Draining support
We’re already seeing right wingers on social media announcing that they hadn’t been planning to vote for Donald Trump, but they are going to vote for him now that he’s been convicted in this trial. I hope everyone can intuitively see that this is obviously total nonsense.
There’s no one who went into this trial planning not to vote for Trump and came out of the trial planning to vote for him. No one thinks “Well I wasn’t going to vote for that guy, but now that he’s a convicted criminal, I’ll vote for him after all.” Anyone who’s talking like that was obviously going to vote for Trump all along, and is merely trying to generate broader support for him by pretending that the trial somehow convinced them to vote for him.
Meanwhile back in the real world, various polls have said that Trump will lose significant support among Republican voters if he becomes a convicted felon. Now that he’s been convicted, we’ll have to wait to see what happens with the polls. Keep in mind that any polls released in the next few days will have been conducted before he was found guilty. Also keep in mind that your favorite cable news networks love to promote one poll out of context, even if the rest of the polls say the opposite.
So if you want to see the real impact of Trump’s felony conviction, wait two weeks and then look for changes in the polling averages. In any case, we certainly know that Trump’s felony conviction isn’t going to make his numbers go up. No matter how many fear mongers might keep repeating that notion, it’ll still be an intuitively ridiculous notion.
