Q&A – If Trump’s Jailed Would It Help or Hurt His Presidential Campaign?
Each day I feature a listener question sent by one of these methods.
Email: brianmudd@iheartmedia.com
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Today’s Entry: Today’s topic was submitted via talkback. A listener suggested that if New York Judge Merchan jailed Donald Trump over a gag order violation that Trump would be assured of winning.
Bottom Line: In this wild world we live in this topic has become an increasingly hot one since New York Judge Merchan has now found Trump in contempt twice for violations of his gag order. Merchan’s more strongly worded second contempt finding came with this message: I do not want to impose a jail sanction and have done everything I can to avoid doing so. But I will if necessary. Now the objectivity of that statement is certainly open for discussion as Judge Merchan, a Joe Biden donor, is stating he’s doing everything he can to avoid issuing a jail sentence for Trump, while having refused to first, recuse himself from the case and second, having issued a gag order. As always there are two sides to stories and one side to facts. As outlined, it's objectively a matter of fact that the judge has not done “everything he can” to avoid that potential outcome. Nevertheless, as the dominating news about this case today is Stormy Daniels having taken the stand the thought with remains... If Trump is jailed by Merchan, Trump will win in November.
In analyzing the view of the possible two competing ideas are possible. It’s possible that 1) Being jailed could be a negative for Trump with potentially persuadable voters but that 2) Trump could win the presidency. In my weekly Anatomy of a Swing State Series, Trump remains the favorite to win the Presidential election as of today. What’s becoming increasingly apparent as we’re now under six months away from Election Day is that there’s very little movement regardless of what’s happening in the news. The migrant crisis, reacceleration of inflation, the college protests, the Trump trial, you name it. With all of that going on the movement within all of the polling has been extremely consistent (Trump appearing to have a slight advantage). This is unsurprising given that we’re talking about two knowns that every voter already has a strong opinion about. That takes me to the matter at hand. Would Trump being jailed over the gag order assure his reelection?
One of the hardest things for any person to do is to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. That’s doubly true when we’re talking about the extreme political divide between Biden and Trump. As recently as the 2012 Presidential election we were accustomed to having elections in which the average voter of one presidential candidate could and generally did understand how and why the other candidate could win. Starting with the 2016 election, that no longer was the case – for either side. Much of that is about the extent of the political divide. It’s not been wider for as long as Gallup has been measuring issue-based partisanship dating back several decades. This led to Gallup making this observation last year entering this election cycle:
- Over the past two decades, partisan gaps on all of the issues included in this analysis have either remained roughly the same or expanded. This reinforces the fundamental (albeit not surprising) conclusion that when Americans are divided into two groups based on their political identity, they are also predictably divided into two groups on a wide range of politically and socially important issues.
What this means is that independent of political candidates, Americans have become increasingly divided over political issues making the gaps between them consistently wider. This has had a two-prong effect. The first is that there are simply fewer persuadable voters, as those who’ve been left leaning have become more closely aligned with Democrat politics, while those who’ve been right leaning have become more closely aligned with Republican politics. Rising levels of NPA voter registrations and/or rising levels of voters saying they’re “independents” is a smoke screen. Most don’t really mean it – they may just not particularly like either political party even if they’re reliable voters for one of them. So anyway, that’s the overall political landscape, but then when you add in the names Biden and Trump...you’re essentially shaking the rest of the partisan leaning tree as hard as you possibly can. This takes me to the final point about the narrative that Trump being jailed would be good/bad.
On the one hand, I’ve read a lot of polling about the potential impact of Trump being jailed. None of it has been good for him. That’s because for the person who is genuinely on the fence about who to vote for (which again is extremely difficult if not almost impossible for most people to be able to analytically envision), it’s generally seen as Trump having done something wrong which is a negative. I haven’t seen evidence that people animated by Trump being a victim of the system, and thus voting for him as a result, are waiting to see if Trump will be jailed on a gag order violation to determine if they feel he’s a victim of the system sufficiently to the point to which they think they should vote for him because of it. Let me put this another way. How big do you think the universe of “Trump is a victim of the system” voters are there that are currently undecided?
Given that practical political consideration it's likely that at a minimum Trump being jailed for a gag order would be a negative to the extent that it would further keep him in off the campaign trail connecting with voters which is what he tends to do best. But as I mentioned at the onset, it can be true that being jailed for whatever reason could be both a negative for Trump and yet he could still win the election. I stand by my original analysis in April of last year when asked about a Trump/Biden rematch. As I said at the time:
Joe Biden’s approval rating with Independents is 28% approval to 60% disapproval. Nobody wins elections with numbers like that. Because when you’re losing potentially persuadable voters by greater than 2 to 1, you’re losing every potentially close election that takes place. And Trump or whomever the challenger would be wouldn’t necessarily need them to flip their votes to them, provided that many who voted for Biden once wouldn’t do so again. Which, by the way I think would be likely to happen in a head-to-head rematch between the two. Lower turnout than 2020 to the benefit of Donald Trump.
That remains my position today. I firmly believe turnout as a percentage of the eligible voters will be lower than 2020, and I firmly believe that while there will be fewer voters who vote for both the former and current president than four years ago, the lower turnout will generally benefit Trump. I do think that whether Trump is jailed for whatever reason has the potential to impact that that dynamic but maybe not for the reasons people might think. Trump’s biggest weakness against Biden in 2020 was in the early and vote-by-mail process. That was a huge miss and an unforced error on his part. There are always voters who say they’ll vote on Election Day but never do because life happens. Trump needs to have as many votes in the bank as he can prior to Election Day. The more fired up his base is to vote for him as soon as they can the better for him because there will be fewer potential lost votes for him on Election Day.