The (no longer) much too early 2024 election thread

[N.E. Brigand]

Pennsylvania's primaries were held today, along with a state legislature special election. In the latter, the Republican won by 19% in a district that Donald Trump carried by 28%. Meanwhile, the state's "Squad" member, Rep. Summer Lee from Pittsburgh, held off a centrist primary challenger by 61%-39%. And statewide, with about 75% of the vote in, Joe Biden has 93% in the Democratic presidential primary and Donald Trump has 83% in the Republican presidential primary.

That's right, even though Nikki Haley withdrew from the race before Pennsylvania began mailing out absentee ballots, she's currently got 17% of the vote and more than 128,000 votes. And these are closed primaries, so there should be no party crossover today. In 2020, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by about 81,000 votes. How many of these Haley voters will stay home rather than vote for Trump in seven months? (The 7% of Pennsylvania Democrats who voted against Biden today picked Dean Phillips, who also dropped out of the race over a month ago, when he endorsed Biden.)

[RoseMorninStar]

Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) has been putting out a lot of ads. Polls indicate a dead heat (what an odd phrase meaning 50/50) among those who say are certain to vote. She has a 5 point lead among registered voters.

[N.E. Brigand]

Donald Trump leads President Biden in seven of eight possible swing states, per a new Morning Consult poll for Bloomberg, with Pennsylvania the only exception.

Edited to fix link. (This one was wrong.)

[Voronwë the Faithful]

That's disappointing but we are still a long ways away.

[N.E. Brigand]

Yes, but after a couple weeks in which Biden seemed to be slowly improving, today is rough for him. Besides the polls mentioned above, Pew has Donald Trump leading President Biden nationally 49%-48%, and Quinnipiac, which Biden led in each of the past three months, now has him tied with Trump. In the latter poll, they remain tied even with third party candidates in the race (there does seem to be a trend lately in which RFK is starting to pull as much from Trump as from Biden). A new YouGov / Economist poll also finds the candidates tied (unchanged from last month). A tie in the popular vote is almost certainly a win for Trump.

[N.E. Brigand]

Today in The Daily Beast: "Trump is using a GOP compliance firm as a go-between [from five PACs] to pay lawyers, allowing him to hide who he's actually paying. Experts have real questions whether he can do that." Allison Gill points out (citing a 2022 Washington Post article) that this company, Red Curve, offered former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson a job while she was being interviewed by the January 6th Committee.

Edited to add that as I was writing that, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who had a key role in planning Donald Trump's overpriced but underproduced 2017 presidential inauguration and then was a senior advisor to First Lady Melania Trump for about a year, noted that Red Curve "audited" the inauguration committee's finances. Those are her scare quotes. She says that Allen Weisselberg knows more about this.

[N.E. Brigand]

Today, 538.com launched its 2024 presidential polling average, which shows Donald Trump leading President Biden nationally by 0.7 points. That's improved by about 1.5 points from a month ago. Trump currently leads Biden in most swing states.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

There is something really wrong about having 538.com without Nate Silver.

[N.E. Brigand]

Yesterday Politico reported that two sources told them the reason the New York Times ran so many stories about President Biden's age following the release of Special Counsel Robert Hur's report, and the reason the Times in general has taken an oddly harsh perspective of Biden, is that the publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, is upset that the president hasn't sat down for an extended interview at the paper for years. The Times denied this reporting.

In other news, President Biden is currently being interviewed by "shock jock" radio host Howard Stern. I don't have a subscription to the satellite service that carries Stern's show but an AP reporter says the interview "so far is very biographical. Biden recalls that 'I was a jerk in law school' and that initially, he 'didn't take it seriously enough' -- for instance, he didn't buy textbooks until the middle of the semester." In 2016, Hillary Clinton declined to be interviewed on Stern's show, which Stern naturally claimed was a factor in her eventual loss. (I don't know if Stern interviewed Donald Trump during that campaign.)

[N.E. Brigand]

In an interview this morning, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said:

(1) He has turned down multiple requests from Donald Trump's campaign to be Trump's running mate this year.

(2) He thinks that abortion medication hasn't been studied enough to be deemed safe for use.

[RoseMorninStar]

I don't have satellite service/don't listen to Howard Stern's show, but from interviews I've seen, he's gone through therapy and he's not quite the 'shock jock' he once was.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., on the other hand...

[Frelga]

There is something really wrong about having 538.com without Nate Silver.

They weren't exactly right with him, either. Except that one year.

