A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled that former President Donald Trump has partial immunity from criminal prosecution for actions he took while in office. While this may be true under US law, if there’s one thing the past few weeks have shown conclusively, it’s that Trump enjoys complete immunity from political law.
This is both good news and bad news for Trump supporters.
For a variety of reasons, my social circles tend to lean left politically, and as a result, I often hang out with fun people who live in completely different political worlds, all of whom know what I do for a living and frequently ask me for my opinion on how the right sees things.
I remember well their jubilation when Trump was convicted of 34 felonies in May. A convicted felon plummets in the polls, they reasoned, and surely the public wouldn’t elect him. A few of them came up to me and asked how a conviction would affect the 2024 election.
They were shocked when I honestly told them that a guilty conviction would have no effect on the race.
If the polls are to be believed, his opponent’s television gaffe did not do Trump much good.
For anyone who has followed politics for the past decade or more, it is certainly quite shocking that 20+ felony convictions have no impact on a presidential election. Have Anyone who has followed politics over the past decade should not be surprised that this will have no impact, especially on Trump.
Trump has always been more or less exempt from the rules that have governed American politics since World War II: other candidates’ steep declines in the polls have no effect on him.
That was true in 2016, and it’s even more true now that Trump was actually elected president and served four years. For better or worse, there is almost no one in America today who doesn’t have a pretty specific view of Trump. The number of people with a flexible view of the most polarizing figure in modern political history is incredibly small, and getting smaller. After the past decade, it’s pretty hard to think of anything about Trump that would surprise Americans.
And how did the American people react to Trump’s conviction?… Hardly anything. According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Trump had an average lead over Biden of 0.8 points on May 31. A week later, that lead remained at 0.8 points. If you believe the polls, his conviction literally had no impact.
Unfortunately for Trump’s supporters, this appears to be a two-way street: Two events have happened in the past three weeks that would have boosted any other politician’s approval ratings by double digits.
The first of these, of course, was the June 27 debate between Trump and Biden, which was panned by everyone, including Biden himself, as a major failure for Biden.
But calling it a “fiasco” is an injustice to the fiasco. The first debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney was a fiasco. Biden’s performance was anything but. Not only did Biden lose, but he spent 90 minutes live exposing his weaknesses: his age and visible senility, in a highly embarrassing way. His performance was so spectacular that partisan Democrats on CNN and MSNBC have almost uniformly spent the last three weeks on the air trying to convince Biden to drop out of the race.
But if the polls are to be believed, the collapse of his televised opponents doesn’t seem to have done Trump much favor. The last pre-debate poll came in on June 28, when Trump held a 1.9-point lead in the RCP average. A week later, Trump’s lead had fallen to 3.3 points. That’s a change, but it’s so slight that it could be explained away as statistical noise.
Compare this public reaction to Michael Dukakis’ relatively mild response to the question of whether he would support the death penalty if someone killed his wife. Dukakis’s answer was essentially well thought out and clearly stated. It was out of step with what Americans thought, and as a result, George H.W. Bush 4-point lead Pre-debate polls showed They opened up a 17-point lead Post-debate polls showed the Republicans winning, effectively ending the election.
By comparison, the fact that Biden’s 90-minute “Weekend at Bernie’s” performance may have moved the polls by a percentage point is nothing short of astonishing.
Similarly, the old rules of politics would have predicted that a candidate who survived an assassination attempt would enjoy a significant (at least temporary) boost in the polls, especially given the iconic image of Trump, bloodied-faced, pumping his fist into the crowd and mouthing, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
Historical comparisons here are obviously scarce, but the only similarity we have suggests that Trump should have seen a significant boost in approval ratings. When John Hinckley attempted to assassinate Reagan in March 1981, Reagan’s approval ratings soared from the low 50s to the high 60s. It remained that way for most of the year..
In contrast, the assassination attempt on Trump appears to have had little impact on the race: Two polls based on interviews conducted after the assassination attempt gave Trump leads of 2 and 4 points, respectively. The exact same results as in the polls conducted before the assassination attempt.
The usual caveats apply here: there is good reason to believe that polling is an increasingly imperfect science, and we should also be mindful that, as the 2016 and 2020 elections demonstrated, a swing of one or two points can make a big difference in electoral vote totals.
But with Trump, it’s clear that there hasn’t been any seismic shift in public opinion at this point that has affected nearly every other politician: People know who Trump is, and they’ve already made up their minds about him. That’s it.
For better or worse, all the rules of politics don’t apply to Trump.
