Swing voters swing, Biden delivers Trends are more important than individual polls. Since Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts (with more cases pending), polling trend lines now favor Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential race. Polling immediately after Trump’s convictions was too soon to pick up the shift. Two-time Trump voters have had enough. Donald Trump is bleeding support. “My guess is right now, this is gonna be a blip,” pollster Lee Carter told Fox News’ Fox & Friends this morning. “I don’t think this is something that’s long term. Sure. Just a flesh wound. Significantly, there has been a large swing since May among independent voters toward Biden. And since they are the largest bloc of registrants in many states, independent turnout could be determinative. Simon Rosenberg tweets, “We’ve had lots of polling this year suggesting a Trump guilty conviction could weaken his coalition and cost him voters (as it should). We now have 6 national polls showing Biden gaining 2-4 pts since the conviction. Election appears to be changing, getting bluer.” The Fox poll was among registered voters.
Uncategorized
Judges Tried To Persuade Cannon To Recuse but she refused The NY Times has a big scoop on the Mar-a-lago case (gift link from the reporters) Shortly after Judge Aileen M. Cannon drew the assignment in June 2023 to oversee former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case, two more experienced colleagues on the federal bench in Florida urged her to pass it up and hand it off to another jurist, according to two people briefed on the conversations. The judges who approached Judge Cannon — including the chief judge in the Southern District of Florida, Cecilia M. Altonaga — each asked her to consider whether it would be better if she were to decline the high-profile case, allowing it to go to another judge, the two people said. But Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, wanted to keep the case and refused the judges’ entreaties. Her assignment raised eyebrows because she has scant trial experience and had previously shown unusual favor to Mr.
Every, single, election this happens. It’s tedious and destructive. Josh Marshall has a good piece today on the totally predictable phenomenon of Democrats running to the press to clutch pearls and wring hands over the campaign they think should be doing something different than they are. He notes this Axios piece that “presents a picture of a campaign cocooned from outside input, intolerant of dissenters who aren’t confident of a win and largely the work of Biden and top advisor Mike Donilon, who is portrayed as having a strategy that is little more than a preciously naive hope that in the end voters will “do the right thing.” So typical. Marshall writes: But the heart of the piece comes at the top with a quote (emphasis added) from someone described as a “Democratic strategist in touch with the campaign.” I spend a lot of time trying to avoid the twin perils of wallowing pessimism and empty optimism. But when I read this, I at first literally checked to see whether I had done a search of my email that had served up an Axios newsletter from last January.
Generally, I don’t tear up every time I hear news of an actor’s passing. But this is one of those times: Never daunted by a role, good, bad or ugly. Sounds about right. He was fearless, alright. And what a resume…where do you even start? Donald McNichol Sutherland was born in Saint John, Newfoundland/Labrador on July 17, 1935. I’ll admit that on occasion, I have completely forgotten that he was Canadian-born. But Sutherland himself certainly never forgot about his roots. From today’s obituary by the CBC: Though he found international success, the actor maintained a professional and personal connection to Canada throughout his life. He narrated two documentaries for the National Film Board in the ’80s, lent his voice to the 2015 Canadian animated film Pirate’s Passage and returned to Toronto theatre — where he got his start — in the early 2000s. He was awarded a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2000. “I’m a Canadian. The thing about Canada is that you go from east to west, from Nova Scotia to Vancouver.
It was never really “mostly harmless” Daniel Dale of CNN by now has got to be burned out fact-checking the firehose of false and misleading statements made by the immediate past president at every rally. Dale’s ability to do it in near-real-time has always impressed. But to have that as a job? He runs through 30 of Trump’s lies/exaggerations/misstatements from his Tuesday rally in Racine, Wisconsin in the clip below. Even more soul-sapping, as Tom Nichols puts it, is that millions of people who live next door lap it up like cream from a saucer, “willfully blinding” themselves to the truth, as Peter Wehner put it, or exhibiting “motivated unreasoning” as I did.
