The (no longer) much too early 2024 election thread

[N.E. Brigand]

It's not even a week since Ron DeSantis said: "You can be the most worthless Republican in America, if you kiss the ring, Trump will say you are wonderful."

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DeSantis's announcement today included a quotation of Winston Churchill that Churchill never actually said.

[Frelga]

A bunch of people on Twitter made some variation of a joke that DeSantis should be forced to carry his campaign to term.

[RoseMorninStar]

A bunch of people on Twitter made some variation of a joke that DeSantis should be forced to carry his campaign to term.

Good one.

[N.E. Brigand]

Donald Trump said tonight that Nikki Haley was in charge of security at the Capitol on Jan. 6th. I know he meant Nancy Pelosi (the usual Republican target of that claim), but I struggle to see how this is just a simple slip of the tongue: he says "Nikki Haley" four times as he builds into that statement.

Referencing those remarks, Nikki Haley began publicly questioning Donald Trump's cognitive abilities over the weekend.

Trump defended his cognition during a speech last night in which he said that he "aced" a cognitive test "a few months ago". He had famously informed the world in 2020 that he passed such a test, so either he took another one this year (in which case: why?) or he's mixing up the two tests. (He's almost certainly getting something wrong in his descriptions of the test, which among other things shows various animal pictures that test-takers must identify. Trump has said that one animal on his test was a whale, but several people familiar with different variations of the test say that no version they've seen includes a whale.)

Trump also said the following: "I’ll let you know when I go bad, I really think I’ll be able to tell you. Because someday we go bad. I feel my mind is stronger now than it was 25 years ago. Is that possible? I really do."

[N.E. Brigand]

Joe Biden is campaigning on what Donald Trump has done to abortion rights:



Pretty weird to see people in the replies point out that Biden was president when Roe v. Wade was overturned.

[N.E. Brigand]

Seventeen months ago, Matt Yglesias had a different reason for predicting that Ron DeSantis wouldn't be the Republican candidate:

[N.E. Brigand]

Donald Trump compared himself to "people that aren't so good ... in the church," i.e., pedophile priests, to support his argument that presidents need immunity from prosecution.

[N.E. Brigand]

DeSantis's announcement today included a quotation of Winston Churchill that Churchill never actually said.

It appears that the source of DeSantis's faux-Churchill quote is a 1938 Budweiser ad.

[N.E. Brigand]

I have been tough on the so-called mainstream media for what I see as a rightward bias that downplays Joe Biden's very real accomplishments. But that oversimplifies, because it's also true -- as I think I've suggested a time or two -- that many reporters also have a cultural leftwing bias that blinds them to certain realities. Matt Yglesias offers some examples of why "having lots of young, city-dwelling, educated progressives dominate the shrinking media industry is a mixed blessing at best for Joe Biden," among which are the fact that "there's been dramatically more coverage of student loan policy than of prescription drug pricing even though there's a lot more people on Part D than who have student loans."

Likewise he feels that because journalists' leftward assumptions, the media "tends to focus on ideas that divide Democrats rather than ideas that unite them." Here he notes that there used to be a dispute among Democrats about whether the $7.25 per hour federal minimum wage -- which was set in 2009 -- should be incrementally increased or quickly raised to $15 per hour, and that debate got a lot of news coverage. This was circa 2012 and included a "Fight for $15" movement among progressives. Now Democrats are mostly in agreement that it should be $15 per hour -- the progressives won the debate! -- and that fact is not the subject of much reporting. It's still $7.25 per hour, by the way, because a small handful of centrist Congressional Democrats like Kyrsten Sinema (now an independent) and Joe Manchin joined all Republicans in 2021 to block an increase.

And because the leftward-blinkered media doesn't pay much attention to internal Republican debates, and because they prefer to cover horseraces than to cover policy discussions ("the odds rather than the stakes"), and because the explicitly rightwing media like Fox News doesn't want to highlight such dissension, you'd never know that there is disagreement among Republicans about whether the IRS should be abolished and whether Social Security and Medicare should be privatized. So it's always bad news for Democrats.

[N.E. Brigand]

NBC reports that a "Fake Joe Biden robocall tells New Hampshire Democrats not to vote on Tuesday." That's a crime. Who's behind it?

[N.E. Brigand]

Donald Trump said tonight that Nikki Haley was in charge of security at the Capitol on Jan. 6th. I know he meant Nancy Pelosi (the usual Republican target of that claim), but I struggle to see how this is just a simple slip of the tongue: he says "Nikki Haley" four times as he builds into that statement.

Referencing those remarks, Nikki Haley began publicly questioning Donald Trump's cognitive abilities over the weekend.

Trump defended his cognition during a speech last night in which he said that he "aced" a cognitive test "a few months ago". He had famously informed the world in 2020 that he passed such a test, so either he took another one this year (in which case: why?) or he's mixing up the two tests. (He's almost certainly getting something wrong in his descriptions of the test, which among other things shows various animal pictures that test-takers must identify. Trump has said that one animal on his test was a whale, but several people familiar with different variations of the test say that no version they've seen includes a whale.)

Trump also said the following: "I’ll let you know when I go bad, I really think I’ll be able to tell you. Because someday we go bad. I feel my mind is stronger now than it was 25 years ago. Is that possible? I really do."

