I don’t have too much to add to the widely expected and yet still historic indictment revealed just moments ago. Our team is poring over the document as I write. No President, really no politician in American history has committed a series of crimes of the magnitude of those committed by Donald Trump in the final months of his presidency from November 2020 into January of 2021. While very serious, the documents case in Mar-a-Lago pales in comparison. Certainly the felony case in New York state pales in comparison. The probable indictments in Georgia are likely of comparable consequence. Indeed, they appear to be part of the same broad conspiracy that is being charged today. No crime, no violation of the law can be more consequential or grave than one that seeks to overthrow the basis of the law itself, which is to say, to overthrow the federal constitution and the state itself.

I wanted to follow up on my post below about this new Times/Siena poll. A number of you wrote in and made some of the following points. One was, isn’t it a mistake to be making much of anything about a poll almost 18 months before the election. Others pointed more generally to recent polling failures and more specifically to the fact that actual elections since Dobbs have showed Democrats overperforming both with respect to past elections and with regards to polls. One reader even noted that the Times/Siena poll was one of those which helped feed the “Red Wave” frenzy in 2022. That last point is I think only partly true. But the part that is true is worth keeping in mind.

In any case, these are all points well-taken. In general my aim in that post and other similar ones at this point in the campaign cycle is not to prognosticate but to look for vulnerabilities. We should always be on the lookout for facts or at least data that complicate our assumptions.

There’s a bit of a collective freakout this morning, at least in some quarters, about a new Times/Siena poll showing a tied race (link to crosstabs) between President Biden and Donald Trump in a 2024 rematch — a rematch which as we’ve discussed is almost a certainty. They’re currently tied at 43%. The upshot is that this shows a closer race than the 2020 election and, in the words of Times polling guru Nate Cohn, “to the extent the survey suggests a slightly closer race than four years ago, it appears mostly attributable to modest Trump gains among Black, Hispanic, male and low-income voters.” These days when a media organization invests in a big poll they really go to town with it, producing multiple articles. Here’s Cohn’s take on it. Here’s another focusing on the fact that Biden has consolidated Democratic support significantly since last year.

I’m still working through these numbers. But I wanted to share a few reactions and perhaps an outline guide to making sense of them.

As my colleague Josh Marshall notes below, today’s Times/Siena Poll gives us the clearest sign yet that, if you’re a Republican candidate and you’re not named Donald Trump, your grip on the Republican Party and the minds and hearts of GOP voters is tenuous at best and barely existent at worst.

In line with our recent theme, the Times is out today with a poll that is absolutely devastating for Ron DeSantis. But in truth it is devastating for every Republican candidate not named Donald Trump. It is only devastating for DeSantis inasmuch as he is the only candidate who appears to be in the race at all rather than running what amounts to a novelty or lifestyle campaign. According to the Times/Siena Poll, nationwide Trump has 54% of Republicans supporting him compared to 17% for DeSantis. The next five runners-up either have 2% or 3%. As I said, in practical terms, they’re not even in the race.

Is the fractured field preventing DeSantis from breaking through? Not really. If all the other candidates dropped out and gave DeSantis a clear one-on-one matchup, Trump would still be disemboweling him by a 62% to 31% margin.

I want to recommend you listen to this interview Josh Kovensky did with Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar. It’s very interesting stuff. We’re going to be doing more podcast interviews in addition to the weekly episode Kate Riga and I do. That weekly episode will continue with the same format. So I want to encourage you to check out all of these new episodes. But this is a recommendation especially about this episode. It gave me a lot of new insight into Vladimir Putin’s obsession both with the U.S. and with Ukraine and how the two intersect, long before the triangular relationship between these three countries became such a central feature of U.S. politics. Much of it I knew in a very general outline. But many details were knew to me, as was the discussion of Putin’s relationship with George W. Bush and how the collapse of Bush’s domestic support and eventual departure from the White House was a prelude to what came after. Really fascinating stuff.

If you subscribe to the podcast through whatever service you use it will be in your feed. If you don’t subscribe, please subscribe. And if podcasts aren’t your thing you can listen to it on the site right here.

We hear a lot about Joe Biden’s age. And it’s not just Republicans endlessly going to town with out of context videos or clips of Biden looking down momentarily. When I talk to civilians — by which I mean people not immersed in the daily scrum of news and politics and all the commitments that go with it — they often tell me something like, “I like Biden. But I am concerned about his age.” 

So it’s an issue. It’s certainly an issue at the level of perception. And there’s simply zero question that Biden is a much older man that he was when he was Vice President. That’s true in the obvious chronological sense, as it is for all of us. But it’s true in a more specific one as well. Nancy Pelosi is two years older than Biden. You can see some signs of age in her face. Her skin is a bit more drawn. But overall she doesn’t seem much different to me than she did a decade ago. Age affects everyone differently. That’s literally life.

But you know what? Get over it.

Just a few hours after we noted last night that Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), the only Black Republican in Florida’s congressional delegation, very softly criticized one line of Florida’s new Black history curriculum, Team DeSantis responded with outsized fury.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss DeSantis Descending: Josh and Kate discuss the continued flailing of the Ron DeSantis campaign and some last minute chaos around Hunter Biden’s plea deal.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

In today’s episode of the ongoing collapse of the DeSantis campaign, we have a new moment which we might see as the severed segments of Dead Bounce Ron roiling and twitching around, much like a worm that has been cut into pieces but continues to wiggle and move about almost as if nothing had happened. Yesterday in response to a question about ersatz candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., DeSantis said that while he wouldn’t choose Kennedy as his vice president, he would consider him to run the FDA or CDC.

This is of course a ridiculously inane suggestion. But the key is that it was immediately attacked even by many of DeSantis’s erstwhile allies or the kinds of Republicans he needs to gain the support of to remain in the race.

There are two issues to discuss.