Word is that A. G. Sulzberger’s decided that they’re going to say that Stormy Daniels worked in the “jizz biz.” Silver Bulletin should update its nomenclature accordingly.
I believe from obviously anecdotal evidence that there are many informed individuals such as myself that this verdict will make us more likely to vote for Trump rather than stay home, I could never vote for Biden , not only his increasing senility but his horrific economic and foreign policy blunders make me abhor him and fear for our country if he and then slots certainly Kamala are in the Oval Office for the next 4 years. In addition, I think that it is highly likely that given their desperation Biden and his surrogates will overplay their hand regarding this verdict I am in favor of the majority of Trump’s policies, but his actions and bombast have always completely turned me off, he has been his own worst enemy in that regard. But as someone who has followed this trial and has been a political junkie for approximately 70 of my almost 82 years this charge, trial, incredible bias and incredible conflict of interest of the judge combined with the incredibly unfair verdict have clearly convinced me to support Trump against the elites in the best way possible, by voting for him in no spite of my qualms.
The other unknown for all of us is, of course who he picks as his VP running mate, and how that might gain him a lot of additional paid media and accentuate the divisions in the badly fractured Democratic electoral base.
I feel as though we have woken up from an 8 year long nightmare. Regardless of the outcome of the election, democracy won a victory with Trump’s conviction.
The odds of 4 and 5 are near zero, and the odds of 3 are very very low. The question is, is it 1 or 2, or where does it fall on a spectrum between 1 and 2.
I'm seriously fascinated that someone would suggest such an idiotic comparison. Explain how that would have been anything like the Stalinist show trial that just took place in Manhattan.
The upshot of your worldview seems to be "if so-and-so public figure can get enough of the public to hate them in any given jurisdiction, they should be de facto immune to criminal prosecution".
This gives me business ideas. Maybe that's what Elon Musk is up to.
I LOVED those Stalinist show trials that ended in with a sentence of probation and the convicted running for office against Stalin. Those were the best!
The evidence was apparently convincing. I didn't pay much attention to it, but accusing a jury of malpractice ought to come with a high burden of proof. You have offered none. I do not think you've critically examined the issue, and I don't think you're being honest either.
I read one article that summarized the points that had been made by both sides, and what the testimony was, about 2/3rds of the way through the trial.
It seems to me that's about as much attention and information as anyone ought to be paying to it, but 10% of the country has been foaming at the mouth over the trial for the past month, so by comparison, no, I haven't paid much attention.
You're not on the jury, you haven't seen all the evidence, and any attempt to pretend like you have, is wilful self-delusion.
He did actually break the law, that's irrefutable. Should it have been linked to his campaign and charged as a felony? That's extremely debatable, but there's no question the man falsified business records.
He won't do time and will still likely get elected, so I'm not sure if this fits very well into "Stalinist".
I'm not terribly sure linking a pay-walled article is much of a response, but thanks regardless.
After Trump pardoned Roger Stone and Steve Bannon, hell after Ford pardoned Nixon, or more broadly looking back on 200 hundred years of a justice system that punished black and poor people and let the wealthy slide, a justice system where Dred Scott v. Sandford happened, I hardly think a white collar criminal getting a slightly elevated charge by a douchey DA in a state court justifies an "In Memoriam" for justice.
From NY Mag, flagship salon of liberals everywhere:
"But when you impose meaningful search parameters, the truth emerges: the charges against Trump are obscure, and nearly entirely unprecedented. In fact, no state prosecutor – in New York, or Wyoming, or anywhere – has ever charged federal election laws as a direct or predicate state crime, against anyone, for anything. None. Ever. Even putting aside the specifics of election law, the Manhattan DA itself almost never brings any case in which falsification of business records is the only charge.
Standing alone, falsification charges would have been mere misdemeanors under New York law, which posed two problems for the DA. First, nobody cares about a misdemeanor, and it would be laughable to bring the first-ever charge against a former president for a trifling offense that falls within the same technical criminal classification as shoplifting a Snapple and a bag of Cheetos from a bodega. Second, the statute of limitations on a misdemeanor – two years – likely has long expired on Trump’s conduct, which dates to 2016 and 2017.
So, to inflate the charges up to the lowest-level felony (Class E, on a scale of Class A through E) – and to electroshock them back to life within the longer felony statute of limitations – the DA alleged that the falsification of business records was committed “with intent to commit another crime.” Here, according to prosecutors, the “another crime” is a New York state election law violation, which in turn incorporates three separate “unlawful means”: federal campaign crimes, tax crimes, and falsification of still more documents. Inexcusably, the DA refused to specify what those unlawful means actually were – and the judge declined to force them to pony up – until right before closing arguments. So much for the Constitutional obligation to provide notice to the defendant of the accusations against him in advance of trial. (This, folks, is what indictments are for.)
In these key respects, the charges against Trump aren’t just unusual. They’re bespoke, seemingly crafted individually for the former president and nobody else."
