Donald Trump’s recent conviction on 34 felony counts hands the master of branding with short vignettes a very heavy dose of his own medicine.

“Convicted felon” packs a mighty punch in our society – at least equal, one would think, to Trump’s all-time winners like “Crooked Hillary,” and “fake news.” And its impact is all the more powerful, one might hope, since it is based here on real facts and not made-up nonsense.

Short memorable labels recalled or repeated can often have an impact because they are “sticky.” They break through the noise and are memorable. Such sound bites reach Americans busy with our lives, our economic survival, our children, careers and leisure time.

As Amy Walters wrote recently, much of the news received by low-attention voters “will be organic: the kind of information that is floating around in the atmosphere and that you can’t ignore. The first-time criminal conviction of a former president is one of those events.”

For a very long time, American voters have, understandably, been more than hesitant to cast their ballots for convicted criminals. Polling data indicates that such Americans include the young and the nonwhite voters who have been drifting away from President Biden. As the New York Times’ election analyst Nate Cohn has written, the pre-verdict polls “suggest that [those groups] might be especially prone to revert to their traditional [Democratic] leanings in the event of a conviction.” Indeed, a Gallup Poll taken in late January 2024 reported that 71% of Americans said they would not vote for an otherwise well-qualified candidate who was charged with a felony, and 77% gave the same response as to........

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