The (no longer) much too early 2024 election thread

[N.E. Brigand]

There was a story in the past few days about Republican officials in Florida crafting a plan for the state to pay for some of Donald Trump's legal bills. I didn't look up the specifics, but Ron DeSantis, the state's governor who last week dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Trump, says he would veto any such member.

Speaking of DeSantis, today there was reporting that because his wife Casey refused to fly commercial, his campaign spent $1.6 million on private flights, which is more than the DeSantis campaign spent on TV advertising.

[N.E. Brigand]

David Corn notes something I hadn't seen mentioned before:

After winning the Republican primary in New Hampshire on Tuesday night, Donald Trump took the stage at his victory celebration and delivered a rambling speech in which he repeatedly denigrated Nikki Haley, who he had hired to be his UN ambassador when he was president. He did not offer thanks to any specific person. He did not mention his top campaign advisers. He did not express appreciation to anyone on his New Hampshire team. He did not refer to any member of his family. (His wife Melania did not appear with him.) But he did namecheck two supporters in attendance: Steve Wynn and John Paulson.

As Corn notes, Wynn is a casino magnate and was the finance chair of the Republican National Committee in 2017-2018 until the Wall Street Journal "published a blockbuster article citing dozens of people saying that Wynn had 'sexualized his workplace and pressured workers to perform sex acts.'" This led to both the Nevada and Massachusetts gaming commissions fining Wynn's companies for covering up his behavior. Wynn also was sued by the Justice Dept. in 2021 in an attempt to force him to file as a foreign agent for his prior work on behalf of Chinese dissident billionaire (and Steve Bannon funder) Guo Wengui, who was arrested last year on fraud charges. A judge dismissed the case on the grounds that DOJ couldn't require someone to register retroactively.

[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.

Jeff DeWit says that he wasn't bribing Kari Lake: he was telling her that if she dropped out of the 2022 Senate race, he would see to it that she got financial backing from major donors for another run at Arizona's governorship in 2024.

One clear revelation from this story is that anyone who has met with Lake over the past few years should assume she recorded their conversation.

[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.

President Biden wasn't on the ballot because after 2020, Democrats decided that it was time for the early primaries to more closely reflect the demographic makeup of the nation. (But they also were rewarding South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn.) Here's an example of what the New Hampshire Democratic primary ballot yesterday looked liked:



That's right: there were 21 candidates to choose from! Or you could write in an alternative at the bottom.

Despite that (self-inflicted) limitation, Biden got a higher percentage of the New Hampshire Democratic primary vote than Donald Trump got of the New Hampshire Republican primary vote. As V noted earlier: on the Republican side, with 95% of the votes in, Donald Trump has 54.3% of the vote and Nikki Haley has 43.3%. On the Democratic side, 95% of the votes are also in, and Joe Biden has 55.8% to Dean Phillips's 19.5%. In addition, there are some 11,859 write-in votes still to be counted. That's 10.1% of the total. Joe Biden has been winning 89.8% of the write-in vote so far, so if that continues, he'll end up with 64.8% of the total.

It should be noted that because turnout was very high on the Republican side, and because there were only two candidates remaining at such at an early point in the campaign, Donald Trump received more votes (nearly 175,000) than any prior candidate had done in the New Hampshire primary. And Nikki Haley received more votes than any non-winning candidate had ever gotten before.

Edited to add: While I was writing that, the results were updated, and I was a little off:

63.6% -- Joe Biden (write-in)
19.8% -- Dean Phillips
4.1% -- Marianne Williamson
3.9% -- Nikki Haley (write-in)*
1.7% -- Donald Trump (write-in)*
1.3% -- Derek Nadeau
1.2% -- "Ceasefire" (write-in)
0.7% -- Vermin Supreme
0.6% -- John Vail
0.4% -- Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (write-in)
And 2.8% was spread among twenty or so others.

*Yes, this is the Democratic primary, despite the appearance of Haley and Trump here.

