Axios has a new piece out today with the headline: Biden’s Polling Denial. It’s not spin, the article says. The President and his top advisors actually don’t believe his bad poll numbers. “That bedrock belief has informed Biden’s largely steady-as-she-goes campaign,” says Axios. The article notes yesterday’s NYT-Siena poll of swing states and another recent Bloomberg set of swing state polls as examples of bad polling numbers the White House refuses to believe, before then shifting gears to note that other polls actually show him doing significantly better.
The factual questions here aren’t terribly complicated and they’re not really the reason I note this article or write this post. Most polls currently show Biden just behind Trump in a tight race. Others show him either tied or just ahead. And there is a theory of the election that those polls, with a greater emphasis on high propensity voters and the concentrating effect of the final months of the campaign, will put Biden on top in November. I’ve tried to air these different arguments here in the Editors’ Blog. You can believe one or the other.
I note the article because of what it says about the group psychology of each party and the related and intertwined factor of how the political press treats those parties.
GOP Electeds Prostrate Themselves At The Altar Of Trump
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is expected to pay his respects to Donald Trump this morning by showing up at the courthouse where the former president is on criminal trial, joining a steady line of GOP electeds who have seen it as in their own political interest to make the pilgrimage to Manhattan.
The pathetic display of slavish devotion has a third world tinpot dictator feel to it – which is of course in keeping with Trump’s bogus casting of his own fate in terms of political repression by the current ruling regime.
While the GOP pols who see fit to kiss the ring are themselves a dubious collection of easily mocked figures – Sens. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) and J.D. Vance (R-OH) among them – watching the “law and order” and “faith-based” party kneel before a criminal defendant in a case involving a porn star no less is another marker of how far things have fallen.
But when your party has unified around insurrections past and still to come, anything is possible.
Michael Cohen Cross-Examination Could Start Today
TPM’s Josh Kovensky arrived at the courthouse this morning just after 5 a.m. ET to make sure he snares a seat for Day 2 of Michael Cohen’s testimony.
Prosecutors moved swiftly through the bulk of his direct testimony Monday, and the highly anticipated cross-examination of Cohen by Trump attorney Todd Blanche could begin as early as today.
A great thread by Lawfare’s Roger Parloff on what U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon is up to in the classified documents case.
I Missed This
Late last week, Politico published an unusual inside account of the work of the Arizona grand jury that brought indictments in the fake electors probe there:
The Arizona grand jury that recently indicted 18 people for their roles in former President Donald Trump’s scheme to subvert the 2020 election cast a far wider net than state prosecutors had publicly foreshadowed.
The panel of 16 Arizonans displayed unusual independence from the prosecutors supervising the investigation, according to a rare inside look at the secret proceedings based on interviews with eight people familiar with the probe and documents signed by a top prosecutor.
The upshot is that at least one person told my prosecutors they weren’t a target of the investigation ended up indicted within days by this very independent grand jury.
Ratfuckery, 2024 Style
TPM’s Khaya Himmelman: Far-Right Group Recruits Followers To Overwhelm Election Offices With Voter Roll Challenges
Quote Of The Day
If you threaten to harm or kill an election worker, volunteer or official, the Justice Department will find you and we will hold you accountable. The public servants who administer our elections must be able to do their jobs without fearing for their safety or their families. We will aggressively investigate and prosecute those who threaten election workers.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, at a meeting of DOJ’s Election Threats Task Force
On SACR And Extremist Ideology
Drawing in part on TPM’s work, researcher Beth Daviess takes a closer look at the Society for American Civic Renewal, focusing on its gender ideology and accelerationism.
Abortion Watch
Louisiana: Legislators are considering designating the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol as “controlled dangerous substances.”
Arizona: The state Supreme Court delayed until August enforcement of the Civil War-era abortion ban it revived, which may give the legislature’s repeal of the ban enough time to kick in without the ban ever being enforced.
2024 Ephemera
Primary elections are being held today in Maryland, West Virginia, and Nebraska.
MD-Sen: The most closely watched race is the Senate Democratic primary, where Rep. David Trone and Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks will face off for the right to take on former Gov. Larry Hogan (R) in the general election. Trone, with his Total Wine & More fortune, has outspent Alsobrooks by something in the neighborhood of 10-1, an enormous $60 million in a primary. But Alsobrooks has the support of many major Democratic figures.
Democratic super PAC launches a $25 million ad buy in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania featuring abortion rights testimonials.
Wisconsin Supreme Court signals it will overturn a 2022 decision and reinstate ballot drop boxes for absentee voting.
Where Are Senate Democrats?
House Democrats – who wield no subpoena power but understand the messaging value of hard-hitting investigations – have launched a probe of Donald Trump’s meeting last month with oil executives at Mar-a-Lago, where he implored them to funnel $1 billion to his campaign and touted it as a good investment.
More Of This, Please
An important rules change by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (so sexy) that is intended to ease the approval process for the massive expansion of the electrical grid necessary for the transition to a non-carbon energy economy.
We’re Still Not Talking About This The Right Way
A lot of focus in recent weeks on what is being dubbed the “insurance crisis” but which is really the climate crisis coming home to roost. Insurers, especially property insurers, are the canary in the coal mine that real estate values are artificially inflated because they don’t take into account heightened risks from climate change. Obviously that has profound implications on the real estate market, and it is deeply frustrating to homeowners, for example, not to have access to affordable property insurance. But I get the sense the public conversation is focused on building a head of steam to address the insurance piece of this complicated problem and continue to ignore the underlying causes.
