Squint and you might — might — see a change in Trump's poll numbers since the verdict

Polling industry insiders in the U.S. agree on one thing: The criminal conviction of Donald Trump has not had any obvious effect on the presidential election.

And they say there's now enough data to assess the fallout — two full weeks after the precedent-smashing guilty verdict of the former president.

"Yeah, I think we can draw preliminary conclusions," said Carl Bialik, vice-president of data science and U.S. politics editor at the YouGov polling firm.

What's clear is that Trump being branded a felon has not had the dramatic impact that pre-conviction surveys suggested it might.

Those older polls suggested he might lose several percentage points, see swing voters flee, or have a staggering 16 per cent to 24 per cent of his supporters reconsider.

Those polls were dealing in hypotheticals. On May 31, reality struck when a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty 34 times of falsifying business records to pay off a porn star.

So in the real world, what was the impact?

Trump led most, but not all, surveys before the verdict; that hasn't changed. If there has been an effect, it's been so small that pollsters disagree on whether it's actually happened — in other words, if it was a methodological rounding error.

Bialik's assessment? Maybe "a point or two" of change — visible if "you kind of squint."

Marc Trussler, director of data sciences at the University of Pennsylvania's opinion-research centre, sees a slightly larger impact, a roughly two-point shift to Biden. 

But another pollster dismisses all of it. "Absolutely no movement whatsoever," said Patrick Murray, director of the polling centre at Monmouth University.

Here's what the latest surveys actually say.

The New York Times found a two-point shift toward Biden after the verdict. YouGov also found Biden with his first lead in months. 

On the other hand, Biden's lead disappeared in YouGov surveys when the survey questions included third-party candidates. To boot, Trump was back ahead in YouGov's latest poll. In fact, Ipsos even has Trump with his best numbers in months.