The Decided, the Undecided, and the Persuadeable

I disagree with the take of the editors of the Wall Street Journal on the impact of the interminably unfolding Hillary Clinton email scandal:

The former Secretary of State wants voters to believe that her private email server scandal is old news, but every month brings new evidence that she put state secrets at risk in order to hide her emails from the public. The slow public release of new emails commanded by a judge, combined with an expanding FBI probe, may be making Democratic voters wonder if they should nominate such an ethically challenged nominee.

The latest cache hit Friday when the State Department released 1,262 more of Mrs. Clinton’s emails. That dump contained another 66 emails deemed classified, which means State has now discovered some 1,340 instances of the nation’s top diplomat handling sensitive material on an unsecure server—including spy satellite information and the name of at least one confidential CIA source. Given that we know Mrs. Clinton’s server was the target of attempted hacks, this is grossly negligent behavior.

Mrs. Clinton’s assurance that none of these emails were classified “at the time,” and that she always handled such material properly, also looks to be undercut by one recently released message. In a June 17, 2011 email thread, aide Jake Sullivan tells Mrs. Clinton that he can’t get her certain documents she wants because “They say they’ve had issues sending secure fax.” Mrs. Clinton appears to direct Mr. Sullivan to ignore protocol and send the information by insecure methods. “If they can’t, turn into nonpaper [with] no identifying heading and send nonsecure,” she wrote.

I don’t think it really matters much. There are already prima facie cases against Sec. Clinton for violations of the Records Act, the Hatch Act, the Freedom of Information Act, for conspiracy, and for perjury. Despite that her favorability rating is about where it was nine month ago, even improving a little. Her name recognition approaches 100%.

In a pre-election context voters are divided into the decided, the undecided, and, of the undecided, the persuadeable. The questions that need to be addressed are:

• For Democratic primary voters how many are still persuadeable? Who will shift support from Clinton to Sanders? Or vice versa?
• For Democratic general election voters how many are still persuadeable? Who among them would shift support from Clinton to Trump, Cruz, or Rubio?

With respect to the second question, I think the answer is “very few”. Maybe I’m just out of touch.

And with respect to the first question, the most likely to be persuadeable are new voters. Historically, young voters have not tended to turn out for primary elections. There are exceptions but that’s the rule. Will the email scandal persuade young voters to support Sanders over Clinton? And, more importantly, to vote in the primaries? Or are they more likely to discourage them?

In my view what matters in the email scandal is what the Justice Department does. If the Department indicts or if, as some have predicted, a failure by the Justice Department to indict results in a revolt within the Department, that will be a whole ‘nother question.