The Briefing, Vol. XII, Issue 19
This Week:
- Noem shoots her foot in the VP race — so whom will Trump pick?
- Biden’s national polling improves, but in battleground states he is doing as badly as ever
- Democrats hope to use Yucca against Sam Brown
Outlook
Veepstakes: Whether it’s fair or not, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) has certainly shot herself in the foot with her election year book release. She has probably ended any chance she had of becoming Trump’s running-mate with the revelation in her new book that she took out and shot a misbehaving 14-month-old dog. In fairness, the dog had bitten people and killed chickens, leading her to view it as untrainable, but many of all political stripes have objected based on the dog’s age.
This leaves a number of other possibilities, including Sens. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and Tim Scott (R-S.C.) as well as Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.). Although Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has been mentioned by some — and still others suggested months ago that Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) drop out of the presidential race and vie to become vice president — Trump essentially cannot pick any fellow Florida resident due to the 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. (Unless Trump wins practically all of the swing states, any Florida running-mate would fail to get an electoral college majority after forfeiting Florida’s votes. In that case, Trump would be forced to serve alongside whomever the Senate chooses for him.)
Stefanik has proven herself a Trump loyalist, although her rural New York base of support probably won’t provide Trump with any sort of boost. Trump has made a big deal about increasing his percentage of the black vote, and to that end he could do a lot worse than Scott, who incidentally would be the first black man and the first black Republican vice presidential nominee. Vance would be a challenging choice, since he once called Trump an “idiot” and “loathsome.” But he is a pioneer in Trumpist politics and seems to be in the former president’s good graces at this point.
One of the more interesting options would be Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), whose name has come up recently. Cotton, a talented young veteran who knocked off an incumbent Democratic senator in 2014, publicly made a very big point of embracing Trump’s law-and-order posture during the summer of the George Floyd riots. Despite his previous neoconservative leanings on foreign policy, he has adopted Trump’s skepticism of U.S. support for the war in Ukraine.
At a time when Trump is hemming and hawing over the abortion issue, the choice of Cotton might also reassure conservatives that Trump isn’t going to go wobbly in a second term.
Finally, in an era of eyeroll-worthy tokenism, when leaders virtue-signal by choosing the sexes and races of appointees before even considering their merits, the unapologetic choice of a white man in his mid-40s will seem refreshingly based.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden is still stuck with Kamala Harris.
National polling: What is significant about the new ABC News poll released over the weekend is not Biden’s lead. Rather, it is (1) the fact that Biden’s status improves when the poll screens all adults (among whom Trump leads) for “registered” and then improves again for “likely” voters, and (2) the fact that RFK, Jr., unlike in nearly all other polls, takes more support away from Trump than from Biden. For the latter result, ABC notes that RFK’s “supporters are more apt to be Republicans or GOP-leaning independents (54 percent) than Democrats and Democratic leaners (42 percent),” acknowledging that the sample size is really too small to measure this accurately.
This all makes the online survey’s result suspicious, but it is not the only poll suggesting an overall national improvement for Biden in the last week. As of Monday morning, Biden now leads in five of the last ten national polls released, some of which were tied, so this is actually a noteworthy improvement for him. Even so, Biden’s tenuous lead is not good for an incumbent president, and it is not good compared to his last race against Trump, in which he led in about 99 percent of all surveys yet came within a hair’s breadth of losing the Electoral College anyway.
It is also worth considering whether the demographic changes between the parties — that is, the move of Hispanics and the working class toward the GOP, as college-educated whites trend more Democratic — might not be changing the assumptions people make about voter turnout and who is most likely to show up.
Battleground states: More importantly, even after recent events that were expected to be bad for Trump (the recent Arizona abortion controversy, in particular), Biden continues to trail in every important swing state based on polls taken last week — Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania. Note that Trump doesn’t need to win all of those — he just happens to be ahead in all of them, which would imply a 312 or 313 Electoral Vote victory. Biden needs to carry the last three and prevent Trump from putting any other states into play, especially Minnesota, Virginia, and Maine (Trump was campaigning in New Jersey recently), although that’s probably more of a stretch.
Remember that Trump won in 2016, and nearly won again in 2020, despite losing the national popular vote by significant margins on both occasions. As we often point out, he has proven twice that he really does not need to lead in national polls in order to win the 2024 election.
Reasons for Biden optimism? Even so, a caveat for those overly optimistic about Trump’s chances. Biden is roughly matching him in national polling despite straining beneath the weight of a sub-40 percent approval rating. Any improvement in the current situation for Biden could work wonders for his numbers, especially if his partisan allies manage to keep Trump tied up in court with their various lawfare civil cases and prosecutions.
It is hard to imagine Biden doing anything constructive about some of the complaints against him (the border crisis in particular), but if the Fed’s disinflation campaign succeeds over the summer, it could materially change his situation.
Governor 2024
Indiana: Sen. Mike Braun (R) is the odds-on favorite to win the gubernatorial nomination in tomorrow’s primary over Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch (R), former Attorney General Curtis Hill (R), and a handful of other candidates.
West Virginia: Attorney General Patrick Morrisey (R) and Del. Moore Capito (R), son of U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R), are in a dogfight for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in next Tuesday’s primary. This is the race to watch, as current and very popular Gov. Jim Justice (R) will coast to the GOP nomination for Senate to replace the retiring Joe Manchin (D).
Morrisey has led in nearly all media polling, but Capito is benefiting from Justice’s recent endorsement. Justice has followed up on this endorsement by campaigning at various events alongside Capito. This is an unusual thing for candidates in parallel races to do, but Justice’s enormous lead over primary opponent Alex Mooney (R) and the lack of any serious Democratic opposition gives him the luxury of doing pretty much whatever he wants. Likely Republican Takeover.
Senate 2024
Nevada: Likely GOP nominee Sam Brown (R) is taking heat for coming down during his 2022 campaign on the wrong side of a contentious local issue — the use of the painstakingly, expensively constructed and perfectly safe Yucca Mountain facility to house the nation’s nuclear waste. In general, politicians from both parties take public positions strongly against the use of Yucca Mountain, which the late Senate Leader Harry Reid (D) fought against using every trick in the book.
Democrats are hoping that this issue gives a lifeline to endangered Sen. Jacky Rosen (D), whose mid-to-low 40s polling against Brown has been lackluster but still better than Biden’s numbers in her state.
