A New York jury deliberated for 9½ hours over two days before convicting Trump of 34 counts of falsifying business records in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through hush money payments to a porn actor who said the two had sex.

After the verdict, California’s Republican leaders quickly cast doubt on the verdict’s legitimacy and argued it would boost Trump’s chances of reelection in November.

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield said that Trump’s “only ‘crime’ is running against Joe Biden in 2024.”

Jessica Millan Patterson, the chair of the California Republican Party, said the prosecution was “a politically motivated case brought by a far-left district attorney” and that the guilty verdict “never should have happened.”

San Diego-area Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall) called the verdict and the trial “a disgrace.”

Democrats, by contrast, praised the verdict as proof of the American legal system functioning as it should. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), who is running for Senate, said that “the rule of law prevailed” despite Trump’s efforts to “distract, delay and deny.”

In California’s most hotly contested congressional races, though, few wanted to publicly tangle with the question of Trump’s conviction.

Representatives for Reps. Young Kim (R-Anaheim Hills), Michelle Steel (R-Seal Beach), Mike Garcia (R-Santa Clarita), David Valadao (R-Hanford) and John Duarte (R-Modesto) did not return requests for comment. Nor did representatives for Matt Gunderson, who is challenging Rep. Mike Levin (D-San Juan Capistrano) in coastal Orange and San Diego counties, or Stockton Mayor Kevin Lincoln, who is running against Rep. Josh Harder (D-Tracy) in the Central Valley.

A representative for Republican Steve Garvey, who is running for Senate against Schiff, said he had no comment on the verdict.

One exception was Scott Baugh, who is running to flip the coastal Orange County seat held by Rep. Katie Porter (D-Irvine). Baugh, the former chair of the Orange County GOP, characterized Trump’s trial as a political prosecution and said the verdict “should surprise no one.”

“A politically motivated prosecutor and a hostile judge set the trial up for so many prejudicial errors,” Baugh said in a prepared statement. “President Trump will have his opportunity to appeal and I am confident that a fair hearing will expose and resolve these issues.”

And longtime Riverside Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Corona), who is fighting to retain his once-safe seat in a now-competitive swing district, said in a statement on Thursday evening that Trump’s prosecution was political — but his comment was more muted than the loudest GOP voices.

Calvert said that Americans who believe that “justice should be blind to politics” should be “concerned” by the trial’s outcome. He continued: “It’s alarming that our criminal justice system continues to be taken advantage of by partisan prosecutors who want to use the power of their office to influence our democratic elections.”

Whether to lock arms with Trump has been a fraught question for Republicans in California for nearly a decade, but especially this year. Republicans hold such a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives that a handful of hyper-competitive races in the Golden State could determine which party controls the chamber. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report has rated 10 California races as competitive.

Remaining silent on the verdict makes sense for Republicans in those competitive battleground districts, said Dan Schnur, a politics professor at USC, UC Berkeley and Pepperdine.

“You’ll notice that the loudest voices supporting Trump on this tend to be Republicans in very safe seats,” Schnur said. “Candidates who need to reach swing voters don’t have that luxury.”

One challenge for candidates, said UC San Diego political science professor Thad Kousser, is that partisan allegiances determine how voters viewed the trial.

Polling has found that Democrats overwhelmingly saw the trial as fair, while only a tiny percentage of Republicans agreed. Independents were evenly split. A Trump-like message about a rigged, unfair trial that might resonate with a candidate’s Republican base could also turn off independents, Kousser said.

“Anyone trying to win a November race in a competitive district needs to worry about both mobilizing their base through more Trump-like rhetoric, but also the cost of alienating the middle,” he said.

Rob Stutzman, a GOP strategist who isn’t involved in any congressional races, said that while the verdict can be used as a tool by both parties to turn out voters in November, it’s a “touchy subject.”

“You may have independents in congressional seats who are indifferent to the verdict, but don’t necessarily want to see Republican incumbents defending Trump or decrying the verdict,” Stutzman said.

But Shawn Steel, who represents California on the Republican National Committee and is married to Steel, of Orange County, said the verdict will have “absolutely no impact” on California’s House races.

“The White House got the verdict they planned years ago,” Steel said. “The Manhattan jurors who convicted Trump did it out of malice and hate. Today’s verdict, along with the not-guilty verdict of the O.J. Simpson criminal trial, proved the steep decline of trust in the American criminal justice.”

Harmeet Dhillon, a San Francisco attorney who also represents California on the Republican National Committee and whose law firm represents the Trump campaign, said Californians are more concerned with quality-of-life issues, such as homelessness, crime and illegal immigration than they are with the trial.

“People are fed up,” she said. “People are much more motivated in this election to vote because things are getting bad here in California.”

While California Republican House candidates were largely quiet, some of their allies in other states, such as Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake and vice presidential hopeful Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, were not.

“This was a rigged, disgraceful trial,” Trump told reporters after leaving the courtroom. “The real verdict is going to be Nov. 5 by the people.”

The Biden campaign said Thursday’s verdict showed that the law applied to everyone, but warned that the only way to keep Trump out of the White House is voting in November.

“Convicted felon or not, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president,” campaign spokesman Michael Tyler said. “The threat Trump poses to our democracy has never been greater. He is running an increasingly unhinged campaign of revenge and retribution, pledging to be a dictator ‘on Day One’ and calling for our Constitution to be ‘terminated’ so he can regain and keep power.”

