The Briefing, Vol. XII, Issue 9
This week:
- Trump wraps it up, but Haley won’t quit
- Biden trails Trump in every important swing state
- Sheila Jackson-Lee faces defeat in her primary
President 2024
South Carolina: Saturday’s primary left former Gov. Nikki Haley (R) able to save just a minimal amount of face, and even then only just barely. She lost her home state by 20 points — actually somewhat better than was expected for her — and carried one of its seven congressional districts. This leaves her with three delegates from the Palmetto State to Donald Trump’s 47.
So, then, how to explain Haley’s persistence in the race? Her increasingly anti-Trump tone suggests that she is not merely jockeying for a position in a second Trump administration. She is more likely standing by in the wings, in case a criminal conviction makes Trump signficantly less attractive to voters.
Haley would be a good general election candidate. The Marquette Law School’s national poll recently showed her leading Joe Biden by 16 points. That may be an outlier, but her performance suggests Biden is in sufficiently bad shape that any conventional Republican — that is, anyone except Donald Trump — beats him easily.
Trump-Biden matchup: Then again, Trump also beats Biden easily in a general election.
As we have noted previously, Trump never held a stable lead in the polls in 2020. He led in just two out of 220 polls taken that year. Today, he leads in 11 of the last 13 national polls, and in 26 out of 36 national polls since the turn of the new year. Biden has led in only one of the last 13 and six of the last 36 polls.
Bear in mind that Trump doesn’t even need to win the national popular vote in order to win the 2024 election. He already won in the Electoral College once without a popular vote majority in 2016, and he came very close to doing it a second time in 2020. This is why all signs are pointing to a much more resounding Trump victory in 2024.
Not only does Trump lead in national polls, but he leads in all recent polls of Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan, all states he lost in 2020, and together enough to hand him an Electoral College victory in 2024. He also leads in some recent polls of Pennsylvania and ties Biden in Wisconsin — again, both states he lost in 2020.
In short, barring a massive shift in public opinion, the 2024 election is going to be a defensive war for Biden, fought on his own home territory, in which he will have few opportunities to make gains and put Trump country at risk. Trump begins an apparently solid 268 electoral votes, and needs only to put away one additional state between Michigan (where he already leads), Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire. That is assuming he doesn’t manage to put any other unexpected states into play.
Prosecutions: As of today, these polling results reflect an important and perhaps underappreciated reality: Most voters have tacitly accepted that all of the attempts to prosecute Trump are political and not legitimate. Otherwise, they would not be supporting him over an incumbent president.
As astonishing as this might be, this is the only explanation for the current state of play. There is no way Trump could build up such a national or swing-state lead over Biden if most voters viewed these prosecutions as legitimate.
There is a dangerous implication behind this that threatens the very fabric of American civic life. Trump has been so successful in framing his trial as a witch hunt, and Biden has been so woefully unsuccessful in denying the charge of persecuting a political opponent, that the Biden Justice Department is teetering on the edge of illegitimacy. This is the quiet and otherwise unnoticed trend of the election cycle.
Fani Willis: The case against Trump in Georgia is falling apart, with the lead prosecutors, Fannie Willis and her married affair partner, Nathan Wade, apparently perjuring themselves during recent hearings on a number of matters, including the timeline of their illicit extramarital affair and her supposedly having reimbursed Wade in cash (she failed to explain where so many thousands in cash came from) for lavish vacations he treated her to after accepting massive, high-six-figure payments from her office.
If the Fulton County DA’s office is thrown off the case, as now appears likely, then it is unlikely that Trump will be prosecuted in Georgia this year, or ever.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s criminal case against Trump in New York, as weak as it is, is the most obviously political out of the prosecutions currently in the works. Yet it is now scheduled to come first, beginning with jury selection in late March and to continue into early May.
Trump’s legal team is still attempting to delay that trial, although the judge is very unsympathetic. Yet Trump is also already using the case to his advantage.
“They want to keep me nice and busy so I can’t campaign so hard,” Trump told reporters outside the courthouse. “But maybe we won’t have to campaign so hard, because the other side is incompetent. I’m going to have to sit here for months on a trial. I think it’s ridiculous, it’s unfair.”
He will continue to use this line until election day in November.
Senate 2024
Nevada: Sen. Jackie Rosen (D) is polling very poorly for an incumbent, leading Republican veteran Sam Brown (R) only 40 to 38 percent in a new poll. Considering Trump’s robust lead in the Silver State,
With numbers like these, Rosen may become one of the top targets for Senate Republicans this year.
House 2024
Texas-18: Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas) is facing her closest primary election since she was first elected in 1994. A local media poll has her leading by just five points and far below the 50 percent she would need to move on.
How did she get here? After a failed run for Houston Mayor — she was in fact crushed by 30 points — she left off her fundraising. She is now being challenged for her seat by Amanda Edwards (D), a former intern of hers who has outraised her by an order of magnitude.
More background: During the mayoral race, the Harris County Young Democrats effectively un-endorsed Jackson-Lee, citing a “zero-tolerance policy” for officeholders who abuse their staff. Jackson-Lee has had the sixth-highest staff turnover rate in the U.S. House over the last two decades, behind three other Democrats and two Republican House members.
