The (no longer) much too early 2024 election thread

[N.E. Brigand]

Brian Beutler argues that President Biden and the Democrats need to focus on two or three major issues about Trump because "overwhelming the public with hurricanes of truth and lies about every question of controversy in America is a recipe for mass bewilderment and resignation". He recommends Democrats focus on how Donald Trump overturned abortion rights, how his botched response to Covid-19 led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, and how he almost brought an end to democracy in America. I wonder if he's right.

[RoseMorninStar]

I can't say if he's right, but I believe people tend to get overwhelmed and think, 'all politicians are bad/corrupt'. It's why the right has spent so much time on Biden's impeachment & the Hunter Biden story.

[N.E. Brigand]

Donald Trump is playing the "bloodbath" game again, but this time it's "animals".

The link above was comes from someone defending Trump by sharing "the full clip" of remarks he made in Michigan:

The 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia was barbarically murdered by an illegal alien animal. The Democrats said, "Please don't call them 'animals.' They're humans." I said, "No, they're not humans. They're not humans. They're animals." And Nancy Pelosi told me that. She said, "Please don't use the word 'animals,' sir, when you're talking about these people." I said, "I'll use the word 'animal,' because that's what they are."

Just as with "bloodbath," Trump is being deliberately slippery with his language in order to drive outrage while having a fallback position. He and his defenders will say that his use of "animals" refers only to violent criminals who happen to be illegal immigrants. But come on. We're too smart to fall for this again.

(I notice he's using his weird sleepy singsong whisper voice in that clip. I wonder if there's a pattern to when he uses one voice vs. another.)

[N.E. Brigand]

Something else about that speech in Grand Rapids:

The sister of murder victim Ruby Garcia said she and her family were home watching live, in disbelief, as former President Donald Trump told an audience in Grand Rapids that he had spoken with “some of her family.”

“He did not speak with any of us, so it was kind of shocking seeing that he had said that he had spoke with us, and misinforming people on live TV,” Ruby Garcia’s sister, Mavi Garcia, told Target 8.

Mavi Garcia, the family spokesperson, said neither Trump nor anybody from his campaign has contacted her or anybody in her immediate family. She said her family is close and she would know if that had happened.

“It was shocking. I kind of stopped watching it. I’d only seen up to that, after I heard a couple of misinformations he said, I just stopped watching it,” Mavi Garcia said.

Trump spent some of his speech on Tuesday focusing on immigration, turning to the March 22 murder of 25-year-old Ruby Garcia. Court records show Brandon Ortiz-Vite, who was in the U.S. illegally, has confessed to killing her and dumping her along US-131 in Grand Rapids.

[N.E. Brigand]

I don't really have a problem with some progressives voting "uncommitted" to send a message to President Biden in a primary, as long as they're clear-eyed about what they're doing:

[N.E. Brigand]

Yes, Donald Trump really said (but presumably didn't mean to say) this:

[N.E. Brigand]

Nebraska's governor thinks presidential candidates pay too much attention to his state, and he wants to change that.

[N.E. Brigand]

Something else about that speech in Grand Rapids:

The sister of murder victim Ruby Garcia said she and her family were home watching live, in disbelief, as former President Donald Trump told an audience in Grand Rapids that he had spoken with “some of her family.” “He did not speak with any of us, so it was kind of shocking seeing that he had said that he had spoke with us, and misinforming people on live TV,” Ruby Garcia’s sister, Mavi Garcia, told Target 8.

Here's more about Donald Trump lying last night about having met with the family of a murdered woman in Michigan. Apparently a description of the victim that he implied he heard from the family was lifted from a New York Post article.

[N.E. Brigand]

ABC reports that Tulsi Gabbard of Hawai'i, the Democrat turned Independent (in 2022) who was a member of Congress from 2013 to 2021 and ran for president in 2019-2020, says she turned down an offer from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be his running mate.

Apparently Tulsi Gabbard is hoping to be Donald Trump's running mate, or to be appointed to a cabinet position in his administration should he win.

[N.E. Brigand]

Yikes! Is there "context" that explains why Donald Trump said this?

