DON'T BE SO SURE THAT THE 2024 ELECTION WILL BE ALL ABOUT TRUMP'S CRIMINALITY

Seth Masket is certain he knows what the next presidential election will be all about:

Let’s take a moment to imagine what, at this point, is a fairly likely scenario for the fall of 2024: Donald Trump is the Republican presidential nominee, and he is the defendant in multiple ongoing state and federal trials. What does that election look like?

It’s possible that one or more of these trials will have already taken place — perhaps he’ll even have been found guilty but is still running for president. It’s also quite likely that more of these trials will still be pending....

How do you have an election like this? How is any other issue discussed? ...

That’s a setup for a truly awful election, one in which Trump’s guilt or innocence is the only issue under discussion....

Politically engaged people think this will be the most important issue in 2024. But will ordinary Americans feel the same way?

Not long ago, Trump went through a civil trial in which it was found that he sexually assaulted the plaintiff. This had no impact on his poll numbers. He's now been indicted three times, for crimes of increasing seriousness. The insurrection that was intended to keep him in power was the subject of televised congressional hearings last year that went on for months. No impact on the polls.

I know you all keep telling me that polls are simply random number generators that bear no resemblance to actual election results (in which case you'd think there might be GOP primary polls showing Doug Burnum or Larry Elder with a 20-point lead while Trump is mired in seventh place, just because it's a theoretically possible outcome) -- or, if you don't believe that, you think it's too soon for general election polls to be meaningful, even though we're talking about an election between the sitting president of the United States and a former president who was a celebrity for thirty years before being elected. I'm pretty sure even politically disengaged people have thoughts about these two guys, and especially about the crimes the ex-president obviously committed.

But if they have opinions, they're not talking about them when they're contacted by pollsters as much as they're talking about the economy. Or maybe they care about abortion or the cost of health care, or, if they're Republicans, about immigration and "wokeness" and the fact that trans people exist (and did I mention Hunter Biden?).

Obviously, interest in Trump's legal cases will increase significantly once some trials start. But if you're an ordinary American who probably hasn't believed for decades that the government is run well (or run in your best interests), how important is a functioning democracy to you? And won't you still be more concerned about the price of gasoline and milk? (Inflation is cooling, but it's not as if prices have reverted to what they were in the pre-inflation period. That probably explains why 51% of Americans still think the economy is in a downturn, according to a new CNN poll.)

I don't believe Republicans will succeed in making this election about "the Biden crime family" or "the woke agenda," but they can make it about Joe Biden's age, which I think will be the real issue of the 2024 election. Biden is competent, but because he often speaks very poorly, to many people he doesn't seem competent. We all missed the real takeaway from that "Biden yells at his staffers" story that circulated a few weeks ago:

He'll grill aides on topics until it's clear they don’t know the answer to a question — a routine that some see as meticulous and others call "stump the chump" or "stump the dummy."

... Ted Kaufman, Biden's longtime chief of staff when the future president represented Delaware in the Senate, told Axios that Biden's process is policy-driven, and has made him a strong executive.

"If there is something that's not in the brief, he's going to find it," he said. "It's not to embarrass people, it's because he wants to get to the right decision. Most people who have worked for him like the fact that he challenges them and gets them to a better decision."

Biden's speech is muddled, but this tells me that his brain is still sharp and he understands the policy implications of everything he's dealing with, probably because he's been doing this for more than half a century. The results -- keeping an international pro-Ukraine coalition intact, beating the pants off Kevin McCarthy in debt ceiling negotiations -- bear out that impression. But we're not getting stories explicitly pointing out that Biden is highly focused and very well informed.

It's just too easy for many voters to see lingering problems in America and conclude that the person to blame is the old man we see on TV shuffling and stammering (while Trump, despite being ignorant and horribly out of shape, still appears vigorous and obnoxiously verbal). I don't know how Biden prepared for the State of the Union address earlier this year, but he did a fine job delivering the speech, and we need to see more of that skill.

At the same time, yes, obviously Trump is a criminal, and we'll be reminded of that throughout the next fifteen months. Trump's criminality will absolutlely be a major issue in 2024. But it won't be the only issue.