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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024

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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.

I'm pretty comfortable extending this to the electorate

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.

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.