Since he can still run for office and become president while in prison, is this actually going to do anything to stop him from being president? Obviously it’s not gonna sway anyone who’s gonna vote for him, so is there any actual way this keeps him from office, or at least has some positive effect for us? I wanna join the celebration about this, but I don’t see any way it actually leads to a good outcome, just more deeply convince those for or against him that they’re right, maybe at best a few people on the fence about voting for Biden will be convinced by this. It just feels like theatrics, something to grab people’s attention that will never have any real effect on Trump or his campaign
Yeah. It definitely matters. Republicans and voters who voted for him in 2016 or 2020 aren’t a monolith. They are on a spectrum.
People change. People move on. People use lots of factors to decide what they think the best strategy is going to be.
There is a kind of recursive/ circular reasoning people use to determine who they support, which is specifically “how likely is this person to be elected?”, their electability. People aren’t willing to support a candidate if they don’t see them as ‘viable’ (which itself is determined in-part by how much support a candidate has).
Being a felon is just, straight-up, a hit to electability. A felon Trump is fundamentally less electable than non-felon Trump.
There is some cohort of republican voters that will never move on from Trump. There is some cohort of republican voters that are barely attached to Trump. Most lay some where in between. I would guess that maybe 10-15% of Republican voters won’t ever vote for anyone but Trump. Maybe the same percentage are barely attached to Trump (again 10-15%). If even 3-5% of Republican voters move away from Trump, heck if even 1% of Republican voters can be moved on this, that has big impacts because of the self-feeding nature of ‘electability’. A 3% drop in polling for Trump can very quickly turn into a 5-10% drop in polling.
This ruling makes it just that much harder for Trump to grow his base.
Nah, this is much worse. It’s like any effective con: Make it absurd at face value so the only people you deal with are already selected to be foolish rubes.
Too bad the US is full of foolish rubes… Hopefully not over half, but I’m not holding my breath.
That is a grim but valid point.
I still think it’s a spectrum and I put it at a 2-8% drop in polling by June, and a 6-12 point drop by July.
Keep in mind that’s not a probability of victory. Biden also working to lower his polling numbers.