Those gold sneakers are the extent of Trump’s grassroots outreach. Donald Trump says he wants to hold a major campaign event at New York’s Madison Square Garden featuring Black hip-hop artists and athletes. Aides speak of Trump making appearances in Chicago, Detroit and Atlanta with leaders of color and realigning American politics by flipping Democratic constituencies. But five months before the first general election votes are cast, the former president’s campaign has little apparent organization to show for its ambitious plans. His campaign removed its point person for coalitions and has not announced a replacement. The Republican Party’s minority outreach offices across the country have been shuttered and replaced by businesses that include a check-cashing store, an ice cream shop and a sex-toy store. Campaign officials acknowledge they are weeks away from rolling out any targeted programs. Basically, Trump’s saying “you’re on your own” to his Black MAGA endorsers.
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If you watch CNN you’ll no doubt be hearing a lot about their new poll from the most annoying data analyst on television, David Chalian. It shows Trump beating Biden 49-42 and this will almost surely end up being the narrative going into the next week. Don’t listen. It’s an outlier: There is also a new CNN poll today showing Trump with a 49-43 national lead. Given that dozens of other national polls have shown the race within the margin of error and many have shown Biden gaining or with leads THIS CNN POLL IS AN OUTLIER and should be treated that way by CNN and other commentators. Any attempt to use the CNN to guide one’s understanding of the election given that dozens of other polls are showing a completely different race (tied) would be journalistic and/or analytical malpractice. A few months ago the Washington Post published a poll that they considered an outlier, and acknowledged it in their article about the poll, pointing out that their data was different from many other recent polls. CNN and other commentators should do the same with this poll. This race is inexplicably tight to be sure and Trump may well be marginally ahead. But this is ridiculous.
The Trumpers insist they were never in any danger of being stolen or observed in that storage room at Mar-a-Lago. Well: A coat hanger or “very tiny screwdriver” could be used to unlock the Mar-a-Lago storage room where former President Donald Trump stored highly classified documents for more than a year, according to a witness in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation. The account was relayed to FBI agents by an unidentified aide to Trump in January 2023, according to newly released exhibits, and further undercuts claims by Trump that the highly-classified materials he’s accused of taking with him after leaving office were secured at all times. Not to worry. I’m sure none of the thousands of people who attend paying events there every night of the week, (including all the foreign nationals with sketchy credentials) could figure that out. Certainly they couldn’t have known how to unlock that bathroom door where all the boxes were stored in the shower. They were all very, very secure.
Speaking of polls, Philip Bump has a good bit of fun with Trump’s hilariously misleading charts like the one above ostensibly showing his crushing Biden in the latest Bloomberg poll in his newsletter this weekend. It doesn’t matter what the numbers are, Trump is always “crushing” it. He added this bit which I thought was interesting. If the bottom of the red shaded area is not higher than the top of the shaded blue area, it’s best to describe the race as a dead heat or statistically tied. After all, consider those Pennsylvania results, with the margin of error of 3 points. That means support for Biden probably lands between 43 and 49 percent and support for Trump between 44 and 50 percent. So maybe the “real” support for Biden is 47 percent while Trump’s is 46. The crusher has become the crushee! I put “real” in quotes because there’s squishiness all over the place here. Margins of error don’t capture all of the uncertainty, nor do April polls predict November results. Indeed. Remember this as you look at polling over the next few months.
The DNC’s Chicago convention won’t look like 1968 When I told my partner-in-blog I’d been elected a North Carolina delegate to the 2024 DNC convention in Chicago, her advice was to bring a flak jacket. The thought had occurred to me. Those of a certain age remember too well what happened in Chicago at the 1968 convention. It is another reason a 2016 Bernie Sanders delegate insisted I run after Ezra Klein’s reverie about an open convention. Plus, anything might happen between April and August. He wanted me there in case things go off the rails. As things have in Chicago. David Frum writes in The Atlantic why, security-wise, the kind of disruptions Chicago saw in 1968 are unlikely to happen again. Even as American campus protests over the Israeli prosecution of a war in the Gaza Strip draw headlines, 2024 is not 1968. Protesters presuming to replicate 1968 (as some will) are deluding themselves, Frum explains: From 1968 to today, responsibility for protecting political conventions has shifted from cities and states to the federal government. This new federal responsibility was formalized in a directive signed by President Bill Clinton in 1998.
