A looming rematch next year between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump has left voters deeply dissatisfied with their options, longing for alternatives and curious about independent candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., according to new polls of six battleground states conducted by The New York Times and Siena College.
Both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump are viewed unfavorably by a majority of voters in these states, one-fifth of voters don’t like either of them, and enthusiasm about the coming election is down sharply compared with a poll conducted before the 2020 contest.
That frustration and malaise have prompted voters to entertain the idea of other options. When asked about the likeliest 2024 matchup, Mr. Biden versus Mr. Trump, only 2 percent of those polled said they would support another candidate. But when Mr. Kennedy’s name was included as an option, nearly a quarter said they would choose him.
That number almost surely inflates the support of Mr. Kennedy, the political scion and vaccine skeptic, because two-thirds of those who said they would back him had said earlier that they would definitely or probably vote for one of the two front-runners.
Tuesday, November 7, 2023
The RFK Bubble
Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. The 2024 race has begun.
Monday, November 6, 2023
Trump Plans to Abuse DOJ
Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie. And we now know how close he came to subverting the Constitution.
Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey and Devlin Barrett at WP:
Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.
In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Trump has also talked of prosecuting officials at the FBI and Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said.
In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family. The former president has frequently made corruption accusations against them that are not supported by available evidence.
To facilitate Trump’s ability to direct Justice Department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations. Critics have called such ideas dangerous and unconstitutional.
“It would resemble a banana republic if people came into office and started going after their opponents willy-nilly,” said Saikrishna Prakash, a constitutional law professor at the University of Virginia who studies executive power. “It’s hardly something we should aspire to.”
Much of the planning for a second term has been unofficially outsourced to a partnership of right-wing think tanks in Washington. Dubbed “Project 2025,” the group is developing a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act, according to a person involved in those conversations and internal communications reviewed by The Washington Post. The law, last updated in 1871, authorizes the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement.
Sunday, November 5, 2023
Bad Poll for Biden
Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. The 2024 race has begun.
Shane Goldmacher at NYT:
Shane Goldmacher at NYT:
President Biden is trailing Donald J. Trump in five of the six most important battleground states one year before the 2024 election, suffering from enormous doubts about his age and deep dissatisfaction over his handling of the economy and a host of other issues, new polls by The New York Times and Siena College have found.
The results show Mr. Biden losing to Mr. Trump, his likeliest Republican rival, by margins of three to 10 percentage points among registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden is ahead only in Wisconsin, by two percentage points, the poll found.
...
Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump are both deeply — and similarly — unpopular, according to the poll. But voters who overwhelmingly said the nation was on the wrong track are taking out their frustrations on the president.
...
Another ominous sign for Democrats is that voters across all income levels felt that Mr. Biden’s policies had hurt them personally, while they credited Mr. Trump’s policies for helping them. The results were mirror opposites: Voters gave Mr. Trump a 17-point advantage for having helped them and Mr. Biden a 18-point disadvantage for having hurt them.
For Mr. Biden, who turns 81 later this month, being the oldest president in American history stands out as a glaring liability. An overwhelming 71 percent said he was “too old” to be an effective president — an opinion shared across every demographic and geographic group in the poll, including a remarkable 54 percent of Mr. Biden’s own supporters.
In contrast, only 19 percent of supporters of Mr. Trump, who is 77, viewed him as too old, and 39 percent of the electorate overall.
Concerns about the president’s advancing age and mental acuity — 62 percent also said Mr. Biden does not have the “mental sharpness” to be effective — are just the start of a sweeping set of Biden weaknesses in the survey results.
In a hypothetical race without Mr. Biden, an unnamed generic Democrat leads Mr. Trump by eight points, 48 to 40 — a wider lead than the three-point edge held by an unnamed Democrat at this time in 2019.
How Trump Fared in Times/Siena Polling Against …
4 years ago | Today | |
|---|---|---|
Joe Biden | Dem. +2 | Rep. +5 |
A named alternative Elizabeth Warren in 2019; Kamala Harris in 2023 | Rep. +2 | Rep. +3 |
An unnamed, generic Democrat | Dem. +3 | Dem. +8 |
Based on New York Times/Siena College polls of registered voters in battleground states conducted Oct. 22 to Nov. 3 and in October 2019. Numbers are rounded.