Maybe it's unprecedented because no presidential candidate before the now convicted felon Trump has paid off a porn star using someone as a proxy. Maybe the Jan 6 charges are unprecedented because no president before now convicted felon Trump has encouraged his supporters to storm the capital and cheered on chants to hang his vice president
The Clinton campaign misled the public into believing the president was a secret Russian agent being controlled by the kremlin through sexual and financial blackmail, and then classified the payments to the foreign spy who created the Steele dossier as “legal services."
You're no longer worth engaging with. Your all-consuming disdain for your Orange Hitler has left you incapable of understanding that these prosecutions are a perversion of the criminal justice system and a rebuke of democratic norms. I care about THAT, not about Trump.
I'm being willfully ignorant? Really? I cite CNN's senior legal expert explicitly stating that nobody - NOBODY - has ever been charged with this shit, and you claim I'm the one being willfully ignorant?
Trump has been the same for the last eight years. At this point the election is all about Biden convincing many that he has a pulse. Doesn’t it bother Democrats that leading up to the debates Biden is giving no serious interviews or press conferences. Is that how you prep for a big event? The Biden campaign must feel that any serious interviews is a major risk. To me it feels the Democrats like myself should feel very uncomfortable with the trajectory of the race.
"And when they realize there is no possibility of recalling the wing, there will be only one course of action open: total commitment." -- Biden's game plan for consolidating Dem support.
Most Americans aren’t informed voters. Nate’s point is there is more probability that they’ll see the headline, not look into the story so much, and end up either not voting or voting for Biden. Yes there are other outcomes, just he’d argue not as likely. My belief is that this is an inconsequential election- whoever gets it won’t be in for the following two terms. Given the map and scotus I’d argue that leftists want to lose this so they can position themselves for 2028.
Some number of previously disinterested voters could now show up in swing states to cast a vote against Trump. Would this be more than the number of previously disinterested voters that are now galvanized against the perceived leftist persecution (in swing states)? Feels like a wash
I don’t think there are meaningful numbers of voters who are likely to see this as leftist persecution who are not already firmly in Trump’s camp. I mean, I’m sure you could find a few. But still.
I think most disinterested swing voters basically see this as a contest between something like Corrupt Chaos Guy and Old Inflation Guy, and they don’t like either of them but a somewhat larger number will go for Corrupt Chaos Guy if they have to pick. But now Corrupt Chaos Guy is Corrupt Chaos Felon Guy, so maybe some of them will reconsider that, and hold their noses and vote for Old Inflation Guy.
Or maybe not. There’s a reason I said ‘no change’ is very much possible.
As I lazily mathed over at Slow Boring, there is a non-trivial number of potential 2024 voters who were (by pure age) not politically active in 2020. "This guy is a guy" and "This guy is a felon" could well be meaningful in today's on-the-margins elections.
I’m not sure this is possible. 2020 was the highest turnout election in American history. Either side getting MORE people to vote seems unlikely. I think we’re looking at a historically low turnout election.
There are about eight million 18/19 year olds in the United States who were 14/15 in 2020--how politically active were you at that age? Not much for me. AND, that cohort was basically uneducating and semi-feral at the time. I'll be the first to say these are not high-propensity voters, but the people exist.
I think the 2-3 million of these who will vote is dwarfed by the dropoff in turnout that will happen elsewhere, along with the several million older voters who have died since 2020. I wouldn't be surprised if turnout dropped off by 5 or 10 million votes, but I highly doubt it will be historically low compared to like 1996 or something.
What I think this analysis fails to account for (or, reasonably, chooses to not try to account for) is to what extent Trump changes *his* behavior on account of this rather stark assault on his psyche.
To the extent there are voters who think "2019 was pretty good, everything since then sucks", if Trump leans heavily into *his* victimization (even more so than usual), will that drive them away or make them lose interest? His sincerely keen ability to play to a crowd as he's ranting and rolling in real time--will that be inhibited? Everybody's favorite tail risk--will he attempt to flee the country outright? (no, but it's fun to banter about)
He’s only gotten stronger despite all these frivolous lawfare attacks. It’s wonderful to see how lost the left look. Carville’s rant that no matter what they do, it’s not working. I predict a landslide win for Trump in November. And time to open lawsuits against crooks like the Bidens.
Trump may very well be reelected this year. But absent some complete and total sea change in the American political paradigm, we will probably never again bear witness to a "landslide win" for any candidate for nationwide office of either party.
Good point. And it's not just him; it's how the whole Republican party responds. We can hope that lack of self-discipline hurts them before November. (They're already foaming at the mouth to make Comstock the law of the land, for instance). But who knows, with this electorate.
"Distractions to your party's candidate are bad" seems like a good Bayesian prior. A series of felony convictions, with upcoming sentencing, is going to be pretty distracting. Wrong sometimes? Sure, probably.
"Low information voters" is such a bad trope to dismiss people. I think it is a New York stereotype of all of us that live in the rest of the U.S. and write off our opinions. Just like "existential" it is a buzz phrase that says more about the writer than the people the writer is disregarding.