The blood in the water is yours Opponents of women’s reproductive rights are just getting warmed up. As if you needed reminding. Abortion bans are a loser for Republicans, but they are slow learners. They need reminding. ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
One might have thought that after the political upheaval caused by the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade the conservative justices would feel that it was the better part of valor to play it cool for a while and let the smoke clear before they launch into another radical assault on American jurisprudence. But apparently, taking away established rights for half the population was just a warm up act. Last week, they signaled pretty clearly that they’re prepared to enshrine an imperial presidency into the U.S. Constitution. First , we were all treated to the sickening spectacle of the five conservative men on the Court batting around ideas about how many organs need to be failing before an emergency physician can step in to save a pregnant woman’s life. You see, they value the rights of states, a government entity, far more than they value the rights of individuals. Well, individual women anyway. It was obvious that at least four of the Justices are fully prepared to say that any yahoo in a state can override the federal law against allowing people to bleed to death in their ER.
This too: So, what’s Lara up to at the RNC these days? The Republican National Committee was poised to open and staff 40 satellite campaign offices across key battlegrounds when former President Donald Trump, now the presumptive GOP nominee, abruptly replaced RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and her deputies with fresh leadership. Trump’s new RNC team, led by Chairman Michael Whatley, Co-Chair (and Trump’s daughter-in-law) Lara Trump, and senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita, killed McDaniel’s 2024 blueprint. Roughly six weeks later, neither the committee nor the Trump campaign has much infrastructure or personnel in the swing states that will decide the November 5 election, multiple sources in Washington and the crucial battleground states told Dispatch Politics this week. That means few if any regional and local campaign headquarters; little to no deployed field staff; and little to no traditional voter turnout activities, such as door-knocking, phone banking, or volunteer organizing.
Is Taylor Swift a psy-op? .@Donie asks a Trump supporter: "You don't believe Taylor Swift is a government psyop?" Hear his response pic.twitter.com/yQxvmWqmkV — Erin Burnett OutFront (@OutFrontCNN) April 27, 2024 Sigh… I’m sure that these are decent people in many ways. I have people in my family who are good people in their personal lives but their politics are dangerous and frankly, evil. I can’t get through to them, no matter what tack I take and I’ve tried different approaches for many years. In the old days we could all just agree not to talk politics. Today there’s no avoiding it. It’s the media they consume and the bubbles in which they live. And it’s morphed from an ideology into a cult. I have no idea what to do about it except to try to keep them from power while we still have a democracy and hope that somehow if the Trump bubble of invulnerability bursts they get tired or disillusioned and simply retreat as people whose cult leaders are exposed often do. Other than that I’m out of ideas.
Robinson v. Stein offers a stark contrast Joe Biden’s sharpest barb at the White House Correspondents’ dinner was about him running against a six year old. The Guardian this morning uses a few more words for characterizing the “former factory worker” who rose from obscurity to serve as North Carolina’s Republican lieutenant governor. Mark Robinson is his party’s candidate for governor this November. It might be news that Republicans selected a Black candidate to run against state Attorney General Josh Stein. But if Donald Trump is a six year-old, it’s less clear how one might describe Robinson: Born into poverty and working in a furniture factory while attending college, Robinson quit his job and dropped out of school to begin speaking at conservative events. (Robinson, if he wins, would be the first North Carolina governor without a college degree elected since 1937.) Robinson beat a host of competitors for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor in 2020, winning about a third of the primary vote. He faced the state representative Yvonne Holley, an African American Democrat from Raleigh.