Re: Trump's felonies, Biden should just tell the truth

There’s an old advertising adage–“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half”–that speaks to some of the uncertainty we confront when we try to persuade people at scale. That’s probably even more true for politics than it is for product marketing because product marketing doesn’t generally provoke the kind of deep, identity-based emotional reactions that politics does. I listen to The Focus Group (an excellent podcast from Sarah Longwell over at the Bulwark) and despite the incredulous rage it fosters in me almost every time, it does help me experience the wonders of the wildly idiosyncratic reasoning processes that voters go through. A cynical person, perhaps, might say that people are often not so much reasoning as justifying their vibes after the fact. Reader, you can decide for yourself if you think I’m a cynical person. 

You can make some fairly reasonable assumptions at scale, of course. We can and do figure out how different groupings of people tend to respond to various forms of messaging. And these insights can be pretty useful in a lot of races–look at how Tom Suozzi won his special election race in Long Island, for instance. I don’t intend to knock campaign strategists, who have a tough but valuable job for political campaigns. But I do worry that sometimes we can overthink strategy. Sometimes we just don’t have the time to fine-tune messaging. Perhaps the groups we need to persuade are small enough that we might reasonably worry that the lessons we can learn about optimal messaging at scale are subject to too many idiosyncrasies with such fine margins. There’s a time and a place for A/B testing rhetorical strategies, but I think there’s also a time for leaning on the simple truth and making people face it head on.

Let’s be frank: there are five months until the Presidential election, which will hinge on a very, very small number of voters (probably tens of thousands per state, if not less) in a handful of swing states. There seem to be fewer “gettable” voters in this election than in any in recent memory. Both candidates have been President before. Trump’s base is remarkable in its unshakeable commitment; Biden’s anti-Trump and pro-democracy coalition, while fragile, is largely holding (at least if the basic stability of the polling is to be believed). Persuadable voters are largely in three groups: on Trump’s moderate flank (whatever portion of Haley primary voters don’t return to the GOP and weren’t already Biden voters in 2020), on Biden’s left flank (although those voters are likely to depart for third-party candidates or simply stay home, not flip to Trump), and the ‘true’ swing voters who remain unpersuaded. 

It’s that last group of people for whom messaging about Trump’s felony convictions are most relevant. Strategic debates about that messaging have been ongoing throughout the broad pro-democracy coalition since the moment the jury returned its verdict. There’s two big schools of thought: one thinks that Biden talking about this will reinforce the idea that this is a blatantly political prosecution and turn it into a purely partisan matter, and the other thinks that continually highlighting Trump’s felony convictions is the sort of thing that might actually move swing voters away from Trump. 

Here’s my 100% correct, satisfaction-guaranteed, Philosophy Guy proclamation on that debate: we dunno. I’m not saying there isn’t an answer, and I’m not saying that given enough time we couldn’t figure it out. I am saying that we have five short months before the election, that the group of persuadable voters is very small, and that any kind of marketing research we could do is being continuously altered by one simple fact: MAGAworld is absolutely clear on their messaging, and they’ve been moving forward with it since day one. 

The MAGA line is that this entire thing is fraudulent, akin to Stalinist show trials, the clear sign of a banana republic, and even a justification for “War” as the extra-whiny mosquito piloting Tim Pool Ratatouille-style from underneath his beanie posted on X. The MAGA line is also that it is orchestrated by Joe Biden (despite being a state case) and that it will certainly be overturned on appeal. Don’t ask me to explain how those things make sense together. It’s pretty silly, sure, but they’re also beating it into voters’ heads through every single news show, podcast, interview, column, etc., that will platform them. Meanwhile, most of team Biden is wringing their hands about whether stating the plain facts will be perceived as overly political.

There’s another overarching consideration here, too: since the start of his political career, one of Donald Trump’s most effective tactics has been thoroughly poisoning the well against any form of criticism or accountability. The cycle is very simple: Trump claims that everyone except his supporters is out to get him and that he (Trump) is treated so unfairly; Trump does a constant stream of things worthy of criticism, some of those things get picked up for criticism, and Trump complains that this is just proof that everyone’s out to get him because of course they are, see how much they criticize me! 

Accountability works the same way too: After January 6, the message from Trump’s supporters, including formerly serious people, was that he shouldn’t be impeached because we have the court system for that. Then the court system started to work, and suddenly that was a political persecution of the heroic J6 political prisoners, and presidents ought to be absolutely immune from any criminal charges, and after all isn’t this really an election issue? Wouldn’t it be undemocratic to make this guy accountable for anything, since so many voters want to elect him again? Practically speaking, Trump has tried to make it inconceivable, almost ontologically impossible, for Trump to ever actually do or say anything bad. Once you buy the Trump line, the simple fact of criticism serves as proof that the criticism was Fake! A Witch Hunt! So Unfair! 

This works great because (as The Focus Group podcast reminds me every week) lots of people aren’t very rational about forming political beliefs. If you bludgeon a narrative into people’s heads long enough, some of them will pick it up, or at least take it seriously, via a kind of blunt-force-trauma-driven osmosis, regardless of how baseless that narrative is. Then they’ll toss it into a pile of other beliefs they’ve picked up, probably in roughly the same way, with zero regard for whether that pile of beliefs could be put together into any kind of vaguely coherent whole. It drives me insane, but you go to the polls with the voters you have. 

So I think it’s important for the pro-democracy coalition to tell the truth. The trial wasn’t rigged. The jury wasn’t full of “undercover Liberal Activists lying to the Judge in order to get on the Trump Jury.” The verdict wasn’t proof that we live in a banana republic. Even if you think that DA Alvin Bragg was politically motivated (I’m unsure how you would begin to separate any political motivation from the strong evidence of Trump’s guilt as a determinative factor in the first place), the prosecution still had to present a persuasive case. Trump had every chance to defend himself. He’s now a convicted felon. The rule of law is important, and jury trials are how we do that here. The process would have worked if he’d been found innocent, and it worked when he was found guilty. Now Trump and his allies want to attack the rule of law, again, because it’s what they do. It’s important to tell the truth, not just for this election, but because the MAGA movement is attacking the rule of law, and the rule of law needs its friends to mount a strong defense.

I want Joe Biden to make American voters, especially those swing voters, confront those truths. I want the American people to go to the polls confronted by the reality that only one candidate in this election is a convicted felon, that many of his closest associates are convicted felons, that he constantly attacks the rule of law if anyone dares to suggest it applies to him or his allies, and that a vote for Trump is a vote to put a convicted felon in the White House. I’m not sure if that’s the best political strategy, and I’m not sure if it will sink in with people who, in the year of our Lord 2024, look at Joe Biden and Donald Trump and don’t know which of those people seems more fit to be President. But I am sure that it’s true, and I sure would like to see us tell the truth.