The question may be unanswerable before the votes are counted. But we have a rough idea of what kind of voter we should be watching closely.
Consumers of partisan political media, right and left, have been treated to a display of blistering heat from the commentariat in the hours since a Manhattan jury pronounced Trump guilty of the charges brought by Alvin Bragg’s office. Like no other event in this election cycle, these verdicts are likely to accelerate the process through which soft supporters of one candidate or the other become hard supporters. But that merely speeds up a process that would traditionally occur around the nominating conventions. The polls of the 2024 presidential race have shown it to be a tight contest for months, and the voters that matter in it are the voters on the margins. How will they react to the verdict?
The short answer is that no one knows. Indeed, the question may be unanswerable before the votes are counted. But we have a rough idea of what kind of voter we should be watching closely: the unlikely sort.
A poll recently commissioned by the Cook Political Report produced findings that dovetail with what many other pollsters have found. Donald Trump enjoys a commanding lead among potential voters with spotty voting histories and who rarely consume political journalism. Among more reliable voters, Joe Biden enjoys a statistically significant lead. This is hardly the first poll to suggest that Trump’s position is strongest among registered voters who often abstain from voting. Indeed, in special, off-year, and midterm elections since Trump left office, Democrats have benefited from high turnout among a committed but small universe of dedicated voters. The big questions before us are: Can Donald Trump convert his prospective voters into actual voters, and how much does this verdict help or hurt that project?
That depends on whether these marginal voters apply one of two standards when evaluating Trump’s conduct — the politician’s standard or the celebrity’s.
The celebrity/politician dynamic is one on which Jonah Goldberg recently ruminated, and it’s a helpful tool to understand how voters on the electorate’s periphery appraise Trump. The polling analyst Nate Silver scratched out some preliminary thoughts late last night on the impact the verdict could have on Trump’s campaign if undecided, persuadable, “low-information” voters still on the fence apply the politician’s standard to Trump.
Silver asks partisans who have steeped themselves in the minutia of Trump’s legal woes for months to ascend to 30,000 feet. Voters at that altitude see only the headlines that read “Trump guilty on all counts,” but they can’t make out the details. Those voters are soon to be confronted with simple narratives around Trump the “felon,” which is uncomplicated enough to compete with the undeniable observation that Joe Biden is too old and infirm to serve out another term. Plugged-in Republican partisans and independents who reliably lean toward the GOP will reengage with vigor in the political process, but the uncommitted might experience a level of embarrassment over their association with a convict that they’ll withdraw from the process. At least temporarily.
For months, the polling has indicated that a felony conviction would hurt Donald Trump’s standing with voters more than it would help. Although Bragg’s case produced the weakest reaction among voters — a response commensurate with that case’s objective weaknesses — the effect was still measurable. In recent weeks, however, a conventional wisdom has settled over the political class in which it is assumed that respondents who told pollsters (and, perhaps, themselves) that they would be discomfited by a guilty verdict will find a way to rationalize a vote for Trump. But not every low-engagement voter is a cynical instrumentalist whose media diet is curated exclusively by social-media algorithms. Many tuned-out voters will encounter this event, process it as a “scandal,” and, as Silver notes, react to it in predictable ways.
But what if most unenthusiastic voters process all things Trump via a heuristic that applies to celebrities? In that case, Trump’s conviction only adds to the mythology around the man. Once again, the former president’s pursuers have overreached in their manic impulse to extirpate him from public life by any means necessary — a jam out from which “ol’ Donny” is highly likely to wriggle once again when his ordeal is reviewed upon appeal. To the extent that these voters are familiar with the outcomes of the Russia collusion probe, Trump’s impeachments, the effort to strip his name from the ballots in Colorado and Maine, and now this, it all contributes to the image of Trump as escape artist.
Intuitively enough, marginal voters tend not to participate in the political process because they don’t see that exercise as especially productive. They tend to be disaffected with the political system, and they seek changes to it that more conventional voters and politicians regard as radical. The polling of marginal voters ahead of this election has also shown that those voters see Trump as more of a change agent than Joe Biden. That was one of Trump’s strengths in 2016. As a former president backed by the Republican Party establishment, that aura had dissipated some. The verdicts upend that dynamic. Trump’s convictions render the former president an outlaw — the ultimate outsider. If the “scandal” these voters are processing is filtered through a tabloid prism, they’re just as likely to be enlivened by it as they are to be repulsed.
As Silver concludes, conventional political physics dictates that Joe Biden should see some signals in the data that suggest the public will not reward a convicted felon with their votes. If no such signal materializes or if the presumptive GOP presidential nominee enjoys a bump in the polls, it would help establish which standard voters are applying to Trump.