The Briefing, Vol. XII, Issue 24
This week:
- Two weeks later, Trump’s guilty verdict still not helping Biden’s numbers
- Newer polls only confirm Electoral College picture
- Trump endorses Sam Brown in Nevada
President 2024
Trump verdict: The early returns are in: Trump’s New York convictions, setting aside their legal merits, are not helping President Joe Biden politically as he had hoped.
Biden is counting on the legal cases against Trump depressing his support as well as his ability to campaign and earn positive media coverage. In these regards, the prosecutions of Trump have probably backfired.
If voters were taking Trump’s 34 felony convictions in New York state seriously, they would obviously be disqualifying. Instead, in the polls taken since the jury’s verdict, Trump has continued to improve his electoral standing.
He has now managed to put Virginia into play, as a second poll has confirmed. Post-conviction polls showing Trump with five-point leads in Arizona and Nevada suggest that he is only solidifying his lead over Biden. In North Carolina, a new East Carolina University poll taken after the verdict has him up by five. In Georgia, there has been only one partially (four out of five days in the field) post-conviction poll, and it has Trump up by five in a head-to-head and by six when third-party and independent candidates are included.
In addition, a second poll now shows Trump tied with Biden in Virginia (at 48 percent), but trailing him by one point (42 to 41 percent) when the other candidates are included. In fact, Trump’s net approval rating in this post-conviction poll is higher in the Commonwealth (at minus-12 points) than it was in any previous poll commissioned by Fox News since July 2016.
Now, if Virginia is legitimately on the table, then Biden’s re-election chances are worse now, as you read this, than they have ever been previously.
Can we conclude from this that Trump is about to win? Not necessarily. But we know that did not happen. We were correct in expecting that Trump’s conviction would not do what Biden was hoping for and provide him with a miracle that would radically change the dynamic of a 2024 presidential election cycle that is largely going against the incumbent.
Biden backfire: What’s more, Biden has probably wounded himself in the days since the conviction. For example, with multiple speeches endorsing the jury verdict against Trump, he has set himself up for failure in multiple ways.
For one thing, he set the stage to make his own life more complicated when his son Hunter is inevitably convicted for lying on a gun purchase form — a real crime (in contrast to the tortured and manipulated bookkeeping violation used against Trump) for which Hunter’s own spoken and written words have pretty much guaranteed a conviction, barring obvious jury nullification.
Second, President Biden is cutting off his own defense against the backlash that the Trump conviction is already creating. Because Biden is now positively campaigning on Trump’s conviction, attacking him as a “convicted felon” and demanding that the public take the verdict seriously, this renders moot any claims that he was not involved in planning the multiple prosecutions that his fellow Democrats brought. It no longer matters whether Biden or his top aides were involved, since his efforts to legitimize the convictions and benefit from will them make him culpable to whatever extent the public views the prosecution as illegitimate.
On the other side, Trump’s conviction has already benefited Trump immensely, and Democrats’ ambivalence toward the result of the trial says it all. First of all, it has consolidated Trump’s support on the political Right where he might have been weaker otherwise. There once remained many “Nikki Haley” Republicans unwilling to back him, but the apparent effort by Democrats to use the justice system as an electoral weapon has brought even the most Trump-skeptical conservatives back into the fold.
Second, it has helped Trump raise a truly immense sum of small-dollar money without any effort — more than $50 million just on the Friday after the verdict came down, and (as his camp claims) as much as $200 million in 72 hours. Recall that, in 2016, Trump won despite being outspent by Hillary Clinton two-to-one, and Trump is likely to do better with better finances.
Electoral picture: Again, the state-level polls mentioned above, in addition to the four national polls taken since the verdict, do not indicate an electorate that is taking the charges or convictions as serious efforts at justice against a criminal.
On a national level, the presidential race remains tied or slightly slanted in Trump’s favor when all candidates are included. There has been no sudden change as a result of the convictions.
On the level of the important swing states, Trump remains clearly or strongly favored to win states and districts worth at least 268 Electoral Votes, and is close behind, tied or narrowly leading in states worth an additional 74 electoral votes (including Virginia), as this map indicates:
Note that on this map, Biden must win all 74 of the 74 unassigned Electoral Votes in order to win a second term.
Given this, it is no wonder that the futures markets (that is, gamblers) also now indicate greater confidence in a Trump victory now than they did at any time this year before his conviction. We do not recommend or endorse gambling on election outcomes, but a $1.00 contract for a Trump victory was selling for 56 cents on Polymarket last night, whereas a contract that pays $1.00 in the event of a Biden victory sold last night for 34 cents, down from 45 cents on May 12.
When a bet allows you to triple your money, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll lose. But it means that you probably won’t win.
Senate 2024
Nevada: There was a time when Trump could be counted on to hold a grudge forever, but here’s just one sign of how much more practical he has gradually become as a politician. He just threw his support behind Sam Brown for U.S. Senate.
Brown has been attacked by his opponents for being insufficiently pro-Trump and for declining to endorse Trump immediately at the beginning of the election cycle, although he did subsequently endorse the former president. Trump, when asked previously why he had not endorsed one of Brown’s opponents, simply remarked that it looked like Brown was going to win.
National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Steve Daines (R-Mt.) had been urging Trump to give this endorsement and put the state’s Republicans in the best possible position down-ticket. Brown is all but certain to win his primary tomorrow by double digits. So why not get aboard the winning team?
Although Trump did not deliver the endorsement in person during his visit to Nevada, he did give Brown a rather full-throated social media post.
Like many other GOP Senate candidates in swing states, Brown is underperforming Trump in his state. But that may just go with the territory of running against an incumbent, and it may eventually be something Brown can overcome.
House 2024
Texas-28: Rep. Henry Cuellar’s (D) bribery trial will not take place until after this fall’s election, and this gives his Laredo-to-San Antonio district a chance to show just how much South Texas Hispanics are shifting Republican. Cuellar, untainted by bribery charges, won his race by 13 points last time.
Cuellar must still be considered the frontrunner despite the charges, if only because the bribes he allegedly took are essentially unrelated to his district (they have to do with U.S. policy toward Azerbaijan). He is also arguably the most moderate Democrat in the House and therefore the one least likely to lose faith with conservative-trending Hispanics. Biden won the seat by only seven points in 2020, and that was before the current border chaos that has roiled many communities in the area. With this entire region reddening, it is not impossible that former Navy Commander Jay Furman (R) will make a good race of it.
Virginia-5: Trump does still keep some grudges, of course. He has endorsed against Rep. Bob Good (R), which has his campaign scrambling ahead of Virginia’s June 18 primary. A conservative organization has produced a poll that shows a substantial lead for the recipient of Trump’s endorsement, retired Navy SEAL and state Sen. John McGuire (R).
Trump’s campaign has since attacked Good for using his image in political ads. Good earned Trump’s ire by getting behind Ron DeSantis for president early on, and he earned the ire of pro-Israel Republican groups (who are supporting McGuire) when he voted against the recent foreign aid package.
Primary electorates, unlike general electorates, can shift very quickly, since changing one’s mind about primary candidates does not necessarily entail completely changing one’s values.
