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Out of the hundreds of posters on the fora I inhabit, not one has plausibly made the claim that they would have voted Trump if not for this -- at least one or two have said that they didn't want to vote for him (and would have gone for a third party), but now feel that they have to in order to send a message. Some of them do have a post history of criticizing the guy, so I think I believe them?
As @VelveteenAmbush points out, it's the people NOT on forums who are going to stop voting for him. The law-n-order conservatives who have never seen a prosecution they don't like.
And those people are going to vote for who exactly? Certainly not Joe 'Mostly Peaceful' Biden -- even among throwaway votes RFK doesn't really appeal to this crowd, and I can't see them getting too excited about putting the 'Libertarian' in LGBTQ.
The cohort you are talking about are also the 'you don't vote, you can't complain' guys -- so I can't even see it hurting on turnout much here.
ETA: I'm not really talking about quirky geek forums here either -- if you wanna put your finger on that particular pulse I'd reccomend ar15.com -- those guys are the most law abiding, letter-of-the-law dudes you will find, and maybe even more right wing than here. I haven't had cause to be down that rabbithole lately, but I guarantee they will have something to say about this.
They'll just stay home and let the Democrats take the purple areas.
The ar15.com guys are familiar with blatant abuse of the law because BATFE does it all the time.
Sure, but they take all the dumb rules to heart -- go on there and ask about cutting an inch off a shotgun barrel or something sometime. And they won't stay home -- voting is a civic duty, remember? And these guys are all about the civic duty.
Yeah, the ar15 guys are serious about the dumb rules because they know if you're not, you risk having your wife shot in the head in front of you. But they're not the guys who will be turning away from Trump. It will be the guys who (at the time Ruby Ridge was in the news) were of the opinion that if Weaver didn't want to get his wife shot, he shouldn't have cut that shotgun too short. Or should have showed up to court (despite getting wrong and conflicting information about the date). There were distressingly many of such people at the time, and they still exist.
That's not why -- you see this on fudd boards all over the place also, around regulations that carry no risk of being actual prosecution. Gun enthusiasts are just very law abiding as a class -- they are exactly the boomercons you are talking about.
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Posters on the fora you inhabit are not a representative sample of the electorate, no matter how many fora you inhabit nor how much you post.
True enough -- but I've heard literally zero people on fora or IRL who were plausible Trump voters and say that now they won't vote for him -- 'some' is more than 'none', and I'm pretty comfortable extending this to the electorate. All this lawfare is a big mistake -- it won't succeed in keeping him off the ballot, and Americans love an underdog. Trump will lean into it.
You shouldn't be. It's just not reasonable to extrapolate your personal social experience to the electorate, no matter how badly you want to.
Whatever man -- apparently he raised $52M over it yesterday, and right next to that in the feed is a sheriff from Cali (who seems kind of law & order oriented) saying "it's time for a felon in the White House": https://x.com/Bubblebathgirl/status/1796750332359262368
That's top of Twitter from typing "trump" into the search box -- tell you what, why don't you see if you can actually find some people that were ever likely to vote for Trump but won't now? The people saying that this matters are saying so because they hate Trump already, simple as.
All very interesting but none of them is a poll
Another guy quoted some upthread -- looks like the same picture to me.
Here are two polling aggregators. None of the polls they register have extended beyond 5/31. In another two weeks, we will probably get an initial read. If they don't show a bump toward Biden of 1-2 points, I think that will be meaningful preliminary evidence that this hasn't hurt Trump. If they do show that bump, it doesn't necessarily say much about whether the Biden bump will last. For that, we'll probably need another two months or whatever.
Anyway, that's what evidence will look like. Anecdotes about forum posters and real life acquaintances and conversations aren't meaningful data points.
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Give it a week and we'll have new polling that shows if this event moved opinions at all. Hopefully they ask specifically about whether the verdict changed their opinion and in what direction so we don't miss one direction of movement being netted out by another.
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Convicting former presidents for paperwork related felonies (in a court and a state that hate him no less) is such a bad precedent to set I don't even know where to start. There is a reason Nixon was pardoned. Who will want to give up power if they know they will be possibly thrown in jail if they do? Even if that never happens the knock on consequences of this down the road are hard to overstate. Like all bad law, it might make sense morally and emotionally at the time, but it creates a monstrosity that will have to be dealt with later.
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