SCOTUS is stalling The National Review comments on the remaining decisions to come out of the Supreme Court: The Supreme Court is scheduled to deliver opinions this Thursday and Friday. There should be 21 opinions remaining because there are 23 cases left, including two pairs (the Chevron challenges and the Florida and Texas social-media laws) that are consolidated and likely to be decided together. We will likely get at least five or six opinions this week, maybe as many as nine. The Court will need to schedule more opinion days next week, probably at least three of them if it intends to wrap up the term by the end of the week; otherwise, it could spill over to July 1 or 2. NR provides a handy chart of what’s left. Notice what’s at the bottom: Leah Litman writes at the New York Times: For those looking for the hidden hand of politics in what the Supreme Court does, there’s plenty of reason for suspicion on Donald Trump’s as-yet-decided immunity case given its urgency. There are, of course, explanations that have nothing to do with politics for why a ruling still hasn’t been issued.
Paul Krugman writes: A few days ago Donald Trump floated a truly terrible, indeed unworkable economic proposal. I’m aware that many readers will say, “So what else is new?” But in so doing, you’re letting Trump benefit from the soft bigotry of rock-bottom expectations, not holding him to the standards that should apply to any presidential candidate. A politician shouldn’t be given a pass on nonsense because he talks nonsense all the time. But in a way the most interesting thing about Trump’s latest awful policy idea is the way his party responded, with the kind of obsequiousness and paranoia you normally expect in places like North Korea. What Trump reportedly proposed was an “all tariff policy” in which taxes on imports replace income taxes. Why is that a bad idea? First, the math doesn’t work. Annual income tax receipts are around $2.4 trillion; imports are around $3.9 trillion. On the face of it, this might seem to suggest that Trump’s idea would require an average tariff rate of around 60 percent.
Time will tell but there are some signs that she might not be quite as nuts as the other nuts. We are probably stuck with this 6 vote lunatic Supreme Court majority for some time so it’s more important than ever to keep our eyes on the potentially small changes that might be relevant, whether it’s signs of concern about politics playing a role or actual disagreement among the majority about their judicial philosophies. This article in Politico suggests that there might be a developing schism on the right that could prove to be at least a little bit helpful depending on who joins what side: A rift is emerging among the Supreme Court’s conservatives — and it could thwart the court’s recent march to expand gun rights. On one side is the court’s oldest and most conservative justice, Clarence Thomas. On the other is its youngest member, Amy Coney Barrett. The question at the center of the spat may seem abstract: How should the court use “history and tradition” to decide modern-day legal issues?
I hope you all have a chance to see at least one the various interviews with Dr. Anthony Fauci as he makes the rounds for his book tour. I particularly like the one with Rachel Maddow, above. For some reason the hatred aimed at him makes me see red in a way that goes way beyond my usual ire at right wing hostility and that says something. Watching that ignorant harpy Marjorie Taylor Greene insult him at that congressional hearing last week had me screaming at the TV. Anyway, his book sounds super interesting and I admire his grit in standing up to these miscreants. And bouy does he explode the myth that people over 80 are non compos mentis.
I didn’t know this but it seems like it should be relevant. I hope the Biden debate prep people are on it. (It’s probably too much to ask that the moderators are.) Jonathan Chait explains: One of the most underappreciated developments of Donald Trump’s presidency is that his strategy toward China was a total failure on its own terms. While Trump began his presidency as a snarling trade warrior, bent on ending Chinese manufacturing dominance, he ended his presidency as a whimpering apologist for Beijing. The culmination of Trump’s standoff with China was a trade deal that supposedly committed China to purchasing $200 billion worth of American goods. Robert O’Brien, a former Trump national security adviser, admits that the Chinese never actually carried out their end of the deal. “I don’t think we’re going to see a deal like we saw in the first term,” he told Semafor’s Morgan Chalfant. “I think people were generally happy with phase one, but as it turned out, the Chinese didn’t honor it.” You don’t say? Huh.