Edited to add: Hang on, that's not new [so I pulled the video insert, and removed the word "today," but I left the link above].

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Edited further to say: I should have paused to check before posting. Sorry about that. I still think it's worth noting that Donald Trump said that, but he said it six weeks ago while addressing the Black Conservative Federation in South Carolina. I believe other remarks from the same event were shared here, but not that part I linked above.

In the "new" (to me) part, Trump said, "Would you rather have the Black president or the white president who got $1.7 billion off the price?" After the crowd cheered, he added, "I think they want the white guy."

It turns out he was referring to the cost of Air Force One. He claims to have negotiated down the cost of new planes by $1.7 billion over the cost that was agreed to by Barack Obama's administration. And he's told that story before, albeit without the explicit references to race.

Mind you, it's a "Sir" story, which usually means that it's not true.

[N.E. Brigand]

I still think it's worth noting what Donald Trump said six weeks ago while addressing the Black Conservative Federation in South Carolina. ... "Would you rather have the Black president or the white president who got $1.7 billion off the price? ... I think they want the white guy."

He was referring to the cost of Air Force One. He claims to have negotiated down the cost of new planes by $1.7 billion over the cost that was agreed to by Barack Obama's administration. And he's told that story before, albeit without the explicit references to race. Mind you, it's a "Sir" story, which usually means that it's not true.

OK, so I vaguely remembered some of this.

As the President-elect in December 2016, Donald Trump tweeted: "Boeing is building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion. Cancel order!" And he said something similar in remarks to reporters later that day. Politifact reported on the figures at the time. The two Air Force One planes currently in use date to 1990 (having been ordered during Ronald Reagan's administration) and were intended to last about 30 years. In 2015, President Obama approved the purchase of new planes from Boeing, for delivery by 2024, with a total cost indeed approaching $4 billion, albeit the government would pay that out over twelve years. That would be about 0.04% of the $8.1 trillion defense budget over that period and about 0.3% of what was then Boeing's anticipated revenues of $1.1 trillion in that timeframe. And the costs were driven by federal government requirements, with no evidence of price-gouging by Boeing.

Trump later claimed that he got Boeing to cut the price by $1 billion, but this 2018 article published soon after he said that found that the $4 billion figure was still in the U.S. defense budget, although Boeing and the Air Force both told reporters that they were seeking to identify possible savings. However, per this report from CNBC in 2022, Trump did reach a deal with Boeing in 2018 that would require the company to absorb any cost overruns -- which apparently is contrary to the normal practice -- and by 2022 that had resulted in Boeing losing $1.1 billion. And Reuters reported that the project also has been delayed, so the planes won't be ready until 2026 or 2027.

So that's what happened. Trump didn't negotiate the price down from the $4 billion he complained about in December 2016. But he did negotiate to keep it from going higher than that. I wonder what Boeing got, or expected to get, in exchange for that. Boeing's CEO, Dave Calhoun, said about the Air Force One deal in 2022 that "I'm just going to call [it] a very unique moment, a very unique negotiation, a very unique set of risks that Boeing probably shouldn't have taken. But we are where we are, and we're going to deliver great airplanes. And we're going to recognize the costs associated with it."

Calhoun certainly didn't bring race into it!

Trump also did require that Air Force One adopt a new paint scheme, which he unveiled in 2019, that would make the planes look more like his own private jet. This would break with the color scheme the planes had since the early 1960s, but Trump said, "The baby blue doesn't fit with us." But the Associated Press reported in 2022 that President Biden had scrapped those plans because they were adding to the cost. This followed a report in Politico that the darker blue Trump wanted would have heated up faster than the light blue in the original plans.

[N.E. Brigand]

The Hill reports that the "Biden campaign posted its best grassroots fundraising month to date in March, breaking its own record for small-dollar donations for a fifth consecutive month." In addition, Biden's campaign "also saw its active email list double in size from the end of 2023 to the end of March in a sign of enthusiasm and growth among supporters."

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The Real Clear Politics average continues to show Donald Trump leading Joe Biden -- currently by 0.8% -- but as Josh Marshall notes here, Biden does seem to be slowly improving, although a new Wall Street Journal shows Biden trailing Trump in six of seven key swing states.

