I realize that people only want to talk about what a terrible loser Joe Biden is, and I hate to burst their bubble, but it’s not actually true: New PPP polls in the key states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin- where wins for Joe Biden next year would be enough to get him to 270 electoral votes- find him leading Donald Trump by 3 or 4 points in each of them. Biden is up 48-44 in both Michigan and Wisconsin, and 48-45 in Pennsylvania. Most recent coverage of the race has focused on Biden’s struggles, and it’s true that he’s not terribly popular with favorability ratings of 42/51, 40/49, and 41/51 in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin respectively. But elections are a choice and not a referendum. And Biden is popular in these key swing states compared to his likely opponent of Donald Trump and his likely foil of Kevin McCarthy and House Republicans. Trump’s net favorability rating is -23 in Michigan at 35/58, 14 points worse than Biden’s. It’s -20 at 35/55 in Wisconsin, 10 points worse than Biden’s. And it’s -16 at 38/54 in Pennsylvania, 7 points worse than Biden’s.
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The NY Times: “I’d shut down the government if they can’t make an appropriate deal, absolutely,” Mr. Trump said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Mr. Trump’s view of how shutdowns work was shaped by his own experience as president, when the longest government shutdown in history took place from December 2018 to January 2019. He incurred the public blame for it, as he publicly embraced the idea of a shutdown while holding contentious talks about a budget agreement with two Democratic leaders, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and the House speaker at the time, Nancy Pelosi of California. “I’ll be the one to shut it down,” Mr. Trump told the leaders in a contentious Oval Office meeting in December 2018 shortly before the shutdown. “I will take the mantle. And I will shut it down for border security.” There is no reason to believe that Mr. Biden would be granted outsize blame, if any at all, for a shutdown that a group of Republican holdouts in Congress are encouraging. Mr. McCarthy has privately noted what Mr. Trump said publicly at the time in 2018, according to a person with knowledge of Mr.
I’m excited to say that you can now follow my WordPress account on the fediverse! This is really exciting news; the ActivityPub plugin on WordPress is starting to roll out to WP users. To follow me in Mastodon or another fediverse service, use my account on this blog, @evanprodromou@evanp.me . Connecting these two parts of … Continue reading This blog is now on the Fediverse!
This is truly astonishing: This is a really good exchange. MAGA's current rage at the top brass is all about the fact it wouldn't back the coup. https://t.co/c6PKCeVovX — Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) September 27, 2023 Fox didn’t question any of the kids table about this at the debate last night. In fact, they didn’t mention anything about Trump at all, not the indictments, the fraud verdict, the rape trial or any of it. And the kids table didn’t offer anything. What cowards. All of them.
Trump is wounded but not done There is some good news out there: Democrats keep winning post-Dobbs elections. A recent poll from Univision shows Latinos trust Democrats more than Republicans to lower their cost of living (their No. 1 concern). As you saw yesterday, better polls than the Washington Post’s admitted outlier show Joe Biden better positioned for 2024 than the soon-to-be bankrupt Donald Trump. The GOP is determined to shut down the government, doing no one any favors. The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson summed up the GOP debate Wednesday night by posting, “I’ve attended probably 30 primary debates and watched most of them over the last 30 years. This is the most shambolic trainwreck I’ve ever seen.” Nevertheless, the threat of violence persists from the fringe right when democracy does not hand them the power they demand. Eric Levitz writes: Last Friday, the Republican Party’s presidential front-runner suggested that America’s top general deserves to die.
Premise of GOP’s Biden impeachment inquiry It is a consistent ploy of conspiracy theorist that where supporting “evidence” is concerned, what they lack in quality they make up for in quantity. That was plenty evident on Wednesday when Republicans introduced their impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden by releasing 700 pages of bird shot. It did not go well for House Ways and Means Committee Chair Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO) when asked by NBC’s Richard Neal to explain why whatever Hunter Biden did when his father was a private citizen was somehow an abuse of power and worthy of impeaching Joe Biden now. U.S. Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO) melts down as an NBC reporter questions GOP claims of DOJ political interference in favor of Joe Biden before he was president. pic.twitter.com/Afm75G5CDq — Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) September 27, 2023 But we have 700 pages! Have you read our 700 pages?!
Political strategist Simon Rosenberg got the 2022 election right when almost everyone else got it wrong. He’s worth listening to. Here, he discusses that Washington Post/ABC poll and suggests, correctly, that they should have just thrown it out. (And the rest of the media should have ignored it.) He has some other info you might find interesting: A few other notes on this poll and other recent election data: -In a recent post I talked about something I’ve been calling asymetrical engagement. It’s the idea that right now, due to Republicans having a robust primary and Democrats not that our two coalitions are not paying equal attention to the Presidential election, and polls are coming back a bit more Republican than is the actual state of things. A confirmation of this theory is the new CNN poll of New Hampshire, a state where voters are paying attention and engaged, which has Biden ahead of Trump 52-40. Biden won NH by 7 pts in 2020. So in this large sample poll of a state where ads are flying Biden is outperforming 2020 by 5 points, similar to our overperformance in special elections across the US this year.
Good Lord. Philip Bump has the story: America transitioned out of its covid-19 mobilization the same way it transitioned in: awkwardly, unevenly and with mixed results. The Biden administration’s interest in formalizing the end of the official pandemic — under pressure from President Biden’s right — meant that systems that had been cobbled together to measure and address the problem were often just switched off, with varying downstream effects. Given that the tools we’d used to track the pandemic are now mostly broken or out-of-date, it’s a bit harder to know when and if the virus might again be surging. But in recent weeks, there’s been little question: wastewater measurements and other calculations made clear that infections were again rising. Hopefully, despite the shift to cooler weather in the Northeast, the recent plateau in cases means the trend is reversing. When KFF earlier this month asked Americans if they thought that cases were surging, however, about a third said they didn’t. That was a minority position, but the demographic divides on the question were revealing.
wow this new biden ad is brilliant pic.twitter.com/9zcuq9Qlp9 — MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) September 28, 2023
This from Punchbowl is just astonishing. It represents a failure of education that a faction of Republicans has absolutely no knowledge of history and is too stupid and arrogant to listen to anyone who does: One week after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a plea for additional American aid, a sobering reality has set in on Capitol Hill — Congress has no clear path, as of this moment, to approve new funding for the embattled U.S. ally. The issue has become tied up in the dispute over government funding, with Speaker Kevin McCarthy refusing to include new Ukraine aid in any stopgap spending measure over fears that a conservative revolt could cost him his post. In some ways, McCarthy’s own standing has become tied to this issue. Ukraine in general has become such a charged issue for House Republicans that party leaders late Wednesday night stripped a small portion of Ukraine aid from their version of the FY2024 Defense spending bill. That came just hours after the House overwhelmingly defeated an amendment to strip this exact same funding from the bill. The vote was 330-104.