The (no longer) much too early 2024 election thread

[RoseMorninStar]

I think where most media is concerned we have to be prepared to take the Rupert Murdoch view; it's not blue or red, it's green that the media/'news' outlets are interested in. And what sells? Anger, resentment, rage, grievance. A different sort of Shock & Awe.

[N.E. Brigand]

Perhaps the positive economic news (and maybe even the brief cease fire in the Middle-east) is having a positive effect. Who the hell knows?

[Simon Rosenberg tweet noting four poll results this week:
Biden 44 - Trump 42 (Economist/YouGov)
Biden 43 - Trump 42 (Morning Consult)
Biden 39 - Trump 37 (YouGov)
Biden 37 - Trump 35 (Leger/Canadian Press)]

A lot of undecided voters in those polls, though. Matt Yglesias observes that these Biden-friendly poll results don't seem to be getting as much media attention as the Trump-friendly poll results in prior weeks. I think that's true. I hadn't heard of any of these four results until just before you posted about the most recent one today, but I'd heard lots about the polls earlier this month. His take is that "it's not an ideological bias against Biden or in favor of Trump — it's just that stories that are better for traffic get more coverage ... [and] by the same token, Trump winning is better for traffic." One riposte I've seen to arguments of this sort is that it's not the reporters and editors but the publishers who most, but I dunno. The working journalists don't want to lose their jobs.

As for why the polls may be showing movement in Biden's direction, I'll take it whatever the cause, but not only would I like to know the reason but also the answer to the bigger mystery of why they were against him for so long despite the rosy economy and generally good state of affairs in this country. Yglesias also shared some arguments that voters are just very slow to react to economic improvement and that they're forgetful:

"Present random strangers with unmarked versions of these graphs and ask them to identify when the Trump boom began:"



The headline of the column from which Yglesias took that suggestion is "Donald Trump Was President In 2020. It's true, I assure you!"

And of course we've seen other variations on this point for years now. Here's another example from 2018:



It almost seems like overkill. Everybody already knows all that, right?

And yet, in response to other pundits making this point, I see people asking, "Do you blame normal people for wishing for the vibes of 2016-2019 to return?" and arguing that "the whole story" of the 2024 election will be voters deciding "2016-2019 or 2020-2023 ... which period did you like better"?

The inspiration for the essay was the argument by conservative columnist Byron York that Donald Trump can win with the message, "Things were good when I was president. Everything went to hell when Joe Biden became president. Elect me and I'll make things good again."

I mean, sure, 2016 was decent. And 2020 was awful. But Barack Obama was president for all of 2016 and Donald Trump was president for all of 2020!

But York may be right that this could work if Democrats don't hammer home the points of that essay: "Donald Trump was president in 2020, and it had a significant, lasting, negative impact on life in America. To buttress my assertion that Donald Trump was president in 2020, I’d point you to the White House Historical Association, or various elementary school classroom walls, all of which will affirm that Donald J. Trump was president from 2017-2021, a span of time that includes the year 2020, as can be verified with basic counting. ..."

2020 was the year the novel coronavirus escaped China and began to spread in the western hemisphere. The Chinese government bears primary responsibility for failing to contain the outbreak or adequately warn the world of the risk that it could explode into a global pandemic. But other governments had important roles to play as well. They could have pressured China to be more transparent about the virus, or offered international assistance to contain and hopefully eradicate it; they could have warned their own publics that a highly contagious virus was likely to become epidemic, so that people could adequately prepare; they could’ve assisted in those preparations with emergency policy before whole swaths of society were stricken and paralyzed.

What Donald Trump did instead, as head of the U.S. government in 2020, was more or less the opposite. He praised Chinese Premier Xi Jinping in glowing terms, lied to the U.S. public about the COVID-19 risk, and geared policy toward reducing the appearance of risk so that the stock market would not collapse (though, of course, it did anyhow), because in Trump’s mind, a bear stock market meant electoral doom.

It seems so dumb to have to repeat all that basic information (and the essay naturally gives a lot more specifics about how Donald Trump's actions in 2020 wrecked people's lives), but many ordinary people don't have time to keep track of even the simplest political facts. I was shooting the breeze with a very smart colleague on a break yesterday. She's probably an independent-minded Democrat on the rare occasions that she thinks of such things. She works in our finance department and was looking ahead to when we file our annual form 990. We got to talking about how charitable registration is managed by the states not the federal government, and I noted how Donald Trump's charity had been shut down by the state of New York, and somehow that led to a moment in which I remarked that Trump eventually could be in serious trouble for having taken classified documents home.