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Ryan Goodman notes that Donald Trump has been promoting a vigil for January 6th inmates held in the D.C. jail -- but 27 of those 29 inmates have been convicted for or charged with assaulting police officers.

Speaking of which, Karl Rove, the Republican activist who held a key role in George W. Bush's White House, today excoriated the insurrectionists as "thugs" and "sons of bitches." He goes on at some length in that video, in which he seems genuinely outraged, and says Democrats should hit Trump hard for his support of these criminals.

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The social media history of Ervin Lee Bolling, a Navy veteran who drove his SUV into a barricade at FBI headquarters in Atlanta on Monday and then tried to enter the premises on foot before being arrested, reveals someone steeped in Q-Anon and other far-right conspiracy theories who said he was "looking for a good militia to join." In December 2020, he wrote "I love you" when Donald Trump tweeted that the presidential election he'd lost had been stolen by Democrats.

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(Edited to add: I've noticed that people on social media who argue that President Biden is a warmonger while Donald Trump is a pacifist not only ignore that Biden cut Trump's (and Obama's) extensive use of drone strikes to nearly zero and Trump's calls to invade Mexico and Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan (including the airlift that saved more than 100,000 Afghans), but they also blame Biden for the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. (They're not aware of other wars, like that in Sudan, but if they were, they'd probably blame Biden for that too.)

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Until it was referenced today, I had forgotten that in August 2020, Donald Trump's niece, Mary Trump, shared a recording with the Washington Post of her late aunt, the retired judge Maryanne Trump Barry, saying that Donald "has no principles" and that "you can't trust him," and also revealing that she "did his homework for him" in high school and that "he got into the University of Pennsylvania because he had somebody take the exams."

[N.E. Brigand]

Pulling this from another thread:

I only sometimes agree with George Conway, but I agree with this take.

[George Conway on Twitter: "...If I were the New York Attorney General's office, I'm not I wouldn't be pleased with the Appellate Division's order cutting back Trump's bond to $175 million. The reason is that if Trump can actually bond that much of the judgment, then the State of New York is guaranteed the ability to collect at least that much if it wins the appeal—without having to send lawyers around the country chasing Trump’s assets down, which would be a time-consuming, costly, and difficult process. That of course assumes Trump can post the $175 million. But if he can’t, the State isn’t any worse off than it otherwise would have been—it would have to chase Trump around for the full amount."]

I don't always agree with George Conway either: he holds conservative positions that I oppose, and even where we agree (about Donald Trump and the rule of law), I think he sometimes gets out over his skis. However, since first encountering his public commentary, I have taken him as sincere. But during Donald Trump's presidency and for a while after, there were suggestions from both the left and right that Conway, the (now retired) lawyer and longtime Republican who was then married to Trump's advisor Kellyanne Conway, was just a grifter pretending to be opposed to Trump and that the Conways' publicly opposed positions were phony. (To the degree that I felt any inclination to be suspicious, I was assuaged when Liz Mair, another Republican with whom I often disagree but who has had the expensive honor of being sued by Devin Nunes, wrote circa 2019 that in fact the Conways' marriage was just as fraught and sad as it seemed to be.)

If George Conway's role in advising E. Jean Carroll that she probably had the makings of a successful civil case against Trump didn't convince those people otherwise, maybe this news reported this morning by Axios will do so: Conway "wrote a check for $929,600 — the maximum you can give to the Biden Victory Fund."

[N.E. Brigand]

Nebraska's governor thinks presidential candidates pay too much attention to his state, and he wants to change that.

For those who didn't click on that link: currently, Nebraska and Maine partially allocate their electoral votes by Congressional district, rather than using the statewide winner-take-all ("party block") method that most other states use. In Nebraska, which has five electoral votes, that means one vote for each of the three Congressional districts and two votes for the statewide winner. Nebraska has voted Republican overall for a while, but the state's second Congressional disrict, which includes Omaha, often votes Democratic, and thus in 2020, Donald Trump got four electoral votes and Joe Biden got one electoral vote from Nebraska.