In the wake of Trump’s conviction, Democrats seized upon 23 vulnerable House Republicans who had endorsed the former president, including Duarte, Garcia, Calvert and Steel.

“House Republicans have continued to put Donald Trump first and the American people last,” said Courtney Rice, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Their districts deserve better than their cult-like adherence to a wannabe dictator. Each and every one of them should rescind their endorsement, but won’t.”

Trump’s trial, which began in April in New York City, was one of four felony cases that Trump was facing, though it was thought to be the only one likely to see a trial before the November election.

The verdict hinged on whether Trump falsified business records to hide a $130,000 hush money payment that Michael Cohen — Trump’s lawyer and, later, a witness for the prosecution — made to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, who alleged she’d had a sexual encounter with Trump a decade prior.

Manhattan Dist. Atty. Alvin Bragg had to convince the jury that Trump not only commanded Cohen to make the payments, but that he did so in order to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, rather than to shield his family from the story. Trump pleaded not guilty and denied the sexual encounter with Daniels; Cohen testified that he had been deeply involved in the scheme.

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But Trump’s new status as a convicted felon probably won’t significantly affect his chances of winning the 2024 presidential election.

That, too is a strange historic first: a presidential candidate convicted of felonies, but suffering little if any political damage in the process.

However sensational the charges, which stemmed from hush money payments made to an adult film actress, many voters will react to the Manhattan jury’s decision with a shrug.

The conviction won’t prevent him from staying in the race until election day. If he wins, he stands a good chance of avoiding serious penalties while he’s in the White House.

It won’t be easy to spin a conviction on 34 felony counts as a victory, but there are plenty of ways Trump can mitigate the consequences.

He’ll continue to claim that the charges were flimsy and the process was rigged against him.

If he appeals the verdict, as expected, that will allow him to argue — correctly — that a conviction isn’t final while it’s under challenge. Not incidentally, it will also keep him out of jail, at least for a while.

Why do I say the guilty verdict won’t likely put much of a dent in Trump’s electoral prospects? Because that’s what the smartest political pollsters, Republicans and Democrats, say.

Democratic strategist Mark Mellman said the conviction was “unlikely to play a significant role” in the election. “It’s possible that the polls will flutter and then return to where they were. And it’s possible that there won’t be a flutter.”

Republican pollster Whit Ayres said the verdict’s impact would most likely be “negligible.”

In an ABC News/IPSOS poll last month, only 16% of Trump’s current voters said they would “reconsider” supporting him if he were convicted in the New York case. A mere 4% said they would definitely stop supporting him. But voters are often poor predictors of their own reactions, the pollsters said.

Many Democrats told pollsters in 1998 that they thought then-President Clinton should resign if he were impeached for lying about a sexual relationship with a White House intern, Mellman noted. But when the Republican-led House of Representatives actually impeached Clinton, his popularity soared.

Trump voters have proved fiercely loyal to their favored candidate, felon or not.

A month before the 2016 presidential election, when a videotape surfaced in which Trump boasted of kissing women without asking and grabbing them “by the pussy,” his poll numbers dropped by only one percentage point and rebounded quickly.

“We have seen, over eight years, a series of events that caused people to say, ‘Surely this time, Trump will lose support.’ But he never really does,” Ayres said.

Trump himself has marveled at the phenomenon. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” he said in 2016. “It’s, like, incredible.”

The presumptive Republican nominee has primed his supporters to ignore a guilty verdict by relentlessly attacking the cases against him as politically motivated.

“If I were trying to design a court case that would be easy for Republicans to dismiss as a partisan witch hunt, I would design the New York case,” Ayres said, noting that Manhattan Dist. Atty. Alvin Bragg is not only a Democrat, but a vocal Trump critic.

Trump has also shown that constant repetition of even bogus claims can bend public opinion his way.

Case in point: his false claims, long since disproved, that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. A year ago, the Monmouth University Poll found that 68% of Republicans said they believed President Biden won the election through fraud. This year, after Trump spent months denouncing the election at campaign rallies, that number has ticked up to 75%.

Despite the verdict in New York, Trump has scored an important victory in all four of his criminal cases: He and his lawyers, aided by a dose of luck, have succeeded in postponing any final reckoning until after election day.

Six months ago, any of the cases could have threatened his presidential campaign: a federal prosecution stemming from his supporters’ invasion of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; a federal case on charges he illegally retained highly classified documents; a Georgia election interference case; and the New York business fraud case.

Trump has contrived to postpone the trials in three of those cases and will likely appeal his verdict in the fourth. The appeals process would last far beyond the election.

Those delays won’t make the charges go away.

But if Trump wins the election, once he is president he can order the Justice Department to halt the two federal cases. Some career Justice Department officials might refuse to carry out those orders, but a newly inaugurated president will presumably be able to find — or appoint — someone willing to do his bidding.

And under most legal precedent, state courts would put his prosecutions in New York and Georgia on hold while he’s in the White House. If he takes office in January and completes a full term, none of the cases would be decided before 2029, when he’ll be 82.

Being the first former president ever convicted on criminal charges is a dubious achievement, to be sure.

Equally unprecedented — and potentially more damaging to democracy — Trump has given future politicians a dangerous example: He has shown that felony convictions need not stand in the way of success.

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