[N.E. Brigand]

This probably won't make sense to casual readers without some explanation:



That would be South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, viewed by some as a possible running mate for Donald Trump, and rumored at one point to have been dating sometime Trump advisor Corey Lewandowski. Today the Guardian published an excerpt from an upcoming memoir by Noem in which the governor, apparently trying to show that she can make the tough decisions, talks about her decision to shoot a 14-month old dog she owned that she says was dangerous and untrainable.

Edited three days later to note that Noem has been sharing this story for a while.

[N.E. Brigand]

Donald Trump's former Attorney General Bill Barr was interviewed tonight on CNN, during which time a chyron noted that Barr "says Trump shouldn't be near the Oval Office, but says he'll vote for him in November."

Barr also said that he did indeed hear Trump, as president, suggest on multiple occasions that he should have people killed.

[Sunsilver]

N.E., that is pretty damn scary!

What have we come to, that so many people are willing to vote for a man who says we should have people killed?
I hate to draw a comparison to Hitler, but that's certainly the first thing that comes to mind.

I was reading a sample of Mary Trump's book recently, which was published in 2020. She says if Trump is elected a second time, she believes that will be the last election in the United States. And, of course, many others have said Trump wants to establish a dictatorship.

[N.E. Brigand]

"Donald Trump Has Never Sounded Like This. No major American presidential candidate has talked like he now does at his rallies — not Richard Nixon, not George Wallace, not even Donald Trump himself."

That's the headline of a new analysis in The New York Times by a reporter who attended seven Trump rallies in the past six months. It opens on Super Tuesday with supporters gathered at Mar-a-Lago. ("'It's not quite Versailles,' a county party chairman mused aloud, 'but it's the closest thing we have here.'") Trump won 14 contests that night, but his speech was very dark, and afterwards, his associate, the convicted criminal Roger Stone, told reporters: "This will be our last election unless we elect Donald Trump." The reporter compares Trump's 2024 speech to that he gave after winning on Super Tuesday in 2016, and he notes two different quotes as emblematic of the change:

[2016]: This has been an amazing period of time. It's been amazing for me, even from an educational standpoint, and I think honestly we've done something that almost nobody thought could be done. And I'm very proud of it. And I just want to leave you with this: I am a unifier.

[2024]: Our cities are choking to death. Our states are dying. And frankly, our country is dying. And we're going to make America great again, greater than ever before. Thank you very much. It’s been a big night.

Then he notes that political scientists who used to be chary of describing Trump as a fascist -- they likened him rather to a populist like Juan Peron -- no longer feel that reluctance. I would add about that Stone quote: most of what Trump and his acolytes say is projection of their own desires.

[N.E. Brigand]

I didn't realize that NBC reporter Kelly O'Donnell is the president of the White House Correspondents' Association, whose annual gala dinner was tonight. I remember O'Donnell when she was a local reporter here in Cleveland back in the early 1990s.

President Biden spoke at the event: "Of course, the 2024 election's in full swing, and yes, age is an issue: I'm a grown man running against a six-year-old." After noting Donald Trump's recent bizarre speech about Gettsyburg, Biden said: "Age is the only thing we have common. For instance, my vice president endorses me." He also said that Trump has endured "stormy weather" over the past couple weeks.

I liked this joke: "Being here is a reminder that folks think what is going on in Congress is political theater. That is not true. If Congress were theater, they'd have thrown out Lauren Boebert a long time ago."

[N.E. Brigand]

Four years ago yesterday, Donald Trump threatened to block states and citie swith Democratic governors and mayors from receiving Covid-19 relief funds.

[N.E. Brigand]

The Arizona Republican Party yesterday elected as its co-chairs Liz Harris, a former state representative who was expelled from her office by her colleagues (in a 46-13 vote) for having used her position to promote 2020 election conspiracy theories, and sitting state senator Jake Hoffman, who was charged last week with nine felonies for having been a phony 2020 elector.

Also yesterday, the Arizona GOP voted to censure former Vice President Mike Pence and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. Apparently for not endorsing Donald Trump. In other words, Republicans are doubling down on the crazy.

And it may be working! A new poll finds Donald Trump nine points ahead of President Biden.

Even though Trump is a criminal and Biden is not.

- - - - - - - - - -
Edited to note that CBS also has a poll out today, but only of three swing states, with Trump leading narrowly in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Biden leading narrowly in Michigan. What's most telling about the poll is this question:



That's right: in 2020, only 36% or less of residents in those three states rated the economy as good.

But looking back, 62% now say the economy under President Trump was good, apparently preferring to forget the last year of his term.

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

[N.E. Brigand]

Contra this piece, saving democracy is in fact a responsibility of journalism, and the statement that "Journalism is about observing bad things happening, not trying to stop them" is wrong, unless journalists seriously think their job is to sign their own death warrants. (Most of them will be killed if fascism takes hold in the U.S.)