She'd only vaguely heard of that, and she replied to this effect: "Don't all politicians do that? Didn't Hillary Clinton have classified information on her private server?"

In general, my coworker doesn't like it when one side gets blamed. She doesn't like "finger-pointing". (This had also been the subject of a work conversation we had about some minor kerfuffle here.) And even if I wanted to, I don't know how I could convince her that one side really has committed most of the wrongdoing.

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Some more useful Biden economic stats here, including the fact that even if you start counting only in July 2022, when the unemployment rate had returned to the best level of Donald Trump's presidency, Joe Biden still beats Donald Trump in average monthly job creation, and that's only counting Trump's presidency pre-pandemic. In other words, in this comparison, Donald Trump gets no blame for what happened during the pandemic, and Joe Biden gets no credit for the pandemic recovery. And yet Biden still leads overwhelmingly: with 287,000 jobs added per month from July 2022 to October 2023, as opposed to 182,000 jobs added per month from February 2017 to February 2020. That's 58% better!

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In notable campaign rhetoric: Today Donald Trump wrote, "I have done more for Black people than any other president (Lincoln?)".

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In an essay titled "We don't see Trump riding a bike," Aaron Rupar notes how Fox News really played up Joe Biden's age over the past week. The following are search results from just two days at Fox News:



The New York Post last week had a story that worked hard to try and generate some scandal around the president's holiday plans, but the title, which was "President Biden and son Hunter take Thanksgiving ‘polar plunge’ in frigid Nantucket waters," and the picture in the article, which I embed below, of Biden after his dip in the 48-degree (Fahrenheit) Atlantic waters undermine those efforts, I think.

[RoseMorninStar]

Love the photo!

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[N.E. Brigand]

O brother, who art thou?

Forbes reports on "Why Cornel West Is Broke," explaining that "new uncovered divorce filings reveal allegations of a 'secret life' and help explain why" the philosopher, political activist, and 2024 presidential candidate, "who has earned millions of dollars over the years, has hardly anything left."

West lived in a Four Seasons condo in Boston, which he later admitted he could not afford, and rode around in a Mercedes or Cadillac. One of his four ex-wives accused West of maintaining a covert apartment in Boston for $5,000 a month to use as a love den. She also alleged that, despite not having any health conditions, he later took a medical leave from his job at Harvard to live a “secret life” with another woman in New Mexico.

In court documents filed in 2002 and 2003, West did not deny burning money on affairs, at least one of which produced a child. (He acknowledged he had an 18-month-old daughter at the time.) And in his 2009 memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, West confirms some of the less-salacious details. But when asked in November to respond to claims he’d “hid or wasted” close to a million dollars, at least some of which went to support extramarital affairs, West offered via email that “The allegations were too ridiculous to attend to–then and now, my brother!” He did not respond to a follow-up inquiry that detailed his ex-wife’s specific allegations.

[RoseMorninStar]

WTH?

[N.E. Brigand]

Axios has obtained the questionnaire that Donald Trump's campaign has been using to screen potential members of a future Trump administration in order to ensure that the government is staffed with only his hardcore loyalists.

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The White House today issued this statement from President Biden noting that thanks to the efforts of Democratic governor Roy Cooper, North Carolina has just become the 40th state to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, which will enable 600,000 more residents of that state to get health coverage. Republicans would like to undo that, of course, and Donald Trump just last week said that would be one of the goals of his second presidency.

As USA Today reports here, tens of millions of Americans have lost their Medicaid coverage this year after emergency federal protections enacted during the pandemic expired, enabling states to kick people off their plans.

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Ron DeSantis's campaign and a key PAC supporting him continue to be at odds with another.

And speaking of DeSantis, last night on Fox News, Sean Hannity moderated a 90-minute debate between DeSantis and California's governor Gavin Newsom. Despite Hannity apparently having let DeSantis get away with breaking several rules to which the two men had agreed, the general consensus seems to be that Newsom won. The clips I saw -- possibly unrepresentative -- all showed Newsom firmly in control of the conversation. I laughed at the way he ended his opening statement, noting that what he and DeSantis have most in common is that neither of them will be their party's nominee for president in 2024.