[N.E. Brigand]

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

The UAW's president, Shawn Fain, went on Fox News to explain why Joe Biden is better than Donald Trump for workers:

[narya]

Seven of the candidates listed above on the NH ballot are also on the California ballot. Here's a statement by each of them, plus one for Biden: https://voterguide.sos.ca.gov/candidate ... ements.htm

[N.E. Brigand]

Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota is the only serious Democratic challenger to Joe Biden's candidacy this year, but it's not clear to me what he stands for. Most of his policy positions are similar to Joe Biden's. He's a little more centrist, I guess. He's had some support from Republicans donors. But as you can see above, he got fewer than one-third the number of votes that Biden got even though Biden wasn't on the ballot. I've been very skeptical of Phillips's motivation, but to his credit, he is tamping down a rumor that's been spreading wildly on social media which flat out claims that Phillips won Tuesday, a claim which he properly says is "shameful and absolutely untrue."

[RoseMorninStar]

Contrary to what one might garner by watching the news, Biden is pretty centrist. Anyone 'more centrist' would have to lean right/what used to be taken for Republican. There's an article in the NYT on Phillips and his 'No Labels' bid.

There is some polling,, and this, but one can find polling that supports the opposite view. It really depends upon the questions asked. This page has a lot of interesting data, but I'm not sure how to interpret it.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

So far as I can tell, Phillips sole qualification is that he is younger than Biden.

[N.E. Brigand]

Liberal commentator Will Stancil, quote tweeting an example, today wrote, "One neat thing that's cropping up on this site is how many people are explicitly saying liberals will be killed after Trump is re-elected," and I would add that it's not unique to Twitter. Reading some Youtube comments on the Carroll-Trump trial today, I saw one from an apparent Trump supporter about how Trump's detractors would be swinging from lamp posts in 2025.

[N.E. Brigand]

Donald Trump's attorney Alina Habba tonight said this in a Fox News interview about Trump's appeal of the Colorado ruling that bars him from appearing on the ballot:

"I think it should be a slam dunk in the Supreme Court. I have faith in them. You know, people like Kavanaugh, who the president fought for, who the president went through hell to get into place. He'll step up."

She went on to say that the justices will support Trump because the law is on his side, but what?! Aren't there rules about a client's lawyer not saying a judge should rule for her client because the client has done favors for the judge?

Here's a link to a nifty amicus brief filed in the case of Donald Trump's Constitutional eligibility. I wasn't very familiar with what the authors, Akhil Reed Amar and Vikram David Amar, call the "First Insurrection" of the 1860s: efforts in late 1860-early 1861 to prevent Abraham Lincoln from being inaugurated and to let federal forts fall into the hands of the southern states, but Amar and Amar show that those events were still well known to Congress in 1868 when the Fourteenth Amendment was being ratified. I had never before heard of John B. Floyd, who was Secretary of War (what we now call Secretary of Defense) under Lincoln's predecessor James Buchanan, but in March 1861, Floyd was being described in Congress as "a man who goes down to everlasting infamy, with Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, and all the traitors who have gone before him." And when Ulysses S. Grant wrote his memoirs some twenty years later, he said of Floyd, whom he later fought aginst when the were opposing generals in a Civil War battle, that he was "unfitted for command, for the reason that his conscience must have troubled him and made him afraid. As secretary of war he had taken a solemn oath to maintain the Constitution of the United States and to uphold the same against all its enemies. He had betrayed that trust."

Oathbreakers, why have ye come?

The brief touches on a number of other issues. I liked this part:

When Civil War lawmakers aimed to exempt the president, they did so expressly. The Ironclad Oath Act of 1862 applied to “every person elected or appointed to any office of honor or profit under the government of the United States, either in the civil, military, or naval departments of the public service, excepting the President of the United States.” This language—in a landmark Oath-law predecessor to Section Three itself—proves that Congress and the public plainly understood that “the President of the United States” was emphatically a person who held an “office . . . under the government of the United States.”

Emphasis as in the brief. (I do think Amar and Amar use italics a bit too much.)

[N.E. Brigand]

Some Republicans apparently believe there are three genders: "male," "female--working woman," and "female--homemaker."

[Túrin Turambar]

Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota is the only serious Democratic challenger to Joe Biden's candidacy this year, but it's not clear to me what he stands for. Most of his policy positions are similar to Joe Biden's. He's a little more centrist, I guess. He's had some support from Republicans donors. But as you can see above, he got fewer than one-third the number of votes that Biden got even though Biden wasn't on the ballot. I've been very skeptical of Phillips's motivation, but to his credit, he is tamping down a rumor that's been spreading wildly on social media which flat out claims that Phillips won Tuesday, a claim which he properly says is "shameful and absolutely untrue."

