Most Americans say Trump should face charges over 2020 election, poll finds

Most Americans support the decision by special counsel Jack Smith to prosecute former President Donald Trump for allegedly trying to overturn his loss in the 2020 election, a new poll from Quinnipiac University found.

More than half of U.S. adults, 54%, said they think Trump should face criminal charges in that case, while 42% disagreed, according to the university’s latest national survey, released Wednesday. That majority included 57% of respondents who said they were independents, and 12% of Republicans, along with nearly all Democrats.

Also, nearly two-thirds of respondents said they considered the federal charges against Trump to be serious, including 52% who said they were “very serious,” the poll found.

“Not only do a large majority of Americans regard the federal charges as serious, more than half of Americans think the former president should face prosecution,” Quinnipiac’s polling analyst Tim Malloy said in a statement.

But the poll also found that Trump’s lead is growing larger in the 2024 Republican presidential primary while his nearest rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, hemorrhages support.

The governor, who was just 6 points behind Trump in Quinnipiac’s national poll in February, trailed the former president by 39 points in the survey released Wednesday.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to the four-count federal indictment charging him with conspiring to subvert the will of voters and reverse President Joe Biden’s legitimate victory in the 2020 contest.

Quinnipiac surveyed 1,818 American adults Aug. 10-14 in its latest poll, which had a margin of error of 2.3 percentage points.

The polling period ended on the same day that Trump was hit with his fourth criminal indictment, this one related to his alleged scheme to reverse his 2020 election loss in the state of Georgia.

The state-level indictment,…