Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Back the Blue, Then Pardon the Mob

Nobody can tell you how many police officers voted for a man convicted of 34 felonies. What is on the record: their largest union endorsed him three times, then watched him free the people who assaulted 140 officers at the Capitol.

On September 6, 2024, Donald Trump walked onto a stage in Charlotte, accepted the endorsement of the largest police organization in the country, and called it an honor. He promised to stand with officers and to make their enemies pay. Four and a half months later, on his first day back in office, he signed papers freeing roughly 1,500 people charged over the January 6 attack on the Capitol, including men convicted of beating the officers who held the line that day. The Fraternal Order of Police had just endorsed him for the third time. After the pardons, it objected. It did not take the endorsement back.

Readers keep asking me a version of the same question: how many cops voted for a convicted felon? The honest answer is that nobody can give you a number, and anyone who hands you one is guessing. The ballot is secret. No exit poll sorts voters by badge. What is not a guess is the institutional record, and that record is sharper than any percentage a pollster could invent.

The number nobody has

Start with what cannot be known. American elections do not record a voter’s occupation, so there is no tally of the law enforcement vote, any more than there is a tally of the plumber vote or the nurse vote. Surveys of officers exist, but the serious ones measure party registration, not how a given person filled out a given ballot.

The most rigorous recent work, published last year in the American Journal of Political Science, merged personnel files from nearly all of the hundred largest local departments with voter rolls. It found that roughly 32 percent of officers were registered Republican, against about 14 percent of the voting-age civilians in the same areas. Police lean to the right of the communities they patrol. That is measured, and it is real. It is also not a vote count, and the same study found that an officer’s party did little to predict how he behaved on a stop.

So when a figure gets thrown around about the share of cops who broke for Trump, treat it the way you would treat any number with no method behind it. The honest version of this story does not need one. The organizations that speak for police told you exactly where they stood, on the record, with their names attached.

What the conviction is

The felony is not vague. On May 30, 2024, a Manhattan jury convicted Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree, a class E felony under New York law. The records concealed a $130,000 payment to an adult film actress in the closing weeks of the 2016 campaign, and the jury found the falsification was done to commit or hide a second crime, a violation of state election law. He became the first president, sitting or former, convicted of a crime. In January 2025 the judge sentenced him to an unconditional discharge, which means the conviction stands and the penalty is nothing. He is appealing.

Note the thing fairly. Trump’s defenders call the case a political prosecution, brought by an elected Democratic district attorney, built on a bookkeeping misdemeanor that an aggressive legal theory stretched into 34 felonies. That argument deserves a hearing, and it will get one on appeal. But the count is the count. Thirty-four guilty verdicts is what twelve jurors returned, unanimously, after the evidence was in.

What “Back the Blue” Bought

The Fraternal Order of Police is not a fringe outfit. It is the largest law enforcement organization in the world, more than 370,000 members across some 2,200 lodges, and its presidential endorsement is among the most sought-after in American politics. It backed Trump in 2016, in 2020, and again in September 2024, when its national president, Patrick Yoes, said there was “zero doubt” about who the membership wanted. The union did not land there casually. It weighed Trump’s written answers to its candidate questionnaire against a letter from the Harris campaign laying out her positions, then made its choice. From the same stage, Trump branded Kamala Harris a defunder of the police and promised stronger legal immunity for officers and a return to stop-and-frisk.

There were reasons, and they were not stupid ones. The summer of 2020 left many officers feeling abandoned by elected leaders who floated cutting their budgets, and Trump cast himself as the man who stood with them when that was unpopular. Crime and the border are the issues police rank highest, and the union judged his record on them stronger than the alternative’s. A rank-and-file officer who soured on Democrats over the defund fight did not need a conspiracy to land on the Republican. The law-and-order party has owned that brand since long before Trump arrived. Take all of it as given. It is the fair case, and it is why the endorsement was never a close call.

Then he pardoned the mob

Then came the first day of the second term. On January 20, 2025, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of roughly 1,500 people charged in connection with January 6. The Justice Department’s own count puts the number of officers assaulted at the Capitol that day at about 140, including some 80 from the U.S. Capitol Police and 60 from the District’s Metropolitan force. Officers were beaten with poles and sprayed with chemicals, some crushed in doorways and left with brain injuries that followed them home. Many of the people who did it walked free that day, their records wiped, on the signature of the man the police union had just helped return to power.

One of those officers was Daniel Hodges of the Metropolitan Police. On January 6 he was pinned in a doorway in the West Front tunnel as rioters clawed at his gas mask and tried to gouge his eyes; he later told the public he was “beaten, crushed, kicked, punched, surrounded.” Men convicted of assaulting him were among those Trump set free. Hodges, still on the job and speaking in his own capacity, had worked that same inauguration week in twelve-hour shifts, guarding Trump and the crowd that came to celebrate him, days before the president signed his attackers’ release.

The institutional reaction was swift and small. The FOP joined the International Association of Chiefs of Police in a statement warning that releasing those convicted of attacking officers devalues the sacrifice of the ones who were hurt. The National Association of Police Organizations went further and named the January 6 pardons directly, saying those who violently assault officers should not benefit from a pardon. The anger reached his own party, too; Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, said none of the people he had watched on video crushing an officer should have been pardoned. Trump, for his part, told an interviewer the attacks on police that day were “very minor incidents.” And the FOP, having said its piece, rescinded nothing. The endorsement stood. It stands today.

Set the two facts side by side. A felony conviction did not move the endorsement. The pardon of people who beat police did not move it either. An organization that exists to defend officers weighed both against the politics and chose the politics. Call it loyalty to a candidate who promised them immunity and revenge on their critics, and there is something to that. It is also the moment the slogan and the people it claims to honor came apart in public, with the union’s own statement conceding the harm while the endorsement held. Even Vice President JD Vance had allowed, before the fact, that anyone who committed violence that day should not be pardoned. The people who committed violence were pardoned anyway. The badge on the bumper sticker and the badge in the tunnel turned out to be two different things.

The New Hampshire piece

None of this is abstract here. New Hampshire went for Harris in 2024, but barely, by about 2.8 points, the closest presidential margin of any state in the country, and every one of its ten counties moved to the right of where it sat four years earlier. The state’s police are not separate from the national story. They belong to the same Fraternal Order of Police, through lodges like the Capital of New Hampshire Lodge No. 10 in Concord, whose stated purpose is to unite the state’s officers under that national banner. The organization that speaks for Granite State cops is the organization that endorsed the man who freed the people who beat their brothers and sisters at the Capitol. No New Hampshire lodge has told me it sees the matter differently, and I would print it if one did.

So, the number. I cannot give it to you, and I will not pretend to. But the number was never the point. The record is the point, and the record is plain. The people paid to speak for American police looked at a man convicted of 34 felonies, a man who would soon free the mob that bloodied 140 officers, and they pinned their endorsement to his chest a third time. In New Hampshire and everywhere else, that is what “back the blue” turned out to buy.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was verified against primary sources before publication; see the fact-check table. Two limits are stated plainly in the body and worth repeating here. First, no scientific tally of how police officers voted exists, because ballots are secret and U.S. elections do not record occupation; the only measured figures are party-registration estimates, which are not the same as votes, and the 32/14 comparison is drawn from a study of the country’s largest local agencies rather than New Hampshire. Second, the FOP endorsement is an institutional decision by union leadership, not a referendum of the rank and file, and it is not evidence of how any individual officer voted. This piece rests on documentary sourcing; it carries no on-the-record New Hampshire law enforcement interview, which is the one thing that would lift it further. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.