I’m sorry to say this, dear reader, but you will not be deciding the 2024 election. That’s not a reflection on you personally (I value your readership dearly), nor am I diminishing the power of your vote (vote!). It’s just a fact of the matter that people reading campaign politics newsletters in June 2024 are not generally the ones who will be on the fence and making crucial calls late in the campaign.
The decisive voters are going to be those who have little to no idea what you and I have been talking about for the past five months — quite literally.
That’s an important lesson as we begin to see major developments that could creep into the consciousness of casual voters — events like the convictions of Donald Trump two weeks ago and Hunter Biden on Tuesday, as well as the first presidential debate in about two weeks.
And it makes what would appear to be a very stagnant 2024 race more unpredictable than we might realize.
A recent poll really drove this home for me. It came from Yahoo News and YouGov, and it asked people a series of basic questions about what’s happening in politics right now.
Among those questions? “As far as you know, which of the following things has Donald Trump been indicted for?”
Only about half of Americans agreed Trump had been indicted for the subjects of his three remaining indictments. Just 55 percent agreed he had been indicted for taking highly classified documents and obstructing efforts to return them. And just less than half agreed Trump had been indicted for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, as he has both federally and in Georgia.
Many said they weren’t sure, but 16 to 21 percent said affirmatively that Trump had not been indicted for these things — these things that he has, in fact, been indicted for.
It’s worth applying some skepticism to these numbers. Republicans were the most likely to answer these questions wrongly. Remarkably, nearly as many said Trump had not been indicted for trying to overturn the election — 34 percent — as said he had — 35 percent.
Some of that could reflect a lack of paying attention or a media diet focused on outlets that simply don’t pay as much attention to these things; those least familiar with the indictments were Fox News viewers and those who don’t watch cable news. Or it could be voters lodging a weird protest against indictments they view as unjustified. If an indictment is invalid and a “witch hunt,” is it really an indictment at all?
But it’s hardly the only evidence that many voters simply haven’t engaged with the 2024 campaign or politics more generally on the most basic of levels.
- 1 in 5 voters in the Yahoo/YouGov survey said either that they didn’t know about Trump’s Manhattan verdict, that Trump was not guilty or that the trial was ongoing. That includes 2 out of every 5 registered voters under the age of 30.
- A majority of independents have said they’ve heard only “a little” or “nothing at all” about Trump’s classified-documents indictment, according to Marquette University Law School polling.
- Just 1 in 5 voters in a May Reuters/Ipsos poll said they were familiar with Trump having said that purported voter fraud in the 2020 election “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
- Republicans, especially, will often tell pollsters things about Donald Trump and his legal problems that are simply wrong.
- Voters also believe strikingly wrong things about the economy, including a majority believing we’re in a recession and half thinking unemployment is at a 50-year high. (Unemployment has actually been at 4 percent or below for its longest stretch in those 50 years.)
None of this means that we’re bound to see big shifts in the 2024 election once voters start paying more attention.
It’s likely many people will go on being unfamiliar with these things through November. And even if people do engage with the substance of these issues as they make their voting decisions and start seeing campaign ads about these things, we’ve seen how polarization can negate the impact of them. The vast majority of Americans are now familiar with Trump’s guilty verdict in Manhattan, and he lost one or two points, at most.
But nor should we discount the fact that, in a close race, low-information voters who could well decide things could be going on a bit — or even a lot — more information than they are now.
Another moment you may have missed
Don’t look now, but statewide and congressional primary season is starting to get a bit more interesting. We had some major contests on Tuesday, as recapped by The Post’s Theodoric Meyer and Leigh Ann Caldwell and yours truly.
- Republicans have increasing reason to worry about their reliance upon infrequent and unreliable voters, after a remarkably competitive special election for Ohio’s 6th District on Tuesday. The Democrat lost by only about 10 points in a 29-point Trump district in a very low-turnout affair. (More on all this here.)
- The survival of Reps. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and William Timmons (R-S.C.) in contested primaries means we still haven’t seen an incumbent lose a primary nearly halfway through the primary calendar, which is pretty rare. But that could end next week with Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), whose opponent Trump has endorsed.
- Mace’s relatively easy 57-30 win is merely the latest message to Republicans: You can have all kinds of personal and staff problems, but as long as you are good (or in Mace’s case, make good) with Trump, you will probably be okay.
It’s rare you see a very human moment from a politician — people who, after all, have chosen a business in which they need to constantly mind their public perception.
Such moments seem to arrive more often with President Biden than most. But even for him, the felony conviction of his son Hunter on Tuesday appeared to be a poignant moment. A president who buried a wife, an infant daughter and a son has now seen his other son go from drug addiction to criminal conviction.
And we shouldn’t underestimate the impact of that personal toll on Biden and what lies ahead, including on the campaign, as The Post’s Matt Viser and Yasmeen Abutaleb report.
“How Republicans used misleading videos to attack Biden in a 24-hour period” (Washington Post)
“How Biden and Trump want to rewrite the tax code” (Washington Post)
“What the Hunter Biden verdict means for 2024 — or doesn’t” (Washington Post)
“Some abortion opponents worry about Trump’s Republican platform rewrite” (Washington Post)
“Biden Loves to Tell Tall Tales. We Cut Them Down to Size.” (New York Times)
“The orthodoxy that doomed Democrats’ border policies” (Atlantic)
