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.