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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics, power and prejudices. This year,

2024, is an election year in America, a presidential election year. And so we will be doing

two podcasts a week, rather than our usual one, because we want to and because we know you can't get enough

Americano in your life. I am delighted to be joined by Tom Lubbock from J.L. Partners. Tom is

completing the hat trick of J.L. Partners people who've been on this podcast. We've had James

Johnson. We've had Scarlet McGuire on. Tom is a founder of founder of JL Partners, which, if people don't know by now, is a polling company that is doing some fascinating work in Britain and in America, spanning the Atlantic. Tom, I thought I'd start by asking you, because by this time next week, Donald Trump could be a convicted felon.

He may or may not be we don't know. And there's been a lot of speculation about how that would

affect the election. Have you done any polling on what voters would think if one of the candidates

is a convict.

Yeah, good to be with you, Freddie.

I mean, in the polling world, it's absolutely cut and dried that if you are convicted,

if Donald Trump is convicted, he will lose a good chunk of support.

Pick your poll, about a fifth in some polls. But the big but is we have to

remember that people are thinking of some hypothetical conviction, which is, you know, the 12

angry men style conviction, something really dramatic, where it's cut and dried, there's no partisan spin to it,

whereas I think what we'll see if Donald Trump is convicted is a kind of first line in the sand

and the inevitable appeal will be spun as a kind of a stay essentially that's how they will spin it if he's

convicted I think it will have an effect I think voters can be quite bad at judging these things for

themselves I think you know as pollsters we're quite honest about this kind of stuff hyper

...