What's a more neutral term for people who haven't taken in as much information? Under our system everybody gets one vote regardless of what they know, so it would be quite foolish to dismiss their opinions.
What does it even mean? I think it is an assumption that isn't true. Yes, there are motivated people who seek information from multiple sources that might be considered high information, but in my work--in libraries--I find that even people w/o formal education are consuming information from many sources. The idea of the "Fox News" viewer (which seems to be a favorite way to characterize people tagged "low info") isn't real anymore. To make the assumption that a lot of people are "low information" is to miss the reality of peoples' information eco-systems.
It deserves more study. You can poll Americans and find out what percent are aware of a particular policy being enacted, or a particular policy position of a party, which has been publicized to at least some extent (the 'mainstream' media does a poor job because of the need to always chase profits in a changing information ecosystem). And often large percentages are unaware of something that others of us would think a voter should very much be aware of. So how do I describe that? People are busy; they have lives. That's a good thing. It's a campaign's job to make voters aware, and to speak to them in terms that matter to them. The failure is more on the part of the campaigns than of the voters.
I would say anyone who thinks the S&P 500 is in a multi-year low or that unemployment is at a decades-long high, is a “low-information voter”, and that seems to be almost 50% of voters who believe those “facts”. There is no nuance or shades of opinion here, those are just drastic factual misunderstandings of the economy by anyone who thinks that.
Well, there's low information, and then there's believing things which are demonstrably untrue. The misinformed and disinformed are seldom swing voters though. And sadly their ignorance counts just as much as your facts.
OK, so you think to have a test on policy issues and then you can call someone "low information" if they don't fully understand the origins of a given policy? I spent a lot of time being upset about Clinton and PRWORA and found that even people working in social services ten years later didn't understand its impact. What's low information to you or me might just be wonky stuff to most people. A job I had as a young librarian was filing the CFR and what I didn't know when I would look through them made me think myself very low info at the time.
I don't find it offensive so much as a tell that the person who uses it assumes that people aren't informed .I think people are generally more informed than the writer who uses it thinks they are. It's the self-regard of the writer who doesn't think much of people at-large and that makes me wonder if the writer knows any real people.
Note that Nate explicitly excludes "Fox News viewers" from the "low information" definition. And while yes, a lot of people get information from many different places (i.e. social media), most people just aren't that interested in politics or current events, so their social feeds aren't discussing the Comstock Act, but... cats, or their partner's Aunt Bettie's cancer treatment, or how Bennifer are supposedly breaking up or something.
This is a politics newsletter. Everyone here (especially those bothering to write comments -- especially those paying to be able to write comments, myself included) is a weirdo "high information voter". As Nate put it, most other people live happy, fulfilling lives and therefore don't have time to stay up-to-date with a bunch of stuff that won't materially affect their lives. Saying someone is "low info" isn't an insult, it just means they've found happiness doing something else than staring at the Lovecraftian horror that is politics.
It is only my opinion that "low information voters" is a pejorative phrase, a condescending way to talk about people. I see it often among political writers.
To give a specific example, if one doesn't know what the Comstock Act is, and the complete extent of what Republicans argue it enables them to do, with no further action required than simply electing a Republican president, then I would say they are unaware of something very important. But I'm not calling them stupid because of it.
? I was giving an example of something a lot of Americans probably don't know about but should, and then asking how we should describe that phenomenon, without insulting said voters.
There are clearly ppl that don’t care about politics or the news. I was one of them until 2020. One of the Trump jurors did not know that Trump had ANY pending trials. So question is what to call those people.
My point is that low information voters are imaginary. It's not a put down it's a frame that allows discourse to develop along incorrect perception of people.
As someone in a deeply blue city with plenty of friends who know whom they'll vote for but don't bother reading the news, have vague opinions on hot button topics but couldn't list any policies they feel correctly or incorrectly address them, I couldn't disagree more.
Many, many people look to their friends, family, and coworkers for cues on who they should vote for, but have no time/interest in politics. Calling these people "low information" is absolutely not an insult, it's purely descriptive. I envy them having lives that are too full to care about elite bickering. You can go on youtube right now and watch hundreds of "man on the street" interviews with people who don't know who they'll vote for because they just don't pay attention.
This is a milestone is the decline of our Republic. Sick targeted persecution and twisting of our laws to take out the leading candidate because Biden can’t beat him straight up. Hopefully this lawfare backfires and Trump’s poll numbers shoot up.
With two of the least liked candidates ever, it is unclear to me that anything as moderately predicatable as this conviction dissuades someone from voting against whom they do not want in the white house. If it does...then I do not believe a meaningful number of voters will choose to vote FOR one or the other. Status quo. The winner will have more people show up at the polls to prevent their opponent from taking office.
