It’s going to take a little while to know how Trump’s indictment impacts 2024
It’s going to take a little while to know how Trump’s indictment impacts 2024
Patience is not our collective strong suit, so here's what you need to know
By the time I get this post up, we might already have some polling on what the general public thinks of former President Donald Trump’s indictment. I’m quite certain there were pollsters in the field overnight on this and that they’ll get results up fast in an effort to maximize media coverage. There are a couple of big reasons to be wary of this fast-turnaround polling, and a one big reason it will be really interesting.
First, the reasons to be wary:
The story will evolve – we don’t even know what the charges are.
I guarantee that there will be headlines very soon trumpeting Trump vs. DeSantis numbers (which you should generally be wary of), arguing either that the indictment caused Trump support to drop or rise or whatever it might have done in any one particular poll. These articles won’t be worth your time until we’ve had some time for more details to come out and opinion to settle.
Will the exact charges matter for public opinion, though? It’s unclear. Republican leaders are certainly setting the expectation that it will be minor and ignorable with their statements in support of Trump. Privately, many likely want Trump out of the way. But publicly, they cannot afford to go against him – if Trump sidesteps all the legal troubles and ends up the 2024 nominee, they will need to be in his good graces. They are betting on no surprises in the indictment. There could be surprises.
We should know the charges on Tuesday, but there will still be a lot of details missing. This case will evolve over the coming months. There is no reason to think that an effect on the horserace now, or even in the next month, will stay exactly the same nine months in the future when the primaries actually start. Play the long game.
Quality polls generally take a bit more time.
Think about the mechanics of conducting a poll in one or two days. In the days of telephone polling one-day polls were frowned upon, largely because we know there are systematic differences in who is home to answer a phone call on any given night. In order to get a high quality sample, you needed to survey over multiple days.
The dynamics are a bit different now that most polls are done online (especially the fast ones; it’s really hard to do a quick phone poll when no one answers their phones), but in general, the same principle applies: A single-day poll is only a poll of those who were paying attention to their email invitations on that particular day – in this case, a Thursday night into Friday. Believe it or not, people who aren’t political junkies might not be watching for an indictment survey to hit their inboxes. These are the normal people.
In short, longer field periods (how long the survey is out there for people to complete) generally result in better samples that don’t suffer from systematic attention biases. You want that - reliable information - not the quick hits of dopamine that today’s and tomorrow’s surveys might give you.
Now, the reason it will be very interesting: It’s still information, even if imperfect.
If you read these polls with the two major caveats above – in other words, not taking it too seriously – you can still glean some idea of where the public might be from these polls. Pay special attention to how the questions were worded (and ignore the poll if they don’t release the question wording), and note the party splits.
Question wording is important because opinion often differs based on how much or what information about the topic is given to respondents. Asking if this a partisan witch hunt is quite different from asking a question that gives the details of the case, which is also quite different from asking whether Trump should go down for his crimes. (Those exact phrases are unlikely to be in a survey question, but you get my point, right?)
In general we know that Republicans will probably mostly be anti-indictment, parroting the messages they’re being given that it’s all an inappropriate partisan attack. But some portion of Republicans will come down anti-Trump - pay attention to where that might be. If it’s higher than the typical one-quarter to one-third of the party that is usually anti-Trump in surveys, that could spell trouble for him. But we would still need more information to know that for sure.
So take what you will from it, just be critical and don’t overhype an early survey. Opinion could evolve, especially once we know what the charges are.