How Trump's conviction will impact the US election

WASHINGTON, United States — A panel of 12 New Yorkers were unanimous in their determination that Donald Trump is guilty as charged -- but for the impact on his election prospects, the jury is still out.

The Republican billionaire was convicted of all 34 charges in New York on Thursday, and now finds himself bidding for a second presidential term unsure if he'll be spending 2025 in the Oval Office, on probation or in jail.

The polarizing case has produced months of TV coverage and furious denouncements from partisans on both sides, but for the public at large, analysts and pollsters are expecting the reaction to be a collective "meh."

"We live in a hyper-partisan system in which voters are focused on what is termed negative partisanship -- they're voting against the candidate they like the least, not for a candidate they support," said political scientist Nicholas Higgins.

"Given this -- and particularly because the accusations are already known and Trump's camp has framed it as a political attack -- few voters will somehow be convinced that their previous view of Trump was wrong because the jury convicted him."

Trump, who turns 78 in June, is the first criminal former president and first felon to be the nominee of a major political party, giving Democrats ample fodder for attack ads as November's election rematch with President Joe Biden looms.

He was found to have falsified business records to misrepresent a hush-money payment just before the 2016 election to porn actress Stormy Daniels for her silence over a sexual encounter she alleges they had.

Part of an illegal scheme to pull the wool over voters' eyes, the fraudulent accounting was bumped from a misdemeanor case to a suite of felony charges.

But the disgraced tycoon's poll numbers were steady throughout the trial, and he remains neck-and-neck with Biden in national polling, while leading the Democrat narrowly in most of the key swing states.

Two-thirds of respondents in the latest Marist poll said a conviction would make no difference to their vote, while the rest were almost evenly divided on whether it would make them more or less likely to support Trump.

Higgins, chair of the political science