I went to a HRC rally on her birthday in Tampa, just before the 2016 election. I took several friends (Hispanic) because HRC had José Andrés as an opening speaker. He was great. Then HRC began to talk about her campaign about safer cookstoves for people in the developing world (noble, I thought). My friends patted me on the shoulder and said, "she's not going to win." That taught me a lot about messaging.
I agree this likely won't be transformative, and will likely be a transitory blip. Because Biden is still losing in the "intuitive fact" game. Yes, "don't vote for a convicted felon" is just as intuitive as "don't vote for an octagenerian", but one of them is more apparent than the other.
Every time a voter looks at Biden, they'll naturally think "man, he's old! I probably shouldn't vote for an 81-year-old..."
But every time a voter looks at Trump, they'll need to remember or be reminded that he's a convicted felon. For high-info voters like anyone reading this newsletter (especially the comment section!), that information will be top-of-mind, I'm sure. But for the low-info voters who have better things to do than spend their time reading about things that won't really affect their lives... Election day is still six months away.
I predict very little impact. That’s based totally on my gut, no real data to back it up except that way, way too much stuff has happened around Trump over the last few years for this to be a deciding factor. I think Dems really need to be attacking him a lot harder on competency than character/legal, but that doesn’t seem to be the direction they are taking. At most Biden will get a couple point bounce but it will be pretty short-term. But I admit that’s a gut feel.
I do think his poll numbers are fairly likely to go up as a result of this, I wouldn't put that too far out on the tail of the distribution. But I also think that the GOP people declaring this just won the election for him is perhaps aspirational - if they repeat it often and loudly enough they can set/frame the narrative for those low information voters who are seeing the headline. Or it might just be copium. Probably some of both.
I’ve been watching Smarkets and Polymarket to see the effect on the election odds. Smarkets went from +15 Trump to +5 Trump just after the announcement but is now back to +14 Trump a day later. Curious where other folks look for good betting markets. Predictit has had some legal issues and lost a lot of volume and generally seems off market. Also fwiw, Polymarket had the odds of a conviction at 75-80%, so you can think of that as how well priced in this verdict was.
This is a complicated issue. I expect, that you're going to get a wide range of ways that people are going to react to it.
On the one hand, criminal prosecution is at least somewhat disconnected from politics. On the other hand, the vast majority of people only care about this because of who was convicted, and the political implications of it.
So, it's weird covering legal cases like this in politics at this level, but, here we are.
I think you're probably correct in your assertion, about likely effects, but I think the most important effect of this will result from the sentencing. If the sentence for the crime is: pay a fine, or probation, or something that doesn't affect Trump at all, then it builds on his brand that he's untouchable and that nothing can stop him. If, the judge were to sentence him to prison, then it would have a much larger effect on that narrative.
I do personally believe that the perception of Trump, as either an unstoppable force, or a reckless man who played fast and loose, and has now slipped, is balanced somewhat delicately. I think that if he retains the image of being unstoppable, then he will probably win the election, in spite of his low ceiling. I suspect that a faltering in his record of getting away with anything, could dampen marginal support, because voting for a sinking ship feels weak, and a man who can't even protect himself surely can't protect others.
There is always psychological pull towards power, and one who is struggling will find they have fewer friends than they thought.
That's a cynical calculation of human nature and politics, but politics is often shallow, and people are too.
Word is that A. G. Sulzberger’s decided that they’re going to say that Stormy Daniels worked in the “jizz biz.” Silver Bulletin should update its nomenclature accordingly.
I believe from obviously anecdotal evidence that there are many informed individuals such as myself that this verdict will make us more likely to vote for Trump rather than stay home, I could never vote for Biden , not only his increasing senility but his horrific economic and foreign policy blunders make me abhor him and fear for our country if he and then slots certainly Kamala are in the Oval Office for the next 4 years. In addition, I think that it is highly likely that given their desperation Biden and his surrogates will overplay their hand regarding this verdict I am in favor of the majority of Trump’s policies, but his actions and bombast have always completely turned me off, he has been his own worst enemy in that regard. But as someone who has followed this trial and has been a political junkie for approximately 70 of my almost 82 years this charge, trial, incredible bias and incredible conflict of interest of the judge combined with the incredibly unfair verdict have clearly convinced me to support Trump against the elites in the best way possible, by voting for him in no spite of my qualms.
The other unknown for all of us is, of course who he picks as his VP running mate, and how that might gain him a lot of additional paid media and accentuate the divisions in the badly fractured Democratic electoral base.
Sir, this is an Arby's.
Also the idea of a twelve-year-old political junkie in 1954 is just flat-out funny. K LIKES IKE
We got the meats
🤣
I feel as though we have woken up from an 8 year long nightmare. Regardless of the outcome of the election, democracy won a victory with Trump’s conviction.
Emphasis on informed.
Impact, from most to least likely:
1. Moderately helpful to Biden.
2. No change.
3. Very helpful to Biden.
4. Moderately helpful to Trump.
5. Very helpful to Trump.
The odds of 4 and 5 are near zero, and the odds of 3 are very very low. The question is, is it 1 or 2, or where does it fall on a spectrum between 1 and 2.
