COLUMN |
ALTITUDE
Trump needs to win votes from people who despise
him. That just got harder.
Even for a politician who skates away from scandal,
this week complicates Trump’s path to election.
By JOHN F.
HARRIS
05/31/2024
12:54 AM EDT
John Harris
is founding editor and global editor-in-chief of POLITICO. His Altitude column
offers a regular perspective on politics in a moment of radical disruption.
Yes, it’s
obviously true that a 34-count felony conviction would be enough to demolish
the career of any normal politician.
Yes, it’s
obviously true that former president Donald Trump is not a normal politician.
His most devoted partisans will only become more so following Thursday’s guilty
verdict. Just as they did after the Access Hollywood tape, the impeachments,
the Jan. 6 riot and other examples too abundant to recount or, for many people,
even to recall.
But these
two obvious truths tend to obscure another one. Trump simply cannot beat
President Joe Biden relying solely on the votes of people who think his legal
travails are a politically motivated scam, and who cheer Trump not in spite of
his transgressions but because of them. Or, more specifically, because they
thrill to the outrage and indignation Trump inspires among his adversaries.
There are
plenty of such people — enough to power this generation’s most important
political movement — but still not enough to win the election. Trump’s only
path to victory is a coalition that includes many Republicans and independents
who find him deplorable but think a second Biden term would be even more so.
That is why
— even as the full consequences likely will emerge slowly — this week was
easily the worst so far this year for Trump and the best for Biden.
This
doesn’t mean the Manhattan verdict will suddenly transform the race — nothing
in Trump’s history of scandal suggests it will. This doesn’t mean huge legions
of swing voters will suddenly agree with Biden’s argument that democracy itself
is on the ballot this fall. If someone wasn’t buying that up until now, why
would a case of document falsification to cover up an alleged sexual
indiscretion change their mind?
It does
mean that many voters who don’t much like Biden received an emphatic,
unambiguous reminder of why they don’t like Trump. The movement of even a small
percentage of voters in closely contested swing states like Michigan,
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all must-win for Biden — could echo decisively
through the balance of the race.
Joe Biden
has flogged one line mercilessly throughout his career: “Don’t compare me to
the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.”
It can be
easy to forget that this is an essential pillar of Trump’s strategy as well.
Polls show a majority of Americans are dissatisfied with their options. The
only way either can win is with the support of nose-holders. His convictions —
and the certainty that they will remain in the news through sentencing and
likely appeals — means reluctant Trump backers will have to pinch even harder.
A
Democratic pollster told my colleague Jonathan Martin after the verdict that
Biden’s message should be: “It is always chaos with Trump, chaos and putting
himself first. How can he do what is best for the country and do what is best
for you when he will spend his entire four years obsessed with his legal
issues, trying to settle scores, trying to stay out of prison?”
A
Republican operative agreed that Trump does better when he is reacting
opportunistically to events in the news — but not when he and his own actions
are the primary subject of sustained news coverage. The last time that was the
case was in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill riots.
That event,
of course, shows the hazards of prediction. It was in the early hours of Jan. 7
that no less a political hand than Mitch McConnell, who had come to loathe the
president even while promoting his court nominees and other parts of his
agenda, crowed to Martin (in the book “This Will Not Pass,” with co-author
Alexander Burns) that Trump was “pretty thoroughly discredited” and his
political career likely over: “He put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
Couldn’t have happened at a better time.”
The
records-falsification case isn’t as dramatic as the Jan. 6 riot. It’s not even
like Trump’s famous boast that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his
backers wouldn’t mind.
To the
contrary, the damage from this case may be that by Trump standards what he was
convicted of doing was not especially dramatic. The payoff from former Trump
lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen to Stormy Daniels, who acted in pornographic
movies — and the accounting legerdemain required to cover up the payment — was
a window into what prosecutors described as a routine operating procedure in
Trump’s retinue.
In that
sense, the charges aren’t like the felony indictments Trump is facing from
prosecutor Jack Smith over trying to overturn the 2020 election. They are more
like the allegations Hillary Rodham Clinton was facing in 2016 — and which
Trump ceaselessly exploited — of improperly conducting official business on her
personal email account. That controversy was damaging not because the
underlying crime was so grave but because for many people it painted a picture
of someone who thought she operated above the rules.
The
Manhattan conviction, according to operatives in both parties, allows Biden to
put Trump in a similar box.
There are
two demographic slices he’ll be aiming at with such an appeal. One is highly
educated, highly informed traditional Republicans, who can reliably be expected
to vote. They don’t like Trump but are open to voting for him because they
regard Biden as too old or his administration as too anti-business. The
conviction makes it harder for this group to rationalize a Trump vote as the
best among bad alternatives.
The other
is low-information, less reliable voters. They typically aren’t paying close
attention to the news, but a big event like the conviction can penetrate their
consciousness in lasting ways.
Among both
groups the argument is less that Trump is a would-be dictator who could end
democracy. It is that he is a self-absorbed agent of chaos who is too
preoccupied with his own troubles to govern effectively.
In both
cases, small movements could have large consequences. A new Cook Political
Report poll of swing-state voters showed Biden leading 49 percent to 45 among
the most reliable voters but trailing Trump by 10 points, 41 percent to 51,
among less regular voters.
Trump
defenders have dismissed the entire trial as a kangaroo court and argue most
people dimly understand the details. But in an odd way that underscores the
danger. Highly informed voters will know that the behavior illuminated in the
case doesn’t fit their definition of presidential propriety, and
low-information voters may know little beyond the bright neon top-line: Trump
is now a convicted felon.
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