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:
They tend to be younger than other Trump supporters (64% are younger than 50 compared with 37% of those who would not reconsider), are less likely to be White (49% are people of color compared with 17% of those who would not reconsider), are more apt to report being Biden voters in 2020 (20% of them say they backed Biden in 2020 vs. 6% of those who would not reconsider) and are likelier to acknowledge that Biden legitimately won enough votes to win the presidency four years ago (63% vs. 22% among those who would not reconsider). They are also more apt to be political independents (49% vs. 31%) and ideologically moderate (50% vs. 38%).
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.
You would think that all voters would be “conviction sensitive” but we live in a world in which corrupt, criminal politicians are revered because they’re very stable geniuses so being a felon who committed massive fraud, assaulted a woman and then defamed her, paid off a porn star, stole classified documents or tried to steal an election makes you “smart.”
Pfeiffer makes the case that at least some of these voters are persuadable and contends that this poll reveals “two broader truths about this election”:
First, Trump’s putative lead is fragile. He is propped up by people who don’t like him, disagree with him on most issues, and have a long history of voting for Democrats. Holding on to this coalition for the next six months would be a challenge for any candidate, let alone a megalomaniacal narcissist with little impulse control and 88 felony indictments.
Second, I am glad to know that some people would have some qualms about making a convicted felon president, but this is more than a conviction. These voters have some doubts about supporting Trump and are looking for an offramp. In other words, they are persuadable. Because everything seems so polarized and this election is a rematch, most assume there are no persuadable voters. That could not be further from the truth. If this poll is accurate, a historically large group of voters is willing to listen to our case.
It’s going to be a long hot summer and events may have more to do with this than anything. But you do have to wonder if the Young, Black and Hispanic voters will really be willing to vote for Trump once they get a good look at him again. It’s up to the Democrats, and all of us, to make sure they do.
As DC Republicans continue trying to repeal Biden’s climate law, Republican governors are busy desperately trying to take all the credit for projects the Biden Administration is making possible. https://t.co/0ao4L2yrldpic.twitter.com/hxfogCyN6q
Georgia Republicans who believe their GOP Governor, GOP Secretary of State, and GOP legislature fixed the 2020 election only for Joe Biden. https://t.co/Tf4Vi11k7g
No American president had ever faced a criminal indictment for retaining and concealing classified documents. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment or a state indictment for trying to overturn an election, or been named an unindicted co-conspirator in two other states for the same crime. No American president has faced hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for business fraud, defamation, and sexual abuse.
Until now, no American presidential race had been more defined by what’s happening in courtrooms than by what’s happening on the campaign trail. The scale of the abnormality is so staggering, that it can actually become numbing. It’s all too easy to fall into reflexive habits, to treat this as a normal campaign, where both sides embrace the rule of law, where both sides are dedicated to a debate based on facts and the peaceful transfer of power. But, that is not what’s happening this election year. Those bedrock tenants of democracy are being tested in a way we haven’t seen since the Civil War. It’s a test for the candidates, for those of us in the media, and for all of us as citizens.
Indeed it is. And unfortunately, so far, the media is only sometimes meeting the moment. Steph meets it here but far too often the savvy DC press corps retreats into its cynical corners. Too many reporters obviously can’t stand Biden — he’s old and boring. And as a result they are not willing to be clear about the stakes or, perhaps even more importantly, fairly tell Biden’s story, which should have people emerging more decisively from their post-pandemic funk. It’s going to be hand to hand combat and journalists need to start telling the truth about just how fucked up this really is.
Trump is highly, highly unlikely to testify in his NY hush money trial but he has been arguing his case (sort of) outside the courthouse every day. The NY Times did a fact check and it’s a doozy
He said:
“He puts in an invoice, or whatever, a bill. And they pay it and they call it a legal expense. I got indicted for that. What else would you call it? Actually nobody’s been able to say what you’re supposed to call it.” — last Monday
The Times calls this false. Of course prosecutors know what to call them. They’re invoices for reimbursement of the $130,000 (plus taxes and bonus) second mortgage Cohen used to pay off Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet before the election.