As someone with a long-running interest in longshot presidential candidates, I'd been paying a bit of attention to Phillips' campaign. As V said, his pitch is the age gap between him and President Biden, but his stated objective is to get the best-possible Democratic candidate on the ballot in November, and from there, a Democrat into the White House in 2025. Based on past experience, I can't see this doing many favours for his own political career, as lower-profile presidential candidates rarely seem to be able to turn the national exposure of a primary campaign into higher office, and if he wanted higher office himself he'd have been better off raising his profile in MN to aim for Senator or Governor.

[N.E. Brigand]

You can be sure that the Biden-Harris campaign shared this comment that Nikki Haley made at a campaign event today: "In the 2024 appropriations budget, Republicans put in $7.4 billion worth of pet projects and earmarks. Democrats put in $2.8 billion. Now you tell me who the big spenders are."

For those who don't know: earmarks are additional spending items added to budget bills by individual lawmakers to fund pet projects, usually as a way to curry favor with the voters in their congressional district or state with an eye toward the next election.

The Biden-Harris campaign also noted that Haley continues to question Trump's mental acuity.

[N.E. Brigand]

The Republican National Committee is mocking President Biden for saying, "Did you read that article about the Snickers bar?" in a campaign speech, implying that he wax just uttering incoherent nonsense, but Biden was actually referring to a recent New York Times essay by a leading economist (titled "Why Are Voters So Upset? Consider the Snickers Bar") that helps to explain why Americans believe inflation is higher than it really is. Here's an excerpt:

The different inflation rates for infrequent and frequent purchases is a big part of why consumers mistakenly believe inflation is higher than it actually is. The prices of more expensive goods like furniture and consumer electronics are actually falling — and have been falling for over a year. Once the post-pandemic surge in demand for electronics, furniture and similar items faded, manufacturers were unable to maintain higher prices, pulling the reported inflation numbers lower.

Unfortunately for the Biden administration, however, food prices are still rising — a fact evident at every supermarket checkout. Less than a tenth of an average household’s budget is spent at the supermarket, but the prices paid there dominate the inflation perception of the consumer. The result is that consumers perceive inflation as higher than it actually is.

This is not an uniquely American phenomenon. In 2002, Italian consumers were convinced inflation was running at 18 percent year over year, when the reality was 2 percent. Further investigation revealed that an increase in the price of a cup of espresso drove much of this erroneous impression.

The fact that we are all biased toward remembering the price of things bought more frequently is then compounded by two other phenomena. Humans are genetically programmed to emphasize bad news over good news when they make decisions. Aversion to loss is a primitive survival mechanism — we run away from the tiger faster than we run toward food.

In an inflation sense this means that people are inclined to place more emphasis on price increases (which represent a loss of spending power) than they are on price declines. In extreme situations this emphasis can span generations. For instance, Germans have a horror of rising prices today because the losses generated by hyperinflation in the 1920s and 1940s have become part of society’s collective memory. That has produced strong popular support for central bank independence and a reluctance to run large fiscal deficits.

[N.E. Brigand]

Also, on the S&P market today, stocks hit an all-time high. But see how it was reported on Fox Business, where host Larry Kudlow said the good stock market returns could be investors hoping that Donald Trump will defeat Joe Biden in ten months.

Donald Trump is now pushing this claim himself. He says that we're currently experiencing "the Trump stock market."

[Sunsilver]

You know, I'd laugh, except a lot of his followers no doubt believe him!

[N.E. Brigand]

Donald Trump, again boasting about how he did on a cognitive test, explained that "they give you six names in a row at the beginning," which you are supposed to memorize for recitation later in the test, and then he gave an example of those six names, as follows:

A chair,
a hat,
a badge,
a necklace,
and a vote.

You do the math!

[RoseMorninStar]

[N.E. Brigand]

Rolling Stone: "Trump aides pledge a 'holy war' on Taylor Swift as the former president privately grouses that he's 'more popular' than her."

A sign that the Trump campaign doesn't like its chances? But as suggested below, it will probably come to very little. Still, this is amusing:



You know who else turns 35 this year? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But I think some filing deadlines may already have passed.