'Sad and trapped and small': Op-ed hits analysts who dismiss Trump trial's election effect

As Donald Trump's first criminal trial gets well underway, the "commentariat class" has already made up its mind that Trump will likely escape a conviction — and they're even questioning the legal soundness of the case, a pair of analysts wrote Friday.

In a new op-ed from Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Anat Shenker-Osorio contend that pundits and analysts who are quick to dismiss the case — in which Trump is accused of illegally offering a hush money payment to hide an affair he had with an adult film star before the 2016 presidential election — are making "the category error" that lawyers' opinions about legal cases "is somehow predictive of political and electoral outcomes."

Lithwick and Shenker-Osorio point to polls that suggest a guilty verdict in the trial isn't likely to affect the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, and say they only tell a small portion of the story.

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"This is where so many political analysts have either memory-holed how presidential elections actually work in the U.S. or are demonstrating that motivated cognition is one hell of a drug," Lithwick and Shenker-Osorio wrote.

"Because for Trump to lose this election, it does not require over 50 percent of people to say that this trial would flip their vote. Many people are already absolutely determined not to vote for the criminal defendant."

People who say the trial will invigorateTrump's base and further entrench their belief that he's being persecuted by the "deep state" are also revealing they have a fundamental misunderstanding of electoral math, they wrote.

"You cannot mobilize the voters who are already absolutely voting for Trump to any greater heights. No matter how rabid their fury, and how bottomless their sense of shared grievance, they still get only one vote each — at least until they figure out how to commit the voter fraud they love to decry on a broader scale. The rank and file in the tank for MAGA cannot become more impactful," they wrote.

Another factor that makes Trump's hush money trial more dangerous for him politically than analysts would like to admit is the fact that it's being exposed to "the full television and social media meme daily bonanza."

"This means that voters who only barely register the drumbeat of political news will still see a man they are supposed to consider the potential leader of the free world falling asleep, muttering threats at jurors, and generally looking sad and trapped and small."

Read the full op-ed over at Slate.

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