Despite the FBI’s investigation having come to an end, a new poll shows that Hillary Clinton’s email woes have severely tarnished her image among U.S. voters.
According to an Associated Press-GfK poll released Friday, 56 percent of Americans think Clinton broke the law when she set up a private email server for use as secretary of state.
While FBI Director James Comey has said Clinton’s email practices did not rise to the level of criminal charges, 39 percent of respondents said they believe the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee not only broke the law, but did so intentionally.
“She’s innocent until proven guilty, but to me the FBI director called her guilty and then gave her a pass card,” James Thompson, a poll respondent from Colorado, told the Associated Press. “If that was anyone else in this world, they would have been gone. They would have been down the river. They would have been in jail.”
Another 36 percent of voters said Clinton exercised bad judgment in her private email practices and handling of classified material but didn’t commit a crime. Only 6 percent of respondents said the former secretary of state did nothing wrong.
As Clinton seeks to turn attention away from her email scandal, 50 percent of Americans now say it is a “major problem” for the Democratic presidential hopeful. Last October, only a third of voters felt that way.
Republicans feel especially optimistic that Clinton escaping criminal charges will harm her in the general election, with 85 percent saying the scandal is a major headache for her campaign. Nearly 50 percent of Democrats felt the same.
The AP-GfK Poll of 1,009 American adults was conducted July 7-11. Results contain a margin of error of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points.