I don't like Trump. Didn't vote for him in 2016 or 2020.
Just donated to his campaign.
So if Hillary had been indicted by Comey in 2016 would you have donated to her?
I'm seriously fascinated that someone would suggest such an idiotic comparison. Explain how that would have been anything like the Stalinist show trial that just took place in Manhattan.
The upshot of your worldview seems to be "if so-and-so public figure can get enough of the public to hate them in any given jurisdiction, they should be de facto immune to criminal prosecution".
This gives me business ideas. Maybe that's what Elon Musk is up to.
Do you usually make wild assumptions about people in order to arrive at your predetermined conclusion? Be quiet, dude. You're embarrassing yourself.
When I'm dumb, I promise I'm dumb on purpose. Brad, be well.
I LOVED those Stalinist show trials that ended in with a sentence of probation and the convicted running for office against Stalin. Those were the best!
So funny.
The evidence was apparently convincing. I didn't pay much attention to it, but accusing a jury of malpractice ought to come with a high burden of proof. You have offered none. I do not think you've critically examined the issue, and I don't think you're being honest either.
"I didn't pay much attention to it"
Then shut the fuck up and go educate yourself. That's not my job.
I read one article that summarized the points that had been made by both sides, and what the testimony was, about 2/3rds of the way through the trial.
It seems to me that's about as much attention and information as anyone ought to be paying to it, but 10% of the country has been foaming at the mouth over the trial for the past month, so by comparison, no, I haven't paid much attention.
You're not on the jury, you haven't seen all the evidence, and any attempt to pretend like you have, is wilful self-delusion.
He did actually break the law, that's irrefutable. Should it have been linked to his campaign and charged as a felony? That's extremely debatable, but there's no question the man falsified business records.
He won't do time and will still likely get elected, so I'm not sure if this fits very well into "Stalinist".
https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/in-memory-of-justice/
And a reminder that National Review despises Trump.
I'm not terribly sure linking a pay-walled article is much of a response, but thanks regardless.
After Trump pardoned Roger Stone and Steve Bannon, hell after Ford pardoned Nixon, or more broadly looking back on 200 hundred years of a justice system that punished black and poor people and let the wealthy slide, a justice system where Dred Scott v. Sandford happened, I hardly think a white collar criminal getting a slightly elevated charge by a douchey DA in a state court justifies an "In Memoriam" for justice.
From NY Mag, flagship salon of liberals everywhere:
"But when you impose meaningful search parameters, the truth emerges: the charges against Trump are obscure, and nearly entirely unprecedented. In fact, no state prosecutor – in New York, or Wyoming, or anywhere – has ever charged federal election laws as a direct or predicate state crime, against anyone, for anything. None. Ever. Even putting aside the specifics of election law, the Manhattan DA itself almost never brings any case in which falsification of business records is the only charge.
Standing alone, falsification charges would have been mere misdemeanors under New York law, which posed two problems for the DA. First, nobody cares about a misdemeanor, and it would be laughable to bring the first-ever charge against a former president for a trifling offense that falls within the same technical criminal classification as shoplifting a Snapple and a bag of Cheetos from a bodega. Second, the statute of limitations on a misdemeanor – two years – likely has long expired on Trump’s conduct, which dates to 2016 and 2017.
So, to inflate the charges up to the lowest-level felony (Class E, on a scale of Class A through E) – and to electroshock them back to life within the longer felony statute of limitations – the DA alleged that the falsification of business records was committed “with intent to commit another crime.” Here, according to prosecutors, the “another crime” is a New York state election law violation, which in turn incorporates three separate “unlawful means”: federal campaign crimes, tax crimes, and falsification of still more documents. Inexcusably, the DA refused to specify what those unlawful means actually were – and the judge declined to force them to pony up – until right before closing arguments. So much for the Constitutional obligation to provide notice to the defendant of the accusations against him in advance of trial. (This, folks, is what indictments are for.)
In these key respects, the charges against Trump aren’t just unusual. They’re bespoke, seemingly crafted individually for the former president and nobody else."
https://archive.ph/o9RU9
Maybe it's unprecedented because no presidential candidate before the now convicted felon Trump has paid off a porn star using someone as a proxy. Maybe the Jan 6 charges are unprecedented because no president before now convicted felon Trump has encouraged his supporters to storm the capital and cheered on chants to hang his vice president
LOL
The Clinton campaign misled the public into believing the president was a secret Russian agent being controlled by the kremlin through sexual and financial blackmail, and then classified the payments to the foreign spy who created the Steele dossier as “legal services."
You're no longer worth engaging with. Your all-consuming disdain for your Orange Hitler has left you incapable of understanding that these prosecutions are a perversion of the criminal justice system and a rebuke of democratic norms. I care about THAT, not about Trump.
What did I say that had anything to do with the Steele dossier or Russia?
Dozens of people have been convicted using the same pattern. You're being willfully ignorant, it's not a good look.
