Intuitively enough, marginal voters tend not to participate in the political process because they don’t see that exercise as especially productive. They tend to be disaffected with the political system, and they seek changes to it that more conventional voters and politicians regard as radical. The polling of marginal voters ahead of this election has also shown that those voters see Trump as more of a change agent than Joe Biden. That was one of Trump’s strengths in 2016. As a former president backed by the Republican Party establishment, that aura had dissipated some. The verdicts upend that dynamic. Trump’s convictions render the former president an outlaw — the ultimate outsider. If the “scandal” these voters are processing is filtered through a tabloid prism, they’re just as likely to be enlivened by it as they are to be repulsed.
As Silver concludes, conventional political physics dictates that Joe Biden should see some signals in the data that suggest the public will not reward a convicted felon with their votes. If no such signal materializes or if the presumptive GOP presidential nominee enjoys a bump in the polls, it would help establish which standard voters are applying to Trump.
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