I spoke to Maggie Haberman for her New York Times story with Jonathan Swan on the political implications of the various Trump criminal proceedings.

Yet Mr. Trump was elected in 2016 despite a lengthy trail of negative incidents related to his character. And polls vary on how many of his supporters who say they will back him would abandon him if he is convicted in a criminal case.

“After the past eight years, that self-selection alone is enough to tell you they won’t have much trouble explaining away an adverse legal ruling, let alone one on dubious grounds,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist.

t

Read the full piece here.

It’s a bit too glib to say LOL nothing matters–conviction is bad, full stop, and given the profound closeness of the past two elections, a stiff breeze could swing the electoral college one way or another.

But at the end of the day, the diminishing poll of Trump supporters who tell pollsters they would reconsider in the event of a hypothetical conviction are still people willing to say they’d support Trump. Intuitively that would be a meaningful threshold, and when you dig into the data, these tend to be strong Republican leaners who are likely to come home when faced with a binary choice.

I spoke with NBC‘s Sahil Kapur about the bipartisan gun safety framework in the Senate, and what it says about the shifting political and strategic calculations of Republican leadership.

Liam Donovan, a lobbyist and former Republican campaign operative, attributed the intra-party shift to a growing prevalence of mass shootings and a “realignment of the GOP coalition.”

“Suburban Romney voters who had once been squarely part of the base are now up for grabs, if not beginning to lean Democrat, and this is the sort of issue that could make a big difference at the margin, both in the midterms and going forward,” Donovan said.

Read the full piece here.

It didn’t make the piece, but another important factor here is the limited window for such a deal to occur. A potential GOP Senate would be unlikely to lead on anything in this realm, to say nothing of the anticipated Republican majority in the House. This is a unique opportunity to defuse a key issue with just a fraction of the conference, with the added bonus of gumming up the legislative calendar at a make or break time for other Democratic priorities.

10yrs down the road of more incidents, more urgency/salience + accelerating realignment of the suburbs as a political matter is what changes the dynamics, and I think Sahil lays the predicate well. One missing link: this is the last best chance for Rs to take it off the table.

— Liam Donovan (@LPDonovan) June 16, 2022