The Story Trump's Base Fears The Most

The central issue in the 2024 election is Trump himself. His base is telling us his biggest vulnerability.

Trump is not the President. He has not been President since January 20, 2021.

Joe Biden is the President right now.

I mention these basic facts because, under almost any other circumstance, the current President of the United States would be a much more prominent topic of online conversation at any given time than any other U.S. political figure.

Trump, though, is different. Within the United States, he is mentioned online more than any other person - more than Taylor Swift, more than Beyonce, more than Elon Musk, more than the current U.S. President Joe Biden (pictured above). The chart below shows the top 5 persons mentioned online in the United States, by number of posts:

This was, briefly, not the case. For a period of about a year-and-a-half, President Biden was talked about online more than Donald Trump. Trump was still #2, but Biden was #1. Here is the same chart, with the dates changed to Jan. 20, 2021 (Biden’s inauguration) through August 8, 2022 - and note that though the timescale is longer, the totals are smaller, which makes sense for a period further away from the 2024 elections:

You, the reader, may be wondering why the dataset ends on August 8, 2022. More on that in a moment.

First, we’re going to shift focus, to the top political issues mentioned in the swing states. This newsletter focused on exactly that topic recently, but did not include Trump himself as an issue. Here’s what it looks like when both Trump and Biden are included as “issues” in the election (obviously, there is some overlap among issues, e.g., Trump and Biden are mentioned in the conversation about each of the other issues):

* “Swing states” means states where the 2020 presidential margin was less than three percent - namely, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Dataset excludes accounts with partisan signifiers in bio.

Again, we see that Trump is mentioned not only more than the current President, but more than any other political topic. It makes sense that Biden himself would be an “issue” - he is the incumbent, and 2024 would typically be a referendum election on the incumbent’s performance.

But Trump is mentioned quite a bit more than Biden, as though the referendum were on him.

So, if the biggest issue in 2024 is Trump, what do people talk about most when they talk about him? What are people arguing about?

More specifically, from the Democratic point of view - what is Trump’s biggest vulnerability?

To answer, we need only look at what his supporters talk about most. Is there a narrative that they are extra-defensive about? A narrative they spend far more energy defending Trump against than they do talking about any positive aspect of his candidacy?

Reader, there is.

When Trump’s supporters talk about Trump, the topic they mention far more than any other is his legal problems:

Nearly 1 in 4 posts mentioning Trump from right-wing accounts in swing states are about his legal problems. Other major topics don’t even come close, and the “everything else” category is diffuse, as the visualization of top words and phrases from that category shows:

Even regular online schmoes aren’t as eager to talk about Trump’s legal problems as Trump supporters are:

However, even regular schmoes still talk about his legal problems quite a bit when they mention Trump. But right wing accounts mention it even more!

Could this be because they are happy about them? We’ve heard quite a bit about Trump supporters being galvanized by the 91 criminal indictments against him, leading them to support him even more because of all the crimes he’s accused of. Sure. That’s why they’re posting about his legal problems so much, because they love that he has legal problems.

The reason there are so many posts devoted to defending Trump against his criminal indictments (91!!!) is that right wingers can sense that he needs defending.

And he does.

Here are the top posts being shared by right wing accounts over the past month (the essay-length diatribes mean they’re not mad):

Above: the most-shared posts about Trump’s legal issues from right wing accounts who are definitely not mad.

Earlier, I mentioned there was significance to the date August 8, 2022, when the first dataset ended - the dataset that showed Biden being mentioned more than Trump. That all changed starting August 9, 2022:

Social media posts from accounts in swing states mentioning Trump and Biden. Each bullet represents a month of data, with the dataset ending during the last complete month (March 31, 2024).

You can see that that date is an inflection point - Trump is suddenly mentioned more often than Biden, and aside from a few exceptions (for instance, Jan/Feb 2023, coinciding with the State of the Union address), Trump is mentioned more each month following the raid on Mar-a-Lago.

This election is shaping up to be a referendum on Trump, who is a disgraced criminal defendant. He will most likely be a convicted felon before November. A convicted felon! As Anat Shenker-Osorio points out, this trial is going to unfold in a way that will be horrifically damaging to Trump - moving the story from a rematch between two candidates people don’t much care for to “shit one of the people in the frontrunning is a criminal.” His supporters are terrified that we will keep mentioning it, though their emotional reaction to the situation is clearly to keep posting “No he’s not!!!” as hard as they can. It’s why the House Republicans tried so hard to make the “Biden Crime Family” a thing. They know if one of the choices is a convicted criminal, it’s the ballgame.

So let’s start winning the ballgame.