But the district's representative in Congress is a Republican. In other words, it's a swing district, and thus there's a reason for presidential candidates to spend money in Nebraska, unlike reliably red states that Democrats ignore and reliably blue states that Republicans ignore.

And that one vote could be critical in a close presidential election, so Nebraska's governor wanted to change the state to a winner-take-all method in order to help Donald Trump. The state legislature voted on it today -- the same day that Republicans got a supermajority after a Democratic legislator switched parties -- but it failed. And while there's talk of trying again, based on today's results, I think it would just fail again: it was 8 yes vs. 36 no. (In other words, many Republicans joined Democrats in voting no.)

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Glad to hear that it failed so decisively. As you note, that one electoral college vote could be important. If Trump flips Arizona, Nevada and Georgia but fails to flip the other swing states Biden won (and doesn't lose in Florida or somewhere else he won in 2020), that one electoral college vote in Nebraska would give Biden exactly 270, the minimum amount needed.

[N.E. Brigand]

Donald Trump is playing the "bloodbath" game again, but this time it's "animals". The link above was comes from someone defending Trump by sharing "the full clip" of remarks he made in Michigan:

The 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia was barbarically murdered by an illegal alien animal. The Democrats say, "Please don't call them 'animals.' They're humans." I said, "No, they're not humans. They're not humans. They're animals." And Nancy Pelosi told me that. She said, "Please don't use the word 'animals,' sir, when you're talking about these people." I said, "I'll use the word 'animal,' because that's what they are."

Just as with "bloodbath," Trump is being deliberately slippery with his language in order to drive outrage while having a fallback position. He and his defenders will say that his use of "animals" refers only to violent criminals who happen to be illegal immigrants. But come on. We're too smart to fall for this again.

The Biden campaign has shared a clip of Donald Trump speaking Tuesday in Michigan as follows: "Democrats say, 'Please don't call them "animals." They're humans.' I said, 'No, they're not humans. They're not humans. They're animals.'"

As you can see by comparing it to my transcript above, that is a shortened but unaltered excerpt of Donald Trump's comments.

But Fox News host Harris Faulkner, after airing that clip from the Biden ad, claimed that it was misleadingly edited, so she played "what he actually said," as follows: "The 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia was barbarically murdered by an illegal alien animal. The Democrats say, 'Please don't call them "animals." They're humans.' I said, 'No, they're not humans. They're not humans. They're animals.'"

As you can see by comparing that to my transcript above, it's the same thing as the Biden campaign shared with the addition of the introduction about Laken Riley. In my opinion, the introduction doesn't make Trump's comments any better. And both the Biden campaign clip and the Fox News clips omit the rest of the statement, in which Trump repeats his statement that "they" are animals not humans. Who is "they"? Trump never says, but the Biden campaign did him a favor by not using that portion of his remarks.

Faulker then asks, "How in the world did they edit all those words together to even put something like what they have?" She notes that she started as an editor and says that what the Biden campaign has done here is "amazing." And then then she goes on to add, "What are they using? AI?"

What the hell?

[N.E. Brigand]

An supposedly independent and fairly well-funded organization called "No Labels" has been courting some more-or-less centrist politicians for a possible third-party 2024 campaign, which likely as not would probably split Democrats and help Donald Trump get back into the White House. This Puck News report includes a secretly recorded conversation in which one potential supporter was told that if she was bothered by the group taking money from billionaire Harlan Crow, "this isn't the place for you." That was just a few weeks before ProPublica broke the story about how Crow has been secretly providing lavish gifts to conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

No Labels has given up and will not be running a third-party presidential campaign this year. (Everyone they asked to be their candidate said no.)

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Good, except they might have run a candidate that drew more votes from Trump than Biden to counteract RFK, Jr. Cornell West, and Jill Stein. Or maybe not. The less white noise the better, says I.

[N.E. Brigand]

NBC reports on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. referring to January 6th insurrectionists as "activists" who have been "stripped of their Constitutional liberties," and that he might pardon them. This was in an email to his supporters. He also referred to Julian Assange as a "political prisoner" (while incorrectly referring to Assange as an "American citizen") and expressed support for longtime Moscow resident Edward Snowden.

