By Nathan Layne
BANGOR, Pennsylvania (Reuters) – Bronwen Brown, a registered Republican in a key Pennsylvania county, was ready to vote for Donald Trump again in November despite long-standing reservations about his character. His conviction by a New York jury gave her pause.
“He was found guilty on all 34 counts. Do I want to go through with it? Probably not,” the 72-year-old former opera singer told Reuters minutes after Trump became the first former US president convicted of a crime .
“Maybe I’m moving to Biden“, she said, referring to President Joe Biden, Trump’s Democratic opponent in the November 5 elections.
Brown lives in Bangor, a neighborhood in Northampton County, a largely rural and white region of 320,000 people that over the decades has become a bellwether for presidential winners in Pennsylvania, a swing state, and across the country.
Reuters spoke to 22 women across the county this week, including a dozen Republican-leaning voters and 10 who lean Democratic, to gauge how they were responding to the trial.
Public opinion polls indicated that women were more likely than men to be influenced by the case, in which Trump was found guilty of falsifying documents to cover up a payment to silence a porn star about an alleged affair before the 2016 election – a connection that Trump denies.
Brown was one of two Republican-leaning women interviewed who said a conviction would make them hesitant to support Trump.
The other 10 described the trial as a political witch hunt and said they would support Trump regardless of what happened in court.
Trump faces three other criminal trials, including two related to his alleged efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat, although they are unlikely to be tried before the November vote.
But in a race that is expected to be very close in Pennsylvania and a handful of other swing states that decide US elections, the loss of even a small number of voters like Brown could be the difference between victory and defeat.
According to an analysis of Reuters/Ipsos polls earlier this year, 57% of respondents who planned to vote for Trump said they would do so even if he were convicted of a crime. Around 13% of his supporters said they would not vote for him in that case and 29% said they were not sure.
While a guilty verdict has been partially incorporated into expectations for the race, it still poses some risk to Trump’s campaign, according to Chris Nicholas, a Republican strategist in Pennsylvania.
“In swing states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, maybe a few others — if a few percent move one way or the other, that could be decisive,” he said, adding that some Republicans may now “leave their vote blank for president or vote”. for Biden.”
DOING IT WITH TRUMP
Opinion polls suggest Pennsylvania will be close. Polls aggregated by the website FiveThirtyEight show Trump leading Biden in the state 42.9% to 40.8%, with independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr with 8% support.
If history is any guide, the candidate who wins Northampton will likely win the state as well.
Since 1924, the winner in Northampton County has won Pennsylvania in all but two elections (1932, 1948), and on all but three occasions (1968, 2000, 2004) the county’s winner has gone to the White House , according to Chris Borick, professor of political science at Muhlenberg College.
Trump carried Northampton by 4 percentage points in 2016 — the first Republican to do so since 1988 — but lost to Biden in 2020 by 1,233 votes, or less than a percentage point.
Fifine Holva, a 65-year-old payroll specialist for a pharmaceutical company, says she will vote for Trump a third time regardless of whether he is convicted, considering Biden’s policies on immigration and the economy a greater risk.
“I am in no way condoning his actions while he was married,” Holva said in an interview two days before the verdict was announced. “I’m voting for his policies. To get this world back to some kind of normalcy.”
Cori Shive, a 44-year-old Trump supporter, said that while she thought it was wrong to hide a payment to cover up an affair, she wasn’t sure Trump actually knew about it. She said she could not support Biden and would vote for Trump a third time.
For Brown, breaking with Trump and potentially supporting a Democrat is not an easy decision. She said she worries about illegal immigration and the overall direction of the country under Biden.
But she also said the conduct at issue in Trump’s conviction reinforced her concerns about his character, despite his insistence that he is innocent of the charges.
“He was found guilty of all of this and maybe it’s time to learn,” she said. “He never learned to lose.”
(Reporting by Nathan Layne in Northampton County, Pennsylvania; Editing by Ross Colvin and Kieran Murray)