They call Cohen’s payments “illegal campaign contributions” and the invoices “reimbursement intended to falsify business records.” In no way were they “legal expenses.”
He said
“Also the things that he got in trouble for were things that had nothing to do with me. He got in trouble. He went to jail. This had nothing to do with me. This had to do with the taxi cab company.” — last Monday
Uh no.
Cohen did plead guilty to personal tax evasion related to the taxi medallions but the campaign finance violations were all about the Stormy scheme and they each carried up to five years in prison. He was sentenced to 3 years and he actually had to spend time behind bars as have many other Trump flunkies while he wines and dines his fans down at Mar-a-Lago.
He said:
“Federal Elections took a total pass on it. They said essentially nothing was done wrong or they would have done something about it.” — last Monday
Au contraire
The Times reports that the commissioners deadlocked along partisan lines but an FEC OLC report found that Trump and the Trump org, along with Cohen “knowingly and willfully” violated federal election law. The GOPers on the commission wrote that pursuing the case wasn’t “the best use of agency resources.” It was enough that Cohen took the rap. (Yes, they actually said his punishment was enough.)
He said:
“I’m not allowed to defend myself, and yet other people are allowed to say whatever they want about me.”— on Tuesday
I think you know how dumb this is. He’s not allowed to talk about witnesses, jurors, court staff or their families but he can talk about the case. Obviously. He can’t shut up about it.
“This is all a Biden indictment. It’s in order to try and win an election.” –on Friday
Oh come on. It’s totally false. But here’s the Times’ fact check on this. …. sigh:
This lacks evidence. Mr. Trump again accused President Biden of orchestrating the legal woes he faces, offering no evidence to support that claim.
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. We’ll have to see if they can get one of the others to join them in this grotesque display of callous indifference to the suffering of pregnant patients and their families in their worst moments of distress.
The hotly anticipated immunity case that was argued the next day really brought home just how far gone the high court really is. As you know, Donald Trump has severe psychological problems that make it impossible for him to admit that has ever lost or done anything wrong. In order to preserve the fragile hold he had on his psyche in the wake of his loss in 2020, he concocted a fantasy in which he actually won and cast himself as a big hero exposing the rigged election by the other side. He went so far as to plot a coup and incite an insurrection in a vain attempt to wrest back power and in the process broke a bunch of laws for which he is now being held to account. Naturally, he cannot accept that so he and his lawyers have come up with a novel legal defense in which they claim that a president is totally immune from the rule of law.
Trump’s argument is quite explicit:
Coming from the man who routinely accused former President Obama of committing crimes and demanded that his Justice Department investigate, that’s pretty rich. (And you have to love the way he slides his belief that police officers should be immune as well in there. It’s an authoritarian smorgasbord.)
Everyone has always understood that presidents are subject to the rule of law once they’re out of office. In fact, it wasn’t until 1973 that the Justice Department’s Office of legal Counsel found it necessary to write a department policy against indicting a sitting president under the assumption that it would interfere with his or her duties while in office. We’ve mercifully not had to deal with that except in the cases of Richard Nixon, who was pardoned, and Bill Clinton who took a plea deal and gave up his law license for five years, which clearly indicates that their understanding was that they had legal liability for the crimes of which they were accused.
That’s all in the past apparently. Today we have a former president accused of very serious crimes who contends that he must be given immunity. And if he doesn’t get it? Well, we’d better hope that he doesn’t win the presidency again because unless the court gives presidents total immunity, Joe Biden is going to jail:
That can’t be read as anything but a threat. (Nice little country you have here … )
I had no expectations that the right wing Supreme Court majority would act with restraint on this issue. Bush v. Gore cured me of faith that they have any integrity when a presidential election is on the line. But going into the Supreme Court arguments last week, I think most legal scholars expected the court to be at least somewhat disdainful of the idea that a president must be allowed to be a criminal or he can’t do the job. But it turns out that at least four of them and possibly even six are quite open to the idea. Justice Samuel Alito went so far as to turn the whole case inside out and upside down by stating:
“If an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?”
I’m pretty sure that ship sailed on January 6th. But what that comment, and others made by the right wingers on the court, shows is that they’ve bought into Trump’s Big Lie that the prosecutions of Donald Trump are partisan exercises brought by his “bitter political opponent.” And they are clearly prepared to use their own vast, unaccountable power to even out the score.