Why Biden Is Behind, and How He Could Come Back - The New York Times
Even Kamala Harris — no political juggernaut so far — fares a bit better than Mr. Biden, trailing Mr. Trump by three points in a hypothetical matchup, compared with Mr. Biden’s five- point deficit (Mr. Trump appears to lead by four points in the top-line 48-44 result because of rounding).
While Mr. Biden doesn’t fare all that much worse than his running mate, the top-line similarity obscures major differences in their support: A full 11 percent of Ms. Harris’s would-be supporters do not back Mr. Biden, and two-thirds of them are either nonwhite or younger than 30.
As a result, Mr. Biden would lead by three points among registered voters and two points among likely voters across the battlegrounds, including leads in five of the six states, if he could regain the nonwhite and young voters who would be willing to vote for his own not-especially-popular vice president. His lead among Black, Hispanic and young voters would return to 2020 levels as well, at least among likely voters.
Saturday, November 4, 2023
Catastrophism
Our book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection. Some Republican leaders -- and a measurable number of rank-and-file voters -- are open to violent rebellion, coups, and secession.
A coalition of intellectual catastrophists on the American right is trying to convince people of just that — giving the next generation of Republican officeholders, senior advisers, judges and appointees explicit permission and encouragement to believe that the country is on the verge of collapse. Some catastrophists take it a step further and suggest that officials might contemplate overthrowing liberal democracy in favor of revolutionary regime change or even imposing a right-wing dictatorship on the country....
Those on the right primarily concerned about the fate of traditionalist Christian morals and worship in the United States insist that we already live in a regime that oppresses and brutalizes religious believers and conservatives. And they make those charges in a theologically inflected idiom that’s meant to address and amplify the right’s intense worries about persecution by progressives.
Among the most extreme catastrophists writing in this vein is Stephen Wolfe, whose book “The Case for Christian Nationalism” calls for a “just revolution” against America’s “gynocracy” (rule by women) that emasculates men, persuading them to affirm “feminine virtues, such as empathy, fairness and equality.” In its place, Mr. Wolfe proposes the installation of a “Christian prince,” or a form of “theocratic Caesarism.”
Other authors aspire to greater nuance by calling the dictatorship weighing down on religious believers soft totalitarianism, usually under the rule of social-justice progressivism. These writers often draw direct parallels between the fate of devout Christians in the contemporary United States and the struggles of Eastern Europeans who sought to practice their faith but were harshly persecuted by Soviet tyranny. Establishing the validity of that parallel is the main point of the most recent book by the writer Rod Dreher, “Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.” (The title is drawn from the writings of the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.)
Friday, November 3, 2023
The Election-Denying Speaker
Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie. And we now know how close he came to subverting the Constitution.
"I am a rule-of-law guy,” Mike Johnson told Sean Hannity last week. Elsewhere, according to The New York Times, he’s complained to student groups, “There’s no transcendent principles anymore. There’s no eternal judge. There’s no absolute standards of right and wrong. All this is exactly the opposite of the way we were founded as a country.”
At the same time, Johnson has been a pivotal figure in undermining the rule of law—specifically trying to overturn the 2020 presidential-election results. In a carefully reported story on the 139 House Republicans who voted to dispute the Electoral College count, three New York Times reporters wrote, “In formal statements justifying their votes, about three-quarters relied on the arguments of a low-profile Louisiana congressman, Representative Mike Johnson, the most important architect of the Electoral College objections.”
Johnson also collected signatures for a legal brief in support of a groundless Texas lawsuit to throw out the results in four battleground states won by Joe Biden.
According to a report in the Times, Johnson “sent an email to his Republican colleagues soliciting signatures for the legal brief in support of it. The initiative had been personally blessed by Mr. Trump, Mr. Johnson wrote, and the president was ‘anxiously awaiting’ to see who in Congress would step up to the plate to defend him.”
Johnson also claimed in a radio interview that a software system used for voting was “suspect because it came from Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.” According to Johnson, “The allegations about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with this software by Dominion. Look, there’s a lot of merit to that.”
“The fix was in,” according to Johnson.
Thursday, November 2, 2023
Republicans Rejecting Reality
Our 2020 book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good.
The Economist and YouGov this week became the latest to publish a head-scratching poll showing Republicans rejecting basic facts about Trump and his legal jeopardy.
The poll asked people whether Trump was “involved in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.” He, of course, was. Myriad pieces of evidence make that abundantly clear. We have a literal recording of him asking Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” just enough votes to overcome his deficit, and Trump on the call explicitly cited “flipping” the results in the state.
