Are they the new soccer moms and NASCAR dads? Dan Pfeiffer looks at the latest (outlier) CNN poll that has the whole beltway gasping with excitement over the prospect that Biden is in the dirt with young people, Black and Hispanic voters. He noted that the polls shows that 25% of Trump voters are what he calls “conviction sensitive” voters who might be persuaded to abandon him if he’s convicted of a crime: Even more interesting, the topline numbers are the characteristics of these conviction-sensitive voters. According to CNN: In other words, these are the exact voters who propelled Trump to his very narrow lead in the polling average. Younger voters, independents, Black and Latino voters are groups Trump struggled with in 2020 but is doing better with now.
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“We do not want to be a democracy”* Republicans want to roll back the 20th century a quarter of the way into the 21st. They’ve made no bones about it for decades. In his heyday during the George W. Bush administration prior to the September 11 attacks, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform busily strong-armed Republicans into signing his anti-tax pledge. He dreamed of returning America to “the McKinley era, absent the protectionism.” He wanted, famously, to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Norquist was a radical for his day. But not so radical that he imagined chucking the Constitution itself along with the last 100 years. Among today’s MAGA Republicans, he’s a RINO. Nancy MacLean, author of “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America,” suggests the remnant of the southern planter class, economic royalists and academic libertarians, undertook affecting a restoration of elite dominance beginning in the late 1940s. Their goal: to save capitalism from democracy.
Trump on Trump 2.0 Not-so-veiled threats and rumors of political retribution are par for the course Donald Trump cheats on. In interviews with Time magazine, the dictator-in-waiting lets everyone know just how far he will go if he wins a second presidential term. Time: Every election is billed as a national turning point. This time that rings true. To supporters, the prospect of Trump 2.0, unconstrained and backed by a disciplined movement of true believers, offers revolutionary promise. To much of the rest of the nation and the world, it represents an alarming risk. A second Trump term could bring “the end of our democracy,” says presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, “and the birth of a new kind of authoritarian presidential order.” Trump 2.0 will be the unitary executive theory on steroids. Nowhere would that power be more momentous than at the Department of Justice. Since the nation’s earliest days, Presidents have generally kept a respectful distance from Senate-confirmed law-enforcement officials to avoid exploiting for personal ends their enormous ability to curtail Americans’ freedoms.
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.
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.