Partisan Identity Drives How Voters Interpret Trump and Biden Convictions

Researchers from the University of Arkansas and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University examined how party loyalty shaped mental processing of two high-profile legal cases in the 2024 presidential election: former President Donald Trump’s conviction for falsifying business records and Hunter Biden’s conviction for illegally purchasing a firearm. The experiment recruited 231 university students (average age ? 22) enrolled in communication and political-science courses at a large Southern university. The sample comprised 117 women, 112 men, and two gender-non-binary participants; politically, 132 identified as Republicans or leaned Republican and 99 as Democrats or leaned Democratic. Participants read three-paragraph, 219-word articles about each conviction in randomized order, then completed a thought-listing exercise to capture “valenced elaboration” (positive or negative reasoning) and a six-item survey on perceived political motivation.

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The data showed that partisan identity strongly dictated the direction and intensity of cognitive effort. Republican participants produced significantly more positively valenced elaboration to defend Trump, while Democrats generated more negatively valenced elaboration to argue the convictions should disqualify him. The reverse pattern appeared for the Biden case: Democrats engaged in much higher levels of positively valenced elaboration to defend the president’s son, and Republicans generated more negatively valenced elaboration against him. Participants with stronger party identification displayed greater identity-congruent elaboration, leading those who defended their candidate to view the charges as a “political weapon,” whereas those who criticized their candidate tended to see the convictions as “legitimate and fair.”

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The authors note several constraints. The reliance on a single university-student sample limits generalizability to the broader electorate, whose political engagement and demographics differ markedly. Moreover, the study juxtaposes a convicted presidential candidate (Trump) with a family member of the incumbent president (Hunter Biden), a disparity that may affect the weight of each scandal. The research is also confined to the U.S. two-party system, leaving open how multi-party contexts might shape similar reasoning.

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• “Recent research provides evidence that voters spend greater mental energy defending politicians from their own party and finding faults in politicians from the opposing party when faced with news of criminal convictions.” — Study authors

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• “Republican participants generated significantly more positively valenced elaboration to defend Donald Trump than Democrats did.” — Study authors

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• “Democrats engaged in much higher levels of positively valenced elaboration to defend the president’s son compared to Republicans.” — Study authors

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• “The more a person engaged in positively valenced elaboration defending a candidate, the more likely they were to believe that the legal charges were a political weapon.” — Study authors

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• “Higher levels of negatively valenced elaboration led participants to view the convictions as legitimate and fair.” — Study authors

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• “Participants who identified strongly with their party displayed greater identity-congruent elaboration.” — Study authors

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