Donald Trump confirmed today that he has twice taken this cognitive test (that is normally only given to dementia patients), once in 2020 and once more recently. He also said that Haley should take one herself.

[N.E. Brigand]

A new poll in Pennsylvania finds Joe Biden leading Donald Trump in that state by 7.5%. By contrast, the U.S. Senator up for reelection there, Democrat Bob Casey, only leads his Republican competitor, David McCormick (who until recently lived in Connecticut), by 3.8% in that poll, conducted last week. The margin of error is 3.7%.

It's just one poll! And neither presidential candidate had a majority: 13% were undecided.

That polling agency, Susquehanna, was within a couple points of the actual results in its final polls of 2020 and 2022.

[Frelga]

They should start polling Biden against Hailey.

[N.E. Brigand]

Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report has "seen enough" in the Democratic and Republican primaries in New Hampshire: he says Joe Biden wins the former (despite not being on the ballot) and Donald Trump wins the latter. The margins are yet to be seen. As several observers are noting, Trump's campaign had previously been predicting a 30% margin of victory over Nikki Haley, but this afternoon, Trump was complaining that Democrats were voting in the Republican primary (they weren't, but independents were), and now Trump's campaign is saying any margin larger than 7% should be considered a landslide. Wasserman expects something above 20%, which would be in keeping with recent polls.*

CNN interviewed some Haley voters today who said they wouldn't be voting for Trump in November. Trump said that he won't need their votes in the fall, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who joined Trump in New Hampshire today, said such voters will be "eradicated" from the Republican Party.

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*Edited to note that what Wasserman actually wrote was that he expected a result that matched the polls. I hadn't checked and misremembered that average showing Trump winning by 22%, but in fact the average has been more like 19%. So I should have written "something below 20%."

[N.E. Brigand]

Biden was fifth in New Hampshire four years ago, when he was on the ballot. These were the 2020 results:

1. 76,384 (25.6%) -- Bernie Sanders
2. 72,454 (24.3%) -- Pete Buttigieg
3. 58,714 (19.7%) -- Amy Klobuchar
4. 27,429 (9.2%) -- Elizabeth Warren
5. 24,944 (8.4%) -- Joe Biden
6. 10,732 (3.6%) -- Tom Steyer
7. 9,755 (3.3%) -- Tulsi Gabbard
8. 8,312 (2.8%) -- Andrew Yang
9. 4,675 (1.6%) -- Michael Bloomberg
10. 1,271 (0.4%) -- Deval Patrick

Roughly 4,000 votes were split among more than fifteen other candidates (including write-ins).

Sanders and Buttigieg tied for delegates, at nine apiece. Klobuchar got six.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Wasserman expects something above 20%, which would be in keeping with recent polls.*
*Edited to note that what Wasserman actually wrote was that he expected a result that matched the polls. I hadn't checked and misremembered that average showing Trump winning by 22%, but in fact the average has been more like 19%. So I should have written "something below 20%."

The current margin with 64% of the ballots counted, the margin is 11%.

[N.E. Brigand]

Wasserman expects something above 20%, which would be in keeping with recent polls.*
*Edited to note that what Wasserman actually wrote was that he expected a result that matched the polls. I hadn't checked and misremembered that average showing Trump winning by 22%, but in fact the average has been more like 19%. So I should have written "something below 20%."

The current margin with 64% of the ballots counted, the margin is 11%.

At one point last night, when about 80% had been returned, it was slowly trending down and I thought it might even get under 10%, but this morning with more than 90% counted it's back to 11%. In other words, Nikki Haley significantly outperformed the polling. Given that it was only in the last few days that she spoke somewhat forcefully against Donald Trump, I wonder if she should have done so earlier.

I also wonder how the dynamics of last night's concession/victory speeches will play out. George Conway has been saying for more than a month that if someone should beat Trump in a primary, he'd go mad. Last night was Haley's best chance, and she fell short. But while conceding New Hampshire, she needled Trump a little, and he went mad anyway! He and his Republican allies appear to be desperate to have her drop out before the primary next month in her home state of South Carolina, even though all the polls show Trump well ahead in that state. She's probably staying in the race for now on the chance that something serious happens to him, so that Republicans have a viable backup choice.

[N.E. Brigand]

There were so many complaints from Bernie Sanders supporters in 2016 that the Democratic National Committee was conspiring against him to help Hillary Clinton win the nomination -- and it was certainly true that the DNC favored Clinton (who, unlike Sanders, was actually a member of the Democratic Party) -- and those complaints were then amplified by both Republicans and by their Russian supporters (including via illegal means) in an effort to sow dissension and help Donald Trump.

So I appreciate Semafor reporter Dave Weigel pointing out that official Republicans have already done much more to help Donald Trump this year than the DNC did to help Clinton, including the Republican National Committee today -- just two weeks into the primaries! -- calling for Nikki Haley to drop out of the race.

[N.E. Brigand]

The United Auto Workers union today endorsed Joe Biden for reelection.

[N.E. Brigand]

Jeff DeWit, the chairman of the Arizona Republican Party, resigned today following the revelation yesterday that last year, former gubernatorial and current U.S. Sentate candidate Kari Lake, recorded him offering her money to drop out of the race. Lake released what DeWit says is a selectively edited recording of the conversation from a year ago, when he says she was his employee. DeWit says that Lake is threatening to release more recordings. So this appears to be both a bribery and a blackmail scandal.