It's a good article because it corrects RFK on several points and notes that most of those people who were jailed in connection with January 6th were violent. That said, there is a politically unaligned group to whom the support for Assange and Snowden will appeal (like my cousin, who says things like "Epstein didn't kill himself" and who voted for Jill Stein in 2016 and I think voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but who has already expressed support for RFK Jr. -- this was even after I pointed out that Kennedy has admitted flying on Epstein's plane). Has that group embraced the January 6th insurrectionists? I don't know.

Will statements like this encourage some Trump supporters to vote for RFK and some lukewarm Biden supporters to vote against him?

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Politico reports on surveys that find RFK Jr. appeals to about one in five Latino and Hispanic voters in Arizona and Nevada. One of many factors is "the Kennedy family history with Cesar Chávez," the hugely influential labor leader who rose to prominence in the 1960s. Chávez died in 1993. As Californians on this forum will know, his birthday five days ago is a state holiday there. It may be notable that last week, Chávez's family demanded that RFK stop using his image in campaign ads and "formally endorsed President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign." Also, "one of César Chávez’s granddaughters, Julie Rodriguez Chavez, serves as Biden’s 2024 campaign manager."

Still, presumably with the news from Politico in mind, President Biden is being (has been?) interviewed today by Enrique Acevedo of the Spanish-language Univision channel.

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Frank Donatelli, who chaired the Republican National Committee in 2008, opines in The Hill on how the RNC in Trump's hands "isn't built to win, but only to protect himself."

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A new Marquette poll finds that over the past month, independents moved from preferring Donald Trump over President Biden by a 54%-43% split to preferring Biden over Trump 53%-46%. Thus Biden now leads Trump 52%-48% among all likely voters (tied among registered voters), a flip from how things stood a month before. (Margin of error: +/-4.9%.)

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I appreciate this CNBC report: "Joe Biden says the U.S. economy is the world's best. Donald Trump calls it a 'cesspool.' The data is clear." Although I wish they move this sub-hed up: "By the numbers, Biden is correct: America's economy is stronger than that of other developed nations."

U.S. gross domestic product grew 2.5% in 2023, significantly outpacing that of other developed economies, according to a January report from the International Monetary Fund. The IMF projected that the U.S. will hold that lead in 2024, though it expects the rate to come down to 2.1%.

Two other large advanced economies, Canada and Germany, lagged with 2023 GDP growth at 1.1% and negative 0.3%, respectively. “The U.S. economy is leading the way for the global economy. It’s driving the global economic train,” Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi told CNBC.

As economists watch U.S. inflation’s wobbly descent, the numbers still remain hot in developed economies worldwide. In Canada, for example, the consumer price index rose 3.9% in 2023 while in Germany, the inflation rate was 5.9%. Countries calculate inflation differently, which makes direct comparisons difficult. But Zandi said that even adjusting for the calculation discrepancies, the U.S. still looks good on the inflation front. “Using the same methodology as let’s say the European Union, the Fed’s already at target, inflation is already below 2%,” he said.

That said, Frank Luntz, the conservative pollster I criticized the other day, shared that CNBC story. So maybe it's bad?

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The Wall Street Journal poll from a few days ago that found Donald Trump leading Joe Biden in most swing states also found, in an echo of responses we've seen before over the past year, that people feel that their own state is doing well economically but that the nation as a whole is struggling.



Maybe the polls should include questions about specific other states? By a 30-point margin, Arizonans think Arizona is doing well. How do they think New Mexico or Utah or Nevada or California are doing? Or if they respond that the nation as a whole is doing poorly, maybe follow up with a request for the five states they think are doing the worst?

(Here's something I hadn't read before: people behave similiarly as regards crime, education, and health care: they say it's good in their area but terrible nationally. Curiously, people's perceptions of crime tracked with reality until about 2001: after that, as crime rates continued to drop, people believed they were rising.)

[N.E. Brigand]

California has an open primary system for most offices in which the top two candidates regardless of party advance to the general election. Something that's apparently never happened before happened in California's 16th Congressional district: there was a tie for second place, so three candidates, all Democrats, will compete in November:

38,489 Sam Liccardo
30,249 Joe Simitian
30,249 Evan Low