WaPo’s Philip Bump delivers the bizarre news that “Most Republicans aren’t aware of Trump’s various legal issues.”
There is an assumption, probably particularly among those who cover the news and those who read it, that Donald Trump’s legal travails are common knowledge. We talk about things like the potential effects of a Trump conviction on the 2024 presidential election with the assumption that this would be an event that rose to the nation’s consciousness, triggering a response from both his supporters and detractors.
But this is a sort of vanity: Just because it is interesting to us certainly doesn’t mean it is interesting to others. Polling released by CNN on Thursday shows that only a quarter of voters seek out news about the campaign; a third pay little to no attention at all.
As it turns out, even major developments often fly under the average American’s radar. New polling conducted by YouGov shows that only a bit over half of the country on average is aware of the various legal challenges Trump faces. And among those Republicans on whose political support he depends? Consistently, only a minority say they are aware of his lawsuits and charges.
YouGov presented American adults with eight legal scenarios to judge the extent of the public’s awareness. Two were invented: that Trump faces charges related to emoluments or related to drug trafficking. Happily, less than a quarter of respondents said those legal threats actually existed.
The other six were real. The one that was familiar to the most people was the federal classified-documents case that is moving forward in Florida; 6 in 10 Americans said they were aware of that case. The one that had the least awareness was the civil suit in New York in which a judge determined that he’d fraudulently inflated the value of his assets. Just under 50 percent of Americans knew about that.
But the pattern among Republicans is clear. At most, 45 percent of Republicans said they knew about legal issues: specifically, the documents case and his being found liable for assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll. Only a quarter knew about the value-inflation suit, and only 4 in 10 knew about the criminal charges in Manhattan related to the hush money payments to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels.
While this will naturally seem bizarre to the sort of people who read political blogs, it really shouldn’t shock us. It’s long been understood that most people ignore politics on a day-to-day basis. George Will was telling us decades ago that Americans don’t start paying attention to Presidential campaigns until after the World Series.
Way back in 1957, the political scientist Anthony Downs defended this as “rational ignorance.” After all, it takes a lot of time and energy to be well-informed and the net individual gain for knowing a lot about politics is negligible. It’s a major reason why most folks rely on shortcuts like party labels to inform their vote.
But Bump is going beyond that, noting that Republicans are more ignorant about a specific subset of the news than Americans overall. Here’s the visual:
In every single instance, Republicans were less knowledgeable than Democrats or Independents. Although, oddly, Trump voters were slightly more knowledgeable than Republicans writ large.
Were I to hazard a guess as to the reason, I’d say it’s a function of Trump’s legal troubles constantly being hammered in the mainstream press and Democratic-leaning outlets while getting much less attention on Fox News and other Republican-leaning outlets. And it turns out, Bump concurs:
It seems very safe to assume this lack of familiarity derives from disinterest in hearing negative information about Trump — and, probably more importantly, the disinterest of conservative and right-wing media outlets to report on them. In May, The Washington Post looked at the extent to which Fox News covered the documents and Daniels cases relative to other cable-news channels. It did so much less frequently.
Now, what all this means is unclear. Presumably, even Republicans will be more aware of Trump’s various legal fights as the election draws closer. Certainly, they will if he’s convicted of crimes.