But to most Republicans, this apparently never happened. Just 18 percent in the YouGov poll said Trump was involved in trying to overturn Georgia’s results, compared to 59 percent who say he wasn’t.
It’s now the second poll to show the vast majority of Republicans saying Trump wasn’t even involved in trying to overturn the election. YouGov asked similar, non-Georgia-specific questions in August. Republicans said just 38-30 percent that there was an attempt to overturn the election. That’s shocking in and of itself. But then it showed only half of that 38 percent said Trump was personally involved.
So in both polls, only about 1 in 5 Republicans said Trump tried to overturn the election — the very basic threshold fact that undergirds two of his four indictments.
But these are hardly the only polls showing Republicans and Trump backers expressing a skewed view of the underlying facts. To wit:Some of these polls are dated. There are, regrettably, not too many surveys testing people’s knowledge of the basic facts surrounding these cases. But the thrust of all of them is similar, with half or more Republicans rejecting what is pretty plain to see.
- Marquette University polling in late 2022 showed 66 percent of Republicans said Trump hadn’t possessed “top secret and other classified material or national security documents at his home in Mar-a-Lago.” This despite the search of Mar-a-Lago having turned up such documents three months prior. That number later dropped after Trump’s indictment this summer, but only to 50 percent.
- A February 2021 USA Today/Suffolk University poll showed 58 percent of Trump voters said Jan. 6 was “mostly an Antifa-inspired attack that only involved a few Trump supporters.” That’s compared to 28 percent who said it was mostly a “rally of Trump supporters, some of whom attacked the Capitol.” (Nearly three years later, there remains no evidence of antifa inspiring or even participating in the attack.)
- A December 2021 CBS News/YouGov poll showed 67 percent of Republicans and 73 percent of Trump voters said the Jan. 6 riot was not an attempt “to overturn the election and keep Donald Trump in power.”
- A mid-2022 Monmouth University poll showed not only that 77 percent of Republicans said Jan. 6 wasn’t an “insurrection” but that a 51 percent majority said it wasn’t even a “riot.”
Wednesday, November 1, 2023
Looking for MAGA Lawyers
Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie. And we now know how close he came to subverting the Constitution.
Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage and The New York Times report an an effort by Trumpists to recruit far-right lawyers for a new administration.
Their aim is to reduce the chances that politically appointed lawyers would frustrate a more radical White House agenda — as they sometimes did when Mr. Trump was in office, by raising objections to his desires for certain harsher immigration policies or for greater personal control over the Justice Department, among others.
Now, as Trump allies grow more confident in an election victory next fall, several outside groups, staffed by former Trump officials who are expected to serve in senior roles if he wins, have begun parallel personnel efforts. At the start of Mr. Trump’s term, his administration relied on the influential Federalist Society, the conservative legal network whose members filled key executive branch legal roles and whose leader helped select his judicial nominations. But in a striking shift, Trump allies are building new recruiting pipelines separate from the Federalist Society.
...
“The Federalist Society doesn’t know what time it is,” said Russell T. Vought, a former senior Trump administration official who runs a think tank with close ties to the former president. He argued that many elite conservative lawyers had proved to be too timid when, in his view, the survival of the nation is at stake.
Such comments may surprise those who view the Federalist Society as hard-line conservatives. But the move away from the group reflects the continuing evolution of the Republican Party in the Trump era and an effort among those now in his inner circle to prepare to take control of the government in a way unseen in modern presidential history.
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Hard-right allies of Mr. Trump increasingly speak of typical Federalist Society members as “squishes” too worried about maintaining their standing in polite society and their employment prospects at big law firms to advance their movement’s most contentious tactics and goals.
...
In January 2020, Mr. Leo was having dinner at Mar-a-Lago when Mr. Trump strode up to his table. The president stunned Mr. Leo, publicly berating him and accusing him of recommending the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, who appointed a special counsel to investigate ties between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.
Taken aback, Mr. Leo protested that he had actually suggested someone else for the position — Mr. Cipollone. Mr. Trump walked away without apologizing.
Nearly a year later, when Mr. Trump was trying to enlist legal assistance for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, he reached out three times to Mr. Leo. But Mr. Leo declined to take or return Mr. Trump’s calls, and has since only dealt with him through others.
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