Slim majority of Georgia voters want Fulton Trump case to end

Tamar Hallerman, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Jan 20, 2025

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ATLANTA — More than half of Georgia voters believe the state should drop the 2020 election interference case against President-elect Donald Trump.

That’s according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution survey of 1,000 registered voters conducted by the University of Georgia’s School of Public and International Affairs Survey Research Center.

Fifty-one percent of poll respondents said the state should stop pursuing the high-profile racketeering case, which has been spearheaded by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, while 47% believed the prosecution should continue. The survey’s margin of error is 3.1 percentage points.

The poll was conducted between Jan. 2 and 10, in the weeks after the release of a bombshell decision by the state Court of Appeals to remove Willis and her office from the case. The court determined that the Democrat’s former romantic relationship with a top deputy constituted a “significant appearance of impropriety” that merited her disqualification.

Willis and her office have appealed the decision to the state Supreme Court. If the high court declines to take up the case or upholds the lower court’s ruling, jurisdiction will shift to the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, a nonpartisan state agency that will be tasked with appointing another prosecutor to take over. But many allies of Willis’ fear that if she is forced to stay off the case it will all but die.

The survey results show that despite the DA’s insistence that politics did not drive her decision-making, Georgia voters largely view the case through a partisan lens. Some 94% of Republicans said the prosecution against Trump should be dropped, while 95% of Democrats want it to continue. Fifty-four percent of independents — a crucial voting bloc in the state — believe the Trump case should come to an end.

Support also fell along gender and racial lines that have helped define the Trump era. Sixty-two percent of men recommended the state end the case, while 57% of women called for it to continue. Similarly, 68% of white voters pushed to drop the prosecution against Trump, while 4 in 5 Black voters wanted it to continue.

Interestingly, young Georgia voters were the least likely of other age groups surveyed to support the prosecution. Two-thirds of respondents 18 to 29 years old said it should be dropped.

The survey polled voters from across the state, but Willis only answers to constituents in deep-blue Fulton County. Last fall, voters overwhelmingly opted to reelect Willis to a second term over an inexperienced Republican challenger.

Charles Morrell is among the Fulton County residents who believes the case should be put to rest.

“I think that President Trump should be worried about running the country versus having this case — in my opinion, it’s a useless case — being charged against him,” said the 51-year-old Roswell resident, who works in health care.

Morrell supported Willis four years ago and initially backed the probe. But his opinion shifted over time, and this fall he decided against supporting the veteran prosecutor at the polls.

“She just don’t seem like a good district attorney to me,” he said. “I just think that you’re calling the president shady, but you’re just as shady yourself because you’re doing stuff that shouldn’t be done.”

But Lakeisha Brown, a 39-year-old model, said Fulton’s case against Trump needs to advance.

Trump, “needs to pay for his crimes,” said Brown, who recently moved from Fulton to Brookhaven. “Coming from an African American woman, I’m pretty sure there is nothing that I can do illegally that I could skirt (the law) and get away with. Nothing like him. So I think everything should be equal across the board.”