If they had any concern about their institution’s credibility they wouldn’t have even heard the case. Obviously, they don’t care about that so it appears that the best we can hope for is that they don’t decide to grant this immunity outright but rather come up with some vague distinction between “official” and “private” acts and send it back to the trial court, delaying the case until after the election. If Trump wins, I think we can be quite sure there will be no immunity for Joe Biden.
It’s disconcerting to realize that the right wing legal intelligentsia is infected with Fox News Brain Rot all the way to the top. You see it from the legal commentators in partisan media, of course. That’s to be expected. But it’s permeated the entire GOP legal establishment from state Attorneys General to judges and to people like Trump’s former Attorney General Bill Barr who recently said that despite the fact that he believes Trump committed illegal acts and is unfit for the presidency he plans to vote for him because Democrats want to regulate kitchen appliances and are therefore a greater threat to democracy. And now we see this extremist majority on the Supreme Court acting as rank partisan operators to ensure that a blatant criminal gets every chance to seize power so that he can pacify his broken psyche by wreaking revenge on his enemies. And they seem to be open to taking down our democracy in the process.
As former former FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissman said on MSNBC over the weekend, “We are one vote away from the end of democracy as we know it.”
Opponents of women’s reproductive rights are just getting warmed up. As if you needed reminding.
😳Leonard Leo ally Tim Busch opines that state constitutional amendments protecting abortion rights conflict w/ the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which he says gives that “right [to life] to the unborn.” Implies they will ask SCOTUS to overturn such state amendments. 1/ pic.twitter.com/Zckz6rG1QN
— jennycohn@toad.social ✍🏻 📢 (@jennycohn1) April 27, 2024
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 order created a category of “National Special Security Events,” for which planning would be led by the Secret Service.
National Security Special Events draw on all the resources of the federal government, including, if need be, those of the Defense Department. In 2016, the federal government spent $50 million on security for each of the two major-party conventions.
Those funds enabled Cleveland, the host of the 2016 Republican convention, to deploy thousands of law-enforcement personnel. Officers were seconded from across Ohio, and from as far away as Texas and California. Federal funds paid for police to be trained in understanding the difference between lawful and unlawful protest, and to equip them with body cameras to record interactions with the public. The city also used federal funds to buy 300 bicycles to field a force that could move quickly into places where cars might not be able to go, and that could patrol public spaces in a way that was more approachable and friendly.
Campuses are lightly controlled and lightly policed, Frum adds. “Pro-Palestinian protesters have proved considerably more circumspect when they march in places where laws of public order are upheld.”
Disruptions like blocking bridges and protests inside the Cannon Office Building on Capitol Hill involve “old-fashioned civil disobedience—lawbreaking that did not threaten injury to anyone, followed by peaceful acceptance of arrest.”
National Special Security Events are different animals. Security at the 2012 convention in Charlotte was tight. (I attended on a press pass.) No one gets past the security perimeter without credentials approved by the party host committee. Protests outside the 2016 Philadelphia convention by a few N.C. Bernie delegates from my district amounted to (in my friend’s reporting) mostly face-painting and fierce crying.
With Jan. 6 informing planning, and with subsequent prosecutions as a point of reference, it is less likely any hopes of disrupting the DNC convention will remain hopes. Frum concludes:
Maybe protesters will discover an unsuspected weak point, overwhelm police, wreak viral-video havoc, embarrass President Biden, and thereby help Donald Trump. The better guess is that they will not only fail in that but also be unable to mobilize any large number to attack police lines and risk serious prison time.
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. And recall that in 2016 the race was always within the margin of error and yet we assumed that Clinton had to win because … well, it’s the only thing that made sense. We know how that turned out.
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.
Besides, Trump says the Presidential Records Act allows him to keep anything he wants, including nuclear secrets, and if he wants to display them for the whole world right there in the ballroom, that’s his privilege. He’s immune, dontcha know. Otherwise some bitter Democratic president will wreak his revenge by criminally prosecuting him for stealing them. .
