57 percent say any criminal charges should disqualify Trump from reelection bid: poll

A majority of Americans in a new poll say that any criminal charges filed against former President Trump should disqualify him from running for another White House term.

Fifty-seven percent of respondents in the Quinnipiac University poll published Wednesday said Trump should be disqualified from running for president again if criminal charges are filed against him, while 38 percent said charges should not disqualify him from running.

Three-quarters of Republican respondents in the survey said Trump shouldn’t be disqualified from running for president again if criminal charges are filed against him, while 88 percent of Democratic respondents and 55 percent of independent voters said he should be disqualified if charges are filed.

Less than a quarter of surveyed Republicans, 23 percent, think he should not be allowed to run if charged with a crime, and just 9 percent of Democrats said he should still be allowed to do so, according to the poll.

The poll comes as a New York grand jury hears evidence in a hush money probe involving payments Trump’s then-attorney paid to adult film star Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 election.

Daniels claimed she had an affair with Trump years earlier, which he has denied. The Manhattan-based grand jury is not scheduled to meet about the case until late April. 

A majority of respondents in the Quinnipiac poll, 55 percent, said the accusations in the Manhattan district attorney’s case are either very or somewhat serious, while 42 percent said they are not too serious or not serious at all.

Still, more than 6 in 10 of those surveyed, 62 percent, said they think the case is “mainly motivated by politics,” compared to 32 percent who said they think it’s mainly motivated by the law.

The former president faces multiple other probes as well, including a federal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Trump, who announced his third White House bid at his Mar-a-Lago estate in November, incorrectly predicted that his arrest would occur last week. He has warned of “potential death & destruction” should he be charged in the Manhattan district attorney’s case, comments that stoked pushback from lawmakers.

The Quinnipiac poll of 1,788 U.S. adults was conducted March 23-27 and had an overall margin of error of 2.3 percentage points.