The Briefing, Vol. XII, Issue 25
This week:
- Good humor: The winning approach to Hunter Biden’s conviction
- Biden has a serious problem with black voters
- Yes, Maine is up for grabs, but it’s complicated
President 2024
Our current map of the race remains unchanged, based on up-to-date polling and other state-level developments:
As noted previously, the states and jurisdictions in this map that are uncolored represent 74 electoral votes. In order to win re-election, given all the other assumptions that go into this map, President Joe Biden (D) would have to go 74 for 74, which is a tall order. Donald Trump (R) can win by picking off any single state or district that remains uncolored on the map.
In short, this map points to a race being fought almost entirely in Biden Country.
As for the assumptions behind the map, they seem sound for now. A new poll out within the last week confirms a pretty solid Trump lead in Arizona, a state where Trump has not trailed in any of the 25 polls of the state taken since August 2023. Other new polls confirm that Maine and Virginia are both too close to assign a clear lead to either contender.
The increasing hopelessness of Biden’s situation is what has driven him to accept a debate invitation for June 27. A debate cannot help Biden on the issues where he is struggling (inflation, immigration, etc.) but it could in part alleviate concerns on the part of voters about his mental acuity, which were front and center during his trip to Europe.
Black voters: Biden is developing a serious problem among black voters that could sink him in Michigan and Pennsylvania, according to new surveys of those states commissioned by USA Today. Whereas 76 percent of the black voter sample in each state said they supported Biden in 2020, only 56 percent now plan to vote for him in Pennsylvania and 54 percent in Michingan. If the drop is even half that amount, Biden is toast. Only a relatively small number of these disaffected Biden voters will back Trump (they are more likely to vote third-party or stay home), but even a small movement is more than Biden can handle in either of these two states.
Hunter Biden conviction: The conviction of presidential son Hunter Biden on gun charges was probably inevitable. But President Biden probably was not expecting it to come down so quickly, which is why someone made the mistake of having him speak on gun control just as it happened. Although Hunter’s conviction is largely irrelevant to the broader race, it gives Trump an easy rebuttal any time Biden tries to campaign on gun control — a humorous and non-caustic reply: “Maybe first we should work on getting Bidens to obey these gun laws before we pass new ones!” If Hunter is convicted later this year for tax evasion, a similar argument will pop up for making the rich pay their “fair share” — “Maybe first we should work on getting Bidens to pay their fair share!”
So far, the Trump campaign has rightly referred to this conviction as a “distraction” from other corrupt Biden dealings related to foreign money and lobbying profits. Trump will win on this issue, so long as he continues to treat it with good humor and does not appear to be bullying an old man over his wayward son.
Trump conviction: Remember when Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felony charges? It happened less than a month ago, and by now it is already evident that it has not affected public opinion on the two candidates.
The legacy media are still running with the narrative that Trump is just successfully mitigating the damage, but we are not buying it. The speculation behind this narrative, which Politico tried to bolster with new poll results, requires a huge assumption: that independent poll respondents tell the literal truth rather than give the “correct response” when they say the conviction makes them “less likely” to vote for Trump. In reality, that response is far more likely to come from an independent voter who was not planning to vote for Trump in the first place.
This helps explain why, despite poll results like these, we have not seen movement in state or national polls when voters are simply asked their preference of candidate. As for the key states, the sole piece of evidence available is a belatedly released survey of Pennsylvania from just after the verdict showing a close race in which Trump still leads.
A far more likely scenario is that Democrats start to realize they should be a little bit scared about what their partisans did with that trial in New York, and that they will almost completely stop talking about it. Biden’s initial reaction to the Trump conviction was to own it, legitimize it, and try to take advantage of it. For now, Democrats are airing ads trying to legitimize and take advantage of it. There’s no evidence that this approach has helped him in national polling or in the few states that have been surveyed since then.
Colordado: The Libertarian Party’s decision to nominate Chase Oliver, a so-called “liberal-tarian,” is having knock-on effects in one Democratic state that has the potential to be close in 2024.
The more conservative-leaning state party, which has an agreement to stand down in state-level races against Republicans who espouse certain libertarian principles, has suggested it will not submit the paperwork required for Oliver to appear on the Centennial State’s ballot. The party’s official statement on the matter went so far as to call Oliver and his running mate “useful idiots for the regime” based on their submission to masking requirements during COVID.
In fact, the deadline for the paperwork is Sept. 6, so there is a chance they will still submit it. It just doesn’t appear that they will at this point. This is significant because it could help Trump in a close race.
For the most part, people who actually take the trouble to go out and vote third-party are die-hards with no interest in voting for the major parties. The idea that they are being “taken away” from other parties is a fallacy. Even so, there are exceptional voters and exceptional candidates (at times, Trump has been one of them) for whom some active participating voters would simply rather not vote. So at the margins, this could help Trump if Colorado ends up with a very, very close presidential race, as many states did in the 2016 and 2020 elections.
In other words, if there are Republicans who want to vote but not for Trump, they may have one less option in Colorado in 2024.
Iowa: Not that anyone was asking, but yes, Iowa has indeed become a deep red state in the Trump era. A new Des Moines Register poll of the former swing state gives Trump an 18-point lead.
Maine: For the first time, there is now a poll showing Trump leading Biden statewide in Maine. Despite having a Democratic trifecta government, Maine has been slowly inching toward the Republican column over the last decade, and Trump ran just three points behind Hillary Clinton in 2016 and nine points behind Biden in 2020, each time winning below 45 percent of the vote.
A problem Trump faces this time is Maine’s strange ranked-choice voting system, which was used in 2020 but may actually affect the presidential election for the first time this year. Ranked-choice throws away a significant percentage of votes and an even larger percentage of actual voter preferences in an attempt to construct an artificial majority. Voters rank all the candidates on the ballot, and in the absence of a majority those voting for the least successful candidates have their votes transferred to their second choices (if they made them) and so on.
The upshot is that, in a head-to-head contest, the same poll shows Biden just barely leading Trump, 51 to 49 percent, which suggests that ranked-choice could cost Trump Maine’s two statewide electoral votes.
But Biden is clearly going to have to fight hard for the Pine Tree State, and that alone is bad news for him. Remember, given the first electoral map above, Biden has to win every single electoral vote that is not already accounted for, including Maine’s two statewide electoral votes.
An interesting approach Trump could take would be to urge supporters to rank him first and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. second. This would be very hard, but if every Trump voter did this, Biden’s chances of losing the state (and thus effectively the presidency) would be much higher.
Minnesota: For the first time, a poll shows Trump leading Biden in the Gopher State. But take that with a grain of salt, because it comes from Trump’s campaign. It shows him leading by two points in a head-to-head, by four in a six-man race, and by five in a race that doesn’t include independent candidate RFK, Jr.
In general, all independent polling suggests that the race in Minnesota will be very close, so it wouldn’t be a surprise if Trump opens up a lead in independent polling at some point. Again, this is one more leak springing in Biden’s electoral boat, along with Maine, Nebraska’s Second Congressional District, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
Virginia: As long as he’s competing for Virginia, why shouldn’t Trump show up there virtually at 6 pm today to campaign against Rep. Bob Good (R), on behalf of challenger John McGuire (R), for the former’s crime of endorsing Ron DeSantis for president. Local political expert Larry Sabato believes this will put a stake in Good’s heart.
