Trump mix of juries gets various trial challenges; most of the courts in liberal regions

Former President Donald Trump is facing jury trials in four jurisdictions where vastly different juries could decide his political future and his freedom.

Mr. Trump is headed to trial in New York City, the District of Columbia and Fulton County, Georgia. All are Democratic strongholds. He also faces criminal charges in southern Florida, where the jury pool will depend on which courthouse hosts the trial.

“Washington, New York and Georgia will have the least favorable jury pools, but the Florida jurisdiction has a much more even distribution of Republicans and Democrats, which makes it the most promising for Trump,” said Richard Gabriel, a jury consultant who worked for the defense teams that won acquittals in the murder trials of O.J. Simpson and Casey Anthony.

Acquittal is no slam-dunk in Florida, where Mr. Trump faces 40 federal felony counts related to the storage of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, jury experts say. The trial’s location and the cut-and-dried nature of the charges could undermine a more favorable jury pool.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the case, has been holding pretrial hearings in Fort Pierce, Florida. If she keeps the trial in Fort Pierce, jurors will be selected from four counties in solid Trump country and one swing county where Mr. Trump eked out a victory in 2020.
 
Judge Cannon, whom Mr. Trump appointed in 2020, suggested that the trial could be moved because of the small jury pool in those counties. The counties combined have 18,000 eligible jurors, one of the smallest jury pools in the region.

Judge Cannon said in a recent order that the trial’s location could be part of “modifications” that could “be made as necessary as the matter proceeds.”

That means the trial could be moved to Miami, Fort Lauderdale or West Palm Beach, with much larger pools of prospective jurors. Those counties turned out heavily for Joseph R. Biden in the last presidential election. Mr. Trump lost Palm Beach County to Mr. Biden by 13 percentage points in 2020.
 
John Anderson, a former U.S. attorney in New Mexico, said the nature of the charges in the documents case could negate any advantage Mr. Trump could gain with a more favorable jury pool. He said the Florida case has a more coherent set of facts than the election interference cases brought in the nation’s capital and Georgia, where jurors will have the harder task of determining Mr. Trump’s intent.
 
In Florida, Mr. Trump is accused of thwarting the government’s efforts to retrieve the documents he moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago. Prosecutors say he erased videotapes that showed the movement of documents around his residence.
 
“His efforts to delete the surveillance tapes very much undercuts the advantage of a more favorable jury because the prosecution is going to come in and say, ‘Regardless of what you think of the former president, the facts are cut and dry,’ Mr. Anderson said. “The election cases are going to be more about what was going on in his mind.”
 
In Georgia, the jury will be drawn from Fulton County, where Democrats have long held sway. Mr. Biden won the 2020 election there by capturing nearly 72% of the vote. Four years earlier, Hillary Clinton overwhelmed Mr. Trump there by more than 40 percentage points.

Mr. Trump’s legal team has a glimmer of hope in Georgia. The jury pool will be drawn from Atlanta and its suburbs, which are politically and economically diverse. Of the 10 seats representing the county in the state Senate, four belong to Republicans. It takes only one vote for a case to result in an acquittal or hung jury.
 
“In Georgia, Trump’s team should look for one to three strong personalities,” Mr. Gabriel said. “People who are going to stand their ground in deliberations. A lone ranger who can hang the jury. Those people are harder to reach, but you can find them.”
 
Legal experts suggest that Mr. Trump might try to move the case to federal court, which would broaden the jury pool to a greater swath of Atlanta’s suburbs, where more of his supporters live.

“At the federal level, Trump will be able to get a larger cross-section of folks with a greater mix of viewpoints,” Mr. Anderson said.

Jury experts say all four cases likely will turn the traditional juror model on its head. Prosecutors typically look for White, middle-class conservatives who support law and order in criminal cases. Such jurors may lean toward Mr. Trump, forcing prosecutors to search for jurors with more liberal outlooks.
 
In New York and the District of Columbia, Mr. Trump lost resoundingly in the 2016 and 2020 elections. Recent polling shows he is even more disliked in those cities than when he was president.
 
“I think Trump’s lawyers have to be concerned,” said Valerie Hans, who teaches a course on juries at Cornell University Law School. “If anything, things have gotten worse because now you have convictions in the E. Jean Carroll [sexual abuse and defamation] and the Trump Organization cases, and Trump’s behavior as a candidate consists of attacking the courts. I think in some ways there is a hardening of views towards him.”

Concerns for Mr. Trump’s legal team go beyond election results. Recent legal cases in New York and the District underscored the difficulty of finding jurors in those cities who don’t have strong views against the former president.
 
At the District-based trial of Michael Sussmann, an attorney for Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign, prosecutors struggled to find jurors who did not donate to the Clinton campaign or other Democrats.

Roughly one-third of the potential jurors screened by prosecutors and defense attorneys in the D.C. courtroom said they had donated to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign in 2016 or had strong opinions about Mr. Trump.

One potential juror told the court she had always been “on the same side” as Mrs. Clinton. A man slammed the Sussmann case as a political prosecution, and a woman said her husband worked for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign.

In New York, a man summoned for jury duty in a tax fraud trial of Mr. Trump’s international real estate company was excused after telling a judge that the former president made him sick to his stomach.

“I don’t feel like it’s a very healthy thing for me to be here,” the man said, adding that his feelings about Mr. Trump “turned into a very visceral feeling in my gut.”

Another man told the court that Mr. Trump is “a narcissist,” and two women said they objected to how he ran the country. All three were sworn in after promising they could be impartial.
 
The demographics underscore Mr. Trump’s challenges in those regions.

In the District, where Mr. Trump is charged with four federal criminal counts concerning his attempts to overturn the 2020 election ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol, the former president remains deeply unpopular.

In the 2016 presidential election, Mr. Trump garnered a mere 4% of the vote in the city, and his Democratic opponent, Mrs. Clinton, won a commanding 91%.

Four years later, Mr. Trump won 5% of the vote and Mr. Biden won 93%. Mr. Biden’s 88-point margin of victory was the largest secured by any major party’s presidential candidate in any jurisdiction since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s landslide win in 1936.

In 2016, Mr. Trump recorded the lowest popular vote and the lowest share of votes in the District since it was granted electors in 1961. Yet he was more unpopular among D.C. voters when he left office than when he was elected. A Morning Consult poll found that Mr. Trump’s approval rating in the city dropped to 26% in 2021.

Mr. Trump also faces state criminal charges in Manhattan over hush-money payments to two women who said they had extramarital affairs with him. He faces 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide the payments.

In 2016, Mr. Trump captured a mere 10% of the vote in Manhattan, his home county. Mrs. Clinton won a commanding 87.2% of voter support. In 2020, Mr. Trump won 12.3% of the vote compared with Mr. Biden’s 86.8%.