EXPERTS SAY THAT TRUMP'S INDICTMENT-DRIVEN POLL BUMP IS TOTALLY NOT AN INDICTMENT-DRIVEN POLL BUMP

It may seem as if Donald Trump's increasingly successful campaign for the Republican nomination consists solely of Trump saying, over and over again, "Vote for me -- I've been indicted again!" However, a number of Very Smart People want you to know that that's totally wrong -- in fact, being indicted has been really bad for Trump's political career. Here's Russell Berman in The Atlantic:

In the months since Donald Trump’s indictments started piling up, pollsters have noticed something remarkable: The dozens of criminal charges brought against the former president have seemed to boost his standing in the Republican presidential primary. Trump has widened his already commanding lead over his rivals, and in poll after poll, GOP voters have said that the charges make them more—not less—likely to vote for him again.

Berman says that this is an illusion:

A new, broader survey of Republican voters suggests that the indictments have, in fact, dented Trump’s advantage in the primary. The study was designed by a group of university researchers who argue that pollsters have been asking the wrong questions to assess how the indictments have affected Republican voters.

One of the researchers behind the study explains how you can really tell what Republican voters are thinking:

Most traditional polls have asked respondents directly whether the indictments have changed their attitude about Trump or their likelihood to vote for him. According to Matt Graham, one of the authors of the new survey and an assistant professor at Temple University, this type of query leads to biased answers. And it devolves into a proxy question for whether voters—and Republicans in particular—like the former president in the first place....

Graham and his colleagues believed that they could elicit more accurate answers about Trump by asking respondents to assess their view of him—and their likelihood of voting for him—as if they did not know he had been indicted. To test their theory, they commissioned a SurveyMonkey poll of more than 5,000 Americans in which half were asked questions in this counterfactual format....

Are you ready for the researchers' key question? I hope you're sitting down for this:

“Suppose you did not know about the indictment. How would you have answered the following question: How likely are you to vote for Donald Trump?”

Um ... really? This is basically "Don't think of an elephant -- and now that you're not thinking of an elephant, tell me how you feel about the safari you're planning to go on where you expect to see elephants."

Even if you believe that this is a more effective way of measuring the effect of the indictments on Trump's popularity among Republicans than, say, looking at pre- and post-indictment polls of Republicans, the results are rather underwhelming:

... the poll based on the counterfactual framing found that the indictments slightly hurt his standing in the party, reducing by 1.6 percent the likelihood that Republicans would vote for him.

Meanwhile, in the real world, where voters are allowing themselves to think of elephants, or rather indictments, Trump has been brought up on charges four times since March 30. On March 30, Trump led Ron DeSantis 45.9% to 30.12% in the Real Clear Politics polling average. He now leads 55.5% to 14.5%. Some of this, obviously, is a consequence of the DeSantis faceplant. But Trump has gained nearly 20 points in that time. And in the most recent poll of the race, from CBS, Trump leads DeSantis 62% to 16%.

Berman writes:

To his critics, the emerging conventional wisdom that the indictments have benefited Trump politically is a dispiriting and even dangerous notion, one that could embolden politicians of any ideological stripe to disregard the law.

Well, of course it's dispiriting. I don't know how dangerous it is -- it won't "embolden politicians of any ideological stripe" to be lawless because it wouldn't apply to a Democrat. But yes, it's dispiriting to be reminded that the majority of Republican voters will choose a nominee -- and possibly elect a president -- next year based on their desire to engage vicariously in a years-long act of oppositional defiant disorder.