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By Khaleda Rahman
National Correspondent
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Donald Trump's campaign is in serious trouble if primary voters abandon him in greater numbers after his historic conviction in New York, a GOP strategist has said.
On June 4, the former president is set to appear on a ballot for the first time since a New York jury found him guilty of 34 felony charges of falsifying business records. The charges related to a hush-money payment made to an adult film actor that prosecutors said Trump arranged in an effort to illegally influence the 2016 election. The former president has denied any wrongdoing.
In March, Trump and President Joe Biden secured the number of delegates needed to be considered their parties' presumptive nominees. The Republican is expected to prevail in Tuesday's primary contests in Montana, New Jersey and New Mexico. However, while polls show Trump and Biden remain closely matched, early signs suggest that Trump's conviction is hampering his chances at winning back the White House in November.
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On X, Mike Madrid—a GOP strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a political action committee that opposes Trump—wrote in a series of posts that the primary results would be the "first clean data look" at how Republican voters were reacting to Trump's felony conviction. He added that if Republican candidates who had left the race continued to receive a significant share of the vote, it would be a "5 alarm fire" for the former president's campaign.
"Most of the public polling shows that the conviction has further damaged Trump with GOP voters," Madrid wrote.
He continued: "The magic number for Trump is 10%. If Trump is losing more GOP vote than that on Election Day he's very likely toast. It may not sound like much but that kind of hemorrhaging isn't unprecedented but you gotta go back pretty deep to get to those numbers in Presidential history."
Madrid added that Trump had "a continuing problem with the GOP base," as voters continued to cast ballots for former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and other candidates who had dropped out of the race.
"Haley and other candidates are routinely getting 18-21% even in closed GOP primaries," he said. "That's a 5 alarm fire for any campaign."
Newsweek has contacted Madrid and the Trump campaign for comment via email.
Support for Trump "would need to drop sharply in today's primaries to draw any solid conclusions about post-conviction defection," Costas Panagopoulos, a political science professor at Northeastern University, told Newsweek.
"It's hard to know exactly where the baseline is," he added. "More telling could be turnout in today's contests, relative to previous years and to primaries earlier in the cycle, adjusting expectations for the timing of the calendar."
Lower rates of participation or support for Trump "could reflect damage attributable to the convictions or simply that the GOP outcome is more or less a foregone conclusion," he continued. "Overall support for down-ballot Republicans in today's races could also be an indicator of indirect damage of the convictions trickling down to other candidates."
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Madrid wrote on X that a defection rate of above 10 percent would be "a serious danger zone" and above 20 percent "would be a disaster sign for Republicans," who are set to formally nominate Trump for president in July, days after he is sentenced in the New York case.
"None of this is good for Trump. Ideally he wants his GOP defection at 8% or better—he lost 8% in 2020 and lost the race," Madrid wrote. "If he pulls under 10% he's actually in a strong position to win the race."
Despite Trump's woes, Madrid said Biden was "losing more Latino & Black voters at this point than he was in 2020 and that's why we're so competitive at the moment."
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