And more about DeSantis: he has called for Christian Ziegler, the chair of Florida's Republican party, to step down following the allegations I mentioned here.

[N.E. Brigand]

David Frum: "You aren't worried enough ... the government cannot function with an indicted or convicted criminal as its head. The president would be an outlaw, or on his way to becoming an outlaw. For his own survival, he would have to destroy the rule of law."

He's right. People haven't thought through the consequences of a new Trump presidency. As Frum notes, it will be a disaster even before it begins. "By Election Day 2024, Donald Trump will be in the thick of multiple criminal trials. It’s not impossible that he may already have been convicted in at least one of them. If he wins the election, Trump will commit the first crime of his second term at noon on Inauguration Day: His oath to defend the Constitution of the United States will be a perjury." And there will be no one to restrain him this time. He won't again make the "mistake" of hiring (or retaining) some competent and principled people in a second administration. They will all be focused on making him dictator.

[N.E. Brigand]

"Ron DeSantis Says He Has 'Moved On' And Disney Should Drop its Lawsuit Against Him"

I hope the Disney's response is "hahaha, no."

So it appears to be.

Tweet thread:

DeSantis asked Disney to move on. Disney isn't moving on. Here are some allegations regarding DeSantis from counterclaim filed yesterday:

9. On March 9, 2022, the then-CEO of The Walt Disney Company (Disney’s parent company), called Governor DeSantis to express the company’s concern. Governor DeSantis recounts telling Disney’s then-CEO, “‘You shouldn’t get involved[;] it’s not going to work out well for you.’”

11. On March 29, 2022, Governor DeSantis said that he thought The Walt Disney Company’s March 28, 2022 statement had “crossed the line” and pledged “to make sure we’re fighting back” in response to Disney’s protected speech.

13. On April 20, 2022, the Senate passed Senate Bill 4C, which was later adopted by the House and signed by Governor DeSantis. House sponsor Representative Randy Fine said to the Florida House State Affairs Committee: “You got me on one thing, this bill does target one company. It targets The Walt Disney Company.” Senator Joe Gruters said, “Disney is learning lessons and paying the political price of jumping out there on an issue.”

108. The District cannot make that showing here. The legislative declaration purporting to abrogate the Contracts was not enacted for any non-arbitrary or reasonable state interest. Nor was Senate Bill 1604. They were instead enacted to further an official State campaign of retaliation against Disney for expressing a viewpoint that Governor DeSantis and his legislative allies disagree with.

115. The District’s actions were motivated by retaliatory intent. On April 17, Governor DeSantis warned that the District would be meeting a few days later to “make sure Disney is held accountable.” Later that day, Governor DeSantis announced, “I look forward to the additional actions that the state control board will implement in the upcoming days.” He also said that he had worked with “both leaders of the House and Senate” on a “bill that will be put out in the Florida legislature that will make sure” that the Contracts “are revoked.”

I didn't realize until today that Bridget Ziegler was one of the six people that Ron DeSantis appointed this year to the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, the organization that was created by Florida's legislature in February to punish Disney for being gay-friendly.

[N.E. Brigand]

Miami Herald: "China-backed DeSantis donor hires top GOP lobbyist, foreign ties not disclosed."

[N.E. Brigand]

What effect will this have on election coverage, I wonder?

Former Trump administration officials Steve Bannon and Kash Patel said on Bannon's podcast that a new Trump administration would see to it that media figures are prosecuted for their reporting on Trump's scandals.

Will this prompt the media to take seriously the concerns about what Donald Trump will do to this country -- to focus, as one media critic has suggested, on the "stakes" rather than the "odds" of a Trump victory?

Or will it make the media afraid to report on Trump, lest they be punished if he wins?

[N.E. Brigand]

Mark Esper, who was Secretary of Defense under Donald Trump from July 2019 until November 2020, today reminded people that Trump wanted the military to shoot protesters in the streets in 2020 and warned that if returned to the White House, Trump will "be able to enact his policy of revenge that he’s been talking about and retribution. And look, it’s quite a dangerous time for our democracy if that were to happen."