I'm being willfully ignorant? Really? I cite CNN's senior legal expert explicitly stating that nobody - NOBODY - has ever been charged with this shit, and you claim I'm the one being willfully ignorant?
🤡
The clown is on CNN, sorry you were duped. Conway clears this up. Dosense have been charged using the same statute. Do your research.
You are completely wrong. Most Americans aren’t brainwashed leftists. I will bet you that Trump’s poll numbers will end up higher.
Bro, just go to the betting markets.
Trump has been the same for the last eight years. At this point the election is all about Biden convincing many that he has a pulse. Doesn’t it bother Democrats that leading up to the debates Biden is giving no serious interviews or press conferences. Is that how you prep for a big event? The Biden campaign must feel that any serious interviews is a major risk. To me it feels the Democrats like myself should feel very uncomfortable with the trajectory of the race.
"And when they realize there is no possibility of recalling the wing, there will be only one course of action open: total commitment." -- Biden's game plan for consolidating Dem support.
Most Americans aren’t informed voters. Nate’s point is there is more probability that they’ll see the headline, not look into the story so much, and end up either not voting or voting for Biden. Yes there are other outcomes, just he’d argue not as likely. My belief is that this is an inconsequential election- whoever gets it won’t be in for the following two terms. Given the map and scotus I’d argue that leftists want to lose this so they can position themselves for 2028.
Some number of previously disinterested voters could now show up in swing states to cast a vote against Trump. Would this be more than the number of previously disinterested voters that are now galvanized against the perceived leftist persecution (in swing states)? Feels like a wash
I don’t think there are meaningful numbers of voters who are likely to see this as leftist persecution who are not already firmly in Trump’s camp. I mean, I’m sure you could find a few. But still.
I think most disinterested swing voters basically see this as a contest between something like Corrupt Chaos Guy and Old Inflation Guy, and they don’t like either of them but a somewhat larger number will go for Corrupt Chaos Guy if they have to pick. But now Corrupt Chaos Guy is Corrupt Chaos Felon Guy, so maybe some of them will reconsider that, and hold their noses and vote for Old Inflation Guy.
Or maybe not. There’s a reason I said ‘no change’ is very much possible.
As I lazily mathed over at Slow Boring, there is a non-trivial number of potential 2024 voters who were (by pure age) not politically active in 2020. "This guy is a guy" and "This guy is a felon" could well be meaningful in today's on-the-margins elections.
I’m not sure this is possible. 2020 was the highest turnout election in American history. Either side getting MORE people to vote seems unlikely. I think we’re looking at a historically low turnout election.
There are about eight million 18/19 year olds in the United States who were 14/15 in 2020--how politically active were you at that age? Not much for me. AND, that cohort was basically uneducating and semi-feral at the time. I'll be the first to say these are not high-propensity voters, but the people exist.
I think the 2-3 million of these who will vote is dwarfed by the dropoff in turnout that will happen elsewhere, along with the several million older voters who have died since 2020. I wouldn't be surprised if turnout dropped off by 5 or 10 million votes, but I highly doubt it will be historically low compared to like 1996 or something.
Idk how much it changes turnout, but it might have some effect on how voters who dislike both candidates decide.
I would flip #3 and #4. I don’t think this will be very helpful to anyone, with most of the impact already baked in.
Good to see that Nate is making money from fascists and the fascist-curious.
To paraphrase the Blues Brothers - “We’ve got both kinds Stalinists & Fascists!”
Your emotional investment in horse-race politics is too damn high
What I think this analysis fails to account for (or, reasonably, chooses to not try to account for) is to what extent Trump changes *his* behavior on account of this rather stark assault on his psyche.
To the extent there are voters who think "2019 was pretty good, everything since then sucks", if Trump leans heavily into *his* victimization (even more so than usual), will that drive them away or make them lose interest? His sincerely keen ability to play to a crowd as he's ranting and rolling in real time--will that be inhibited? Everybody's favorite tail risk--will he attempt to flee the country outright? (no, but it's fun to banter about)
He’s only gotten stronger despite all these frivolous lawfare attacks. It’s wonderful to see how lost the left look. Carville’s rant that no matter what they do, it’s not working. I predict a landslide win for Trump in November. And time to open lawsuits against crooks like the Bidens.
ok ed
Trump may very well be reelected this year. But absent some complete and total sea change in the American political paradigm, we will probably never again bear witness to a "landslide win" for any candidate for nationwide office of either party.
It’s the economy. Any Republican could beat Biden. Trump will underperform any other Republican. It’s an easy election to win.
What lawsuits would you open?
The real question is what kind of car will he be in when he makes a break for it and who's driving. I'm thinking a Black Tesla and Laura Loomer.
Good point. And it's not just him; it's how the whole Republican party responds. We can hope that lack of self-discipline hurts them before November. (They're already foaming at the mouth to make Comstock the law of the land, for instance). But who knows, with this electorate.
