poll found that 55% of voters said those allegations were very serious or somewhat serious, while 42% said they weren’t serious, or not too serious.
A solid majority of voters, 62%, said they agreed with the concept the Manhattan investigation is principally motivated by politics.
Trump himself has claimed that DA Alvin Bragg, who’s a Democrat, has a political agenda in pursuing the probe.
Certainly one of the DOJ probes is investigating Trump for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden.
The opposite DOJ investigation is eyeing Trump’s refusal to return government records, a few of them highly classified, after he left office.
In Atlanta, the Fulton County DA is investigating Trump for potentially illegal interference in that state’s 2020 election by pressuring Georgia election officials to undo Biden’s victory there.
Trump has denied any wrongdoing.