[N.E. Brigand]

I appreciate Semafor election reporter Dave Weigel's pop culture references:

[Voronwë the Faithful]

This high quality polling among young voters (18-29) shows two things. 1) reports of Biden's weakness among young voters against Trump were overstated; but 2) reports that RFK Jr. would hurt Trump more than Biden were wrong, at least among this demographic.

[N.E. Brigand]

Speaking of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., tonight he acknowledged on Fox News that he flew twice on Jeffrey Epstein's plane in the 1990s because "my wife had some sort of relationship with Ghislaine Maxwell."

Now I don't actually think that everyone, or even most people, who were guests of Epstein and/or Maxwell were involved in the pair's illicit activities. Epstein and Maxwell liked to cultivate a circle of rich friends, whom they used in a variety of ways.

That would be the second of RFK Jr.'s three wives, by the way. The details from Wikipedia are rather sad:

Richardson married Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on April 15, 1994, aboard a research vessel on the Hudson River. They had four children. On May 12, 2010, Kennedy filed for divorce from Richardson. Three days later, she was arrested and charged with driving under the influence. She reportedly struggled with alcoholism and substance abuse. A court ordered that full temporary custody of her children be granted to her estranged husband. On May 16, 2012, Richardson was found dead at her home in Bedford, New York. Her death was ruled a suicide by hanging. An autopsy revealed that she had antidepressants in her blood. Her funeral, organized by the Kennedy family, was held at St. Patrick Catholic Church in Bedford. On May 21, 2012, a memorial service organized by the Richardson family was held at the Standard Hotel in Manhattan. A legal battle between her widower and her brother, Thomas W. Richardson, ensued over which family should have control over her remains.

She was 52 when she died.

[N.E. Brigand]

Mark Esper, who was Secretary of Defense under Donald Trump from July 2019 until November 2020, today reminded people that Trump wanted the military to shoot protesters in the streets in 2020 and warned that if returned to the White House, Trump will "be able to enact his policy of revenge that he’s been talking about and retribution. And look, it’s quite a dangerous time for our democracy if that were to happen."

Presumably responding to this concern or others like it, Sean Hannity said to Donald Trump on a Fox News event tonight: "Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?"

And Trump replied, "Except for day one. I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill."

Hannity asked for further clarification, and Trump said, "He says you're not going to be a dictator, are you? I said no, no, no, other than day one. We're closing the border, and we're drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I'm not a dictator."

Now this was presented in a somewhat jocular way, but I think it's clear that Trump is testing the waters to see how much he can get away with.

[N.E. Brigand]

Sean Hannity returned to the topic later in the broadcast, and this was the result:



I think the odds are greater than 50% that Trump will share Capone's fate, but what the hell?

[N.E. Brigand]

In a special election today for a Florida statehouse seat, the Republican won by 6.2%.

Hillary Clinton won in that district by 10% in 2016, but Trump won it by 17% in 2020 and Ron DeSantis won it by 37% in 2022. Still, there was less than 8% turnout, so it's hard to reach much into this swing.

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Meanwhile in Minnesota, the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party candidate (the DFL is Minnesota's "Democratic affiliated" party, mostly replacing true Democrats in that state) defeated her Republican opponent for a special election by 17%, but that was actually an 11% swing toward the Republican in that district.

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Returning to Florida, a state appeals court there yesterday overturned a lower court's ruling against Ron DeSantis's preferred maps ("despite his own admission it diminished Black voting power"), and while the plaintiffs are appealing to Florida's supreme court, most observers seem skeptical that they can prevail, so Republicans are unlikely to lose a seat.

[N.E. Brigand]

In a special election today for a Florida statehouse seat, the Republican won by 6.2%.

Hillary Clinton won in that district by 10% in 2016, but Trump won it by 17% in 2020 and Ron DeSantis won it by 37% in 2022. Still, there was less than 8% turnout, so it's hard to reach much into this swing.

Ugh. Today (!) news broke that the victorious candidate, David Redondo, only sort of lives in his district, because last summer he purchased a "two-bedroom luxury, waterfront condominium for $950,000" that (a) is 20 miles outside of his district and (b) whose 30-year mortgage includes a requirement that Redondo live there for a full year. He also just bought an apartment in his district a few days ago. So either he has to violate the terms of his mortgage or he won't be living in his district.

[narya]

Or he could get his house gerrymandered into his district.