A couple of weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled that former President Donald Trump was only partially immune from criminal prosecution for actions taken during the course of his presidency. That may be true for the laws of the United States, but if there is one thing the last couple of weeks have decisively shown, it is that Trump is wholly and completely immune from the laws of politics.
This is both good and bad news for Trump fans.
For a variety of reasons, my social circle tends to skew left politically. As a result, I often find myself in the company of delightful people who inhabit a completely different political universe. They all know what I do for a living and frequently ask me for my take on how the right sees things.
I remember well that when Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts in May, they reacted with glee. Surely, they thought, a convicted felon would plummet in the polls and the public would refuse to elect him. Several of them came to me and asked me how I thought the convictions would affect the 2024 election.
They were shocked when I told them my honest opinion: The convictions would not affect the race whatsoever.
If the polls are to be believed, the televised implosion of his opponent does not appear to have helped Trump much.
For those who have been watching politics for longer than the last decade, it is indeed pretty shocking that more than two dozen felony convictions would have absolutely no impact on a presidential race, but on the other hand, anyone who has been watching politics for the last decade should not be surprised that they would have no impact on Trump, specifically.
Trump has always been more or less immune to the rules that have governed American politics since World War II. Things that would cause other candidates to crater in the polls do absolutely nothing to Trump.
That was true in 2016, and it is even more true now that Trump was actually elected and served as president for four years. For better or worse, there is now virtually no one in America who does not have a pretty concrete view of Trump. The number of people who have a potentially flexible view of the most polarizing figure in modern political history is incredibly small and getting smaller. After the last 10 years, it’s pretty hard to conceive of something that would surprise the American people about Trump.
And so the American public reacted to Trump’s convictions … pretty much not at all. The RealClearPolitics polling average showed Trump enjoying a 0.8-point advantage on average over Biden on May 31. A week later, the margin was still exactly 0.8. His criminal convictions had literally no impact, if the polls are to be believed.
If you are a Trump fan, the unfortunate truth seems to be that this appears to be a two-way street. In the last three weeks, two events have happened that, to any other politician, would have meant a double-digit polling swing in his favor.
The first of those, of course, was the June 27 debate between Trump and Biden. The debate was widely panned as a debacle for Biden by everyone, including Biden himself.
But calling it a “debacle” is unfair to debacles. Barack Obama’s first debate against Mitt Romney was a debacle. Biden’s performance was something else entirely. It wasn’t just that Biden got beat; it’s that he spent 90 minutes exposing his Achilles’ heel — his age and visibly advancing senility — in a spectacularly embarrassing fashion on live television. His performance was such a spectacle that the partisan Democrats on CNN and MSNBC have almost uniformly spent the last three weeks on air trying to convince Biden to drop out of the race.
Yet if the polls are to be believed, the televised implosion of his opponent does not appear to have helped Trump much. The last of the pre-debate polls rolled in on June 28, and at that time, Trump enjoyed a 1.9-point lead according to the RCP average. A week later, Trump’s advantage sat at 3.3 points. That’s movement, but very little — so little that it is possible to explain it as statistical white noise.
Compare, if you will, this public reaction to Michael Dukakis’ comparatively mild fumbling of his answer regarding whether he would support the death penalty if someone murdered his wife. Dukakis’ answer, substantively, was well thought out and stated clearly. It was just out of step with Americans. And the result of this was that George H.W. Bush, who had a narrow four-point lead in the polls going into the debate, promptly opened up a 17-point lead in polling after the debate and the race was effectively over.
In comparison, the fact that Biden’s 90-minute “Weekend at Bernie’s” act may have moved the polls one percentage point is nothing short of astounding.
Similarly, the old rules of politics would have predicted that a candidate surviving an assassination attempt would enjoy a substantial (at least temporarily) boost in the polls — particularly given the iconic image of Trump extending his fist to the crowd, face covered in blood, mouthing, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
The historical comparisons here are obviously more scant, but the one analogy we have suggests that Trump should have enjoyed a substantial boon in his approval ratings. When John Hinckley attempted to assassinate Reagan in March 1981, Reagan’s approval rating shot up from the low 50s into the high 60s, where it remained for most of the year.
By way of contrast, the assassination attempt on Trump appears to be affecting the race very little, if at all. The two public polls that have been performed with interviews entirely conducted after the assassination attempt show Trump leading by two and four points, respectively — pretty much exactly the same thing these polls showed prior to the assassination attempt.
The usual caveats should apply here. There is good reason to believe that polling is an increasingly imperfect science. It also should be noted that a swing of one or two points can make a huge difference in the electoral vote totals, as the elections of 2016 and 2020 demonstrated.
However, it seems clear that when it comes to Trump, the sorts of seismic shifts in public perception that affect virtually all other politicians simply do not happen at this point. People know who Trump is, they have made up their minds about him, and that is that.
For better or worse, all the rules of politics simply do not apply to Trump.
Opinion & analysis, Politics