"Distractions to your party's candidate are bad" seems like a good Bayesian prior. A series of felony convictions, with upcoming sentencing, is going to be pretty distracting. Wrong sometimes? Sure, probably.
"Low information voters" is such a bad trope to dismiss people. I think it is a New York stereotype of all of us that live in the rest of the U.S. and write off our opinions. Just like "existential" it is a buzz phrase that says more about the writer than the people the writer is disregarding.
What's a more neutral term for people who haven't taken in as much information? Under our system everybody gets one vote regardless of what they know, so it would be quite foolish to dismiss their opinions.
What does it even mean? I think it is an assumption that isn't true. Yes, there are motivated people who seek information from multiple sources that might be considered high information, but in my work--in libraries--I find that even people w/o formal education are consuming information from many sources. The idea of the "Fox News" viewer (which seems to be a favorite way to characterize people tagged "low info") isn't real anymore. To make the assumption that a lot of people are "low information" is to miss the reality of peoples' information eco-systems.
It deserves more study. You can poll Americans and find out what percent are aware of a particular policy being enacted, or a particular policy position of a party, which has been publicized to at least some extent (the 'mainstream' media does a poor job because of the need to always chase profits in a changing information ecosystem). And often large percentages are unaware of something that others of us would think a voter should very much be aware of. So how do I describe that? People are busy; they have lives. That's a good thing. It's a campaign's job to make voters aware, and to speak to them in terms that matter to them. The failure is more on the part of the campaigns than of the voters.
I would say anyone who thinks the S&P 500 is in a multi-year low or that unemployment is at a decades-long high, is a “low-information voter”, and that seems to be almost 50% of voters who believe those “facts”. There is no nuance or shades of opinion here, those are just drastic factual misunderstandings of the economy by anyone who thinks that.
Well, there's low information, and then there's believing things which are demonstrably untrue. The misinformed and disinformed are seldom swing voters though. And sadly their ignorance counts just as much as your facts.
Maybe low information voters are “gaslightable” voters that can be convinced inflation was 9% when Biden took office and has only come down…
OK, so you think to have a test on policy issues and then you can call someone "low information" if they don't fully understand the origins of a given policy? I spent a lot of time being upset about Clinton and PRWORA and found that even people working in social services ten years later didn't understand its impact. What's low information to you or me might just be wonky stuff to most people. A job I had as a young librarian was filing the CFR and what I didn't know when I would look through them made me think myself very low info at the time.
> you can call someone "low information" if they don't fully understand the origins of a given policy?
I guess I'm picking up that you find the phrase per se offensive, but that seems pretty definitionally correct.
I don't find it offensive so much as a tell that the person who uses it assumes that people aren't informed .I think people are generally more informed than the writer who uses it thinks they are. It's the self-regard of the writer who doesn't think much of people at-large and that makes me wonder if the writer knows any real people.
Note that Nate explicitly excludes "Fox News viewers" from the "low information" definition. And while yes, a lot of people get information from many different places (i.e. social media), most people just aren't that interested in politics or current events, so their social feeds aren't discussing the Comstock Act, but... cats, or their partner's Aunt Bettie's cancer treatment, or how Bennifer are supposedly breaking up or something.
This is a politics newsletter. Everyone here (especially those bothering to write comments -- especially those paying to be able to write comments, myself included) is a weirdo "high information voter". As Nate put it, most other people live happy, fulfilling lives and therefore don't have time to stay up-to-date with a bunch of stuff that won't materially affect their lives. Saying someone is "low info" isn't an insult, it just means they've found happiness doing something else than staring at the Lovecraftian horror that is politics.
She didn’t read it
Truthfully, I signed up for the baseball.
It is only my opinion that "low information voters" is a pejorative phrase, a condescending way to talk about people. I see it often among political writers.
To give a specific example, if one doesn't know what the Comstock Act is, and the complete extent of what Republicans argue it enables them to do, with no further action required than simply electing a Republican president, then I would say they are unaware of something very important. But I'm not calling them stupid because of it.
Don't you think anyone who discusses censorship knows this?
? I was giving an example of something a lot of Americans probably don't know about but should, and then asking how we should describe that phenomenon, without insulting said voters.
Why do you think most Americans don't know that? "Comstockery" is a common insult.
Clearly you did not read the piece
Not so, but the headline undercuts the narrative.
There are clearly ppl that don’t care about politics or the news. I was one of them until 2020. One of the Trump jurors did not know that Trump had ANY pending trials. So question is what to call those people.
This! I think there would need to be an analysis of what Social Media is trending
Nate is specifically saying the low information voters are the ones that matter here he isn’t dismissing them at all.
He also specifically said that it was not a put-down.
My point is that low information voters are imaginary. It's not a put down it's a frame that allows discourse to develop along incorrect perception of people.
As someone in a deeply blue city with plenty of friends who know whom they'll vote for but don't bother reading the news, have vague opinions on hot button topics but couldn't list any policies they feel correctly or incorrectly address them, I couldn't disagree more.
