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Donald Trump’s conviction did not make me less likely to vote for him (and why the polls annoy me) [1]

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Date: 2024-06-04  

It annoys me when pollsters ask the wrong question, or fail to ask the right follow-up question. Nobody has asked me yet, but I am no less likely to vote for Trump now than I was last month, or last year, because, unlike temperature, probability cannot go below zero. Therefore, I don’t care whether other people are now less likely to vote for Trump, because maybe for some it only means that they will vote for him anyway, but with less enthusiasm. No, what I want to know is whether the conviction makes somebody unlikely to vote for him, who would have voted for him previously. (Or, God forbid, vice versa.)

That is just one of several reasons why I am having trouble giving credence to all the polls that show Trump and Biden virtually tied. If that is really true, then the fraction of actual “deplorables” in our country, who are OK with Trump’s behavior and want a dictator who will make America great (for billionaires and racists) again, is closer to 50% than to 30%. I will include among such “deplorables” those idiots who are so upset with Biden on one or two key issues that they would vote against him even though the alternative is demonstrably even worse on that very issue. Biden is mentally more decrepit than Trump? Trump will do better for the Palestinians than Biden will? Seriously??

Maybe there really are that many bona fide “deplorables,” but I don’t want there to be, and I really don’t think there are. I think that the real problem—as commentators are now beginning to say—is the large number of “low information voters” who get their news from social media or from nowhere at all. As unbelievable as it sounds to us, they may actually not know just how bad Trump is.

Can Biden’s team figure out how to win them over with the information that they currently lack? I believe they can, but we won’t know for sure until November. Until then, polls that show a close race just don’t matter.

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