Americans are almost evenly divided over whether former President Trump should face prison time for his felony conviction in the New York hush money case, a new survey found.
According to the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll, 50% of American adults said Trump should not be sentenced to prison in the case of a crime, while 48% said he should.
Trump was convicted in May of all 34 counts of falsifying business records, becoming the first former US president to become a convicted felon. The charges stemmed from refunds made to former Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen for a cash payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an alleged affair.
Opinions on prison time in the poll released Monday varied across political parties, with 78 percent of Democrats saying the former president should serve prison time and 86 percent of Republicans saying he should not. Independents were more divided, with 50% saying Trump should be put behind bars, compared to 46% who said he shouldn’t.
A similar trend was observed across party lines when it came to adult approval of sentencing, investigators found. Eighty percent of Democrats said they approved of the hush money conviction, while 6% disapproved and 12% chose neither.
More than half, or 55 percent, of Republicans disapproved of the conviction, while 14 percent said they approved and 30 percent said nothing. Independents in the poll were more mixed on the issue, with 32 percent saying they approved, 21 percent disapproving and 47 percent not choosing either option.
A majority of Democrats — 70 percent — said they were extremely or very confident that Trump was treated fairly, while 63 percent of Republicans said they were not very or not at all confident that the former president received fair treatment. More independents — 42 percent — said they were not confident that Trump was treated fairly, compared with 23 percent of party members who said otherwise.
Trump, who is the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, is expected to be sentenced in September. His sentencing was originally scheduled for Thursday, three days before the opening of the Republican National Convention.
The delay came after Judge Juan Merchan agreed to postpone the July 11 sentencing hearing so Trump could try to mount his presidential immunity defense. The former president has not argued that he is immune from bribery charges, but his lawyers argue that the jury’s verdict should still be rejected because some of the evidence from the trial was excluded by the Supreme Court’s new test.
Several legal experts noted that incarceration would be a rare punishment for a first-time offender convicted of Trump’s New York charges.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), whose office brought the case against the former president, declined to say whether prosecutors would seek prison time, insisting they would talk about their court filings in the coming weeks.
Trump also faces three other criminal cases, including in Florida for alleged mishandling of classified documents, and in Washington, D.C., on charges of conspiring to subvert the results of the 2020 election. He is also charged in Georgia, where he is charged of trying to overturn the results of the 2020 elections in the state.
Trump has pleaded not guilty in the other cases and denies any wrongdoing.
The new survey of 1,088 adults was conducted June 20-24, 2024. It has a margin of sampling error of 4.0 percentage points.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