Many, many people look to their friends, family, and coworkers for cues on who they should vote for, but have no time/interest in politics. Calling these people "low information" is absolutely not an insult, it's purely descriptive. I envy them having lives that are too full to care about elite bickering. You can go on youtube right now and watch hundreds of "man on the street" interviews with people who don't know who they'll vote for because they just don't pay attention.
This is a milestone is the decline of our Republic. Sick targeted persecution and twisting of our laws to take out the leading candidate because Biden can’t beat him straight up. Hopefully this lawfare backfires and Trump’s poll numbers shoot up.
Yeah, ridiculous. Just the other day I used my company credit card to pay a porn actress money, are they going to go after me next?
hey sif, just asking where you work, for reasons
I can’t wait to obsessively follow the election model from June to November
Setting notifications now based on calendars: lunar, Gregorian, Jewish, Aztec, Japanese zodiac, and Islamic
With two of the least liked candidates ever, it is unclear to me that anything as moderately predicatable as this conviction dissuades someone from voting against whom they do not want in the white house. If it does...then I do not believe a meaningful number of voters will choose to vote FOR one or the other. Status quo. The winner will have more people show up at the polls to prevent their opponent from taking office.
Agreed. It's why I question some of the Democrats' efforts to do 'positive' messaging.
I went to a HRC rally on her birthday in Tampa, just before the 2016 election. I took several friends (Hispanic) because HRC had José Andrés as an opening speaker. He was great. Then HRC began to talk about her campaign about safer cookstoves for people in the developing world (noble, I thought). My friends patted me on the shoulder and said, "she's not going to win." That taught me a lot about messaging.
Clinton ran a bad campaign, even if the deck was stacked against her. And women have suffered the most for it.
I highly suggest reading Shattered, which gives a pretty good insider view at how HRC ran a terrible campaign and lost a very winnable election.
Innatentive voters is a good term
I agree this likely won't be transformative, and will likely be a transitory blip. Because Biden is still losing in the "intuitive fact" game. Yes, "don't vote for a convicted felon" is just as intuitive as "don't vote for an octagenerian", but one of them is more apparent than the other.
Every time a voter looks at Biden, they'll naturally think "man, he's old! I probably shouldn't vote for an 81-year-old..."
But every time a voter looks at Trump, they'll need to remember or be reminded that he's a convicted felon. For high-info voters like anyone reading this newsletter (especially the comment section!), that information will be top-of-mind, I'm sure. But for the low-info voters who have better things to do than spend their time reading about things that won't really affect their lives... Election day is still six months away.
In about fifty years Trump will be remembered as the convicted president.
I predict very little impact. That’s based totally on my gut, no real data to back it up except that way, way too much stuff has happened around Trump over the last few years for this to be a deciding factor. I think Dems really need to be attacking him a lot harder on competency than character/legal, but that doesn’t seem to be the direction they are taking. At most Biden will get a couple point bounce but it will be pretty short-term. But I admit that’s a gut feel.
Or attack Republican policy. The people pulling the strings use Trump as a distraction.
I do think his poll numbers are fairly likely to go up as a result of this, I wouldn't put that too far out on the tail of the distribution. But I also think that the GOP people declaring this just won the election for him is perhaps aspirational - if they repeat it often and loudly enough they can set/frame the narrative for those low information voters who are seeing the headline. Or it might just be copium. Probably some of both.
I’ve been watching Smarkets and Polymarket to see the effect on the election odds. Smarkets went from +15 Trump to +5 Trump just after the announcement but is now back to +14 Trump a day later. Curious where other folks look for good betting markets. Predictit has had some legal issues and lost a lot of volume and generally seems off market. Also fwiw, Polymarket had the odds of a conviction at 75-80%, so you can think of that as how well priced in this verdict was.
This is a complicated issue. I expect, that you're going to get a wide range of ways that people are going to react to it.
On the one hand, criminal prosecution is at least somewhat disconnected from politics. On the other hand, the vast majority of people only care about this because of who was convicted, and the political implications of it.
So, it's weird covering legal cases like this in politics at this level, but, here we are.
I think you're probably correct in your assertion, about likely effects, but I think the most important effect of this will result from the sentencing. If the sentence for the crime is: pay a fine, or probation, or something that doesn't affect Trump at all, then it builds on his brand that he's untouchable and that nothing can stop him. If, the judge were to sentence him to prison, then it would have a much larger effect on that narrative.
I do personally believe that the perception of Trump, as either an unstoppable force, or a reckless man who played fast and loose, and has now slipped, is balanced somewhat delicately. I think that if he retains the image of being unstoppable, then he will probably win the election, in spite of his low ceiling. I suspect that a faltering in his record of getting away with anything, could dampen marginal support, because voting for a sinking ship feels weak, and a man who can't even protect himself surely can't protect others.
There is always psychological pull towards power, and one who is struggling will find they have fewer friends than they thought.
That's a cynical calculation of human nature and politics, but politics is often shallow, and people are too.