David Sanborn, 1945-2024
The saxophone great has died after a long bout with prostate cancer:
Let me expand a bit on today’s Backchannel about that Times-Siena poll and polling issues more generally. I mentioned keeping an eye out for the delta between Likely Voter screens and Registered Voter ones. As we’ve noted a few times, this has become a consistent pattern in this presidential race: Joe Biden does substantially better in likely voter polls. And this isn’t an arbitrary difference. It’s not like saying Trump does better in the NYT-Siena poll than he does in the ABC-Ipsos one, so I prefer the latter. A Likely Voter screen is the pollster’s attempt to poll the actual voting electorate as opposed to the population of registered voters. So that distinction is very key. And if they diverge you really want to be doing better with Likely Voters, as Biden is.
While the former president couldn’t be bothered to make the trek amid a campaign schedule that has to be juggled with in-person appearances at his criminal trial in New York, Donald Trump sent a deputy in his stead to make sure Peter Navarro felt appreciated for his Trump family loyalty, as he does time for refusing to comply with a congressional investigation.
True the Vote is enlisting private citizens to help it overwhelm under-staffed and under-resourced election offices with voter roll challenges ahead of election day.
If you’re continuing to rise and fall with the latest polls, you know that the NYT/Siena poll came out today with pretty unwelcome news for the Biden campaign. Biden is close to tied or just behind in the key midwestern states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, but he is far back in the sunbelt states of Arizona, Nevada and Georgia. Possible preview: if Biden won the first three and lost the second three he would win the Electoral College with 270 electoral votes to Trump’s 268. These are bad numbers. There’s no arguing that. The NYT/Siena poll hasn’t been friendly to Biden, but it’s also a quality poll. I would recommend focusing on the averages which suggest a slightly, though not dramatically, different picture. Also, pay close attention to Likely Voter screens as opposed to Registered Voter screens.
I won’t lie to you. I don’t like the look of this poll. But the overall picture continues to be one in which the polls have continued to tighten, albeit not as quickly as I’d like, since around the beginning of March.
Remember a week ago I was trying to find out more information or really just any information about who the assailants were when a group of “pro-Israel” rioters raided the pro-Palestine encampment at UCLA on April 30th. I’ve mentioned a few times hearing pervasive rumors (“common knowledge,” the origin of which is unclear) which I wasn’t publishing because I couldn’t verify them. But on Friday The Guardian published a story confirming that a far-right Armenian-American man named Narek Palyan had been photographed both at one of the daytime counterprotests and then on the evening of April 30th, but still hours before the overnight assault.
The lines were long this morning to get into the Manhattan courthouse where longtime Trump fixer Michael Cohen, the star witness in the Trump hush money case, will testify against his old boss.
TPM’s Josh Kovensky made it in despite the limited access and heavy demand for seats. His liveblog is already up and running this morning. I’d put it up against anyone’s live coverage, including the bigs and their teams of reporters. Check it out.
Key Trial Developments Since Last We Checked In
The prosecution is speeding along in making its case and could rest as early as this week.
Late Friday after trial testimony concluded, the judge considered whether incarcerated former Trump Org CFO Allen Weisselberg should testify, setting up another potential dramatic moment this week.
Josh Kovensky captured an interesting dynamic among the Trump employees testifying, as best exemplified by former executive assistant Madeleine Westerhout.
The OTHER Trial This Week
The second public corruption trial in the last decade of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) gets underway today (the first ended in a hung jury). Politico has a nice little introductory package to the trial:
The former Trump campaign strategist and White House adviser lost his appeal of his contempt of Congress conviction for stiffing the Jan. 6 committee. He was sentenced to four months in prison, but was allowed to remain free while he appealed.
The Trials And Tribulations Of Rudy Giuliani
WABC radio on Friday suspended Rudy Giuliani and canceled his radio show because he persisted in making bogus Big Lie claims about the 2020 election.
Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss are asking the judge in Giuliani’s bankruptcy case to permanently enjoin him from continuing to defame them. As you’ll no doubt recall, Giuliani was forced into bankruptcy when Freeman and Moss won a $148 million defamation lawsuit against him.
Looking Ahead
Just Security: What Happens After Supreme Court Rejects Trump’s Absolute Immunity–Mapping 3 Scenarios
Sorting Through The Rubble Of the MAL Case
Joyce Vance: “There was little doubt before last week that federal Judge Aileen Cannon was determined to delay Trump’s criminal case in front of her—the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case—until after the election. Now, there is none.”
Ya Don’t Say?
ProPublica/NYT: IRS Audit of Trump Could Cost Former President More Than $100 Million
Cry Me A River
The same week that ProPublica won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for its examination of the cozy financial relation between Justice Clarence Thomas and billionaire GOP donor Harlan Crows, Thomas decried “the nastiness and the lies” in an appearance at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit Judicial Conference.
Going Backwards
The school board in Shenandoah County, Virginia, voted to restore the names of three Confederates to schools in the district which had previously been renamed in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd protests.
Manafort Is Out
Within hours of the WaPo reporting on former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s business dealings since he was pardoned by Trump, Manafort withdrew from his volunteer role advising the Trump campaign on the 2024 RNC convention.
2024 Ephemera
WaPo: GOP escalates fight with Secret Service over convention protesters
NYT poll: Democrats Hold Leads in 4 Crucial Races That Could Decide Senate Control
The conservative advocacy group One Nation is dropping $70 million on ad buys in five Senate battleground states.
Inside the tension between national Democrats’ pegging their 2024 campaigns to abortion rights and abortion rights advocates trying to appeal to non-Democratic voters.
Just Gonna Leave This Here …
Trump: Silence of the lamb! The late great Hannibal Lecter. It is a wonderful man. pic.twitter.com/edG9oCH933
The great Roger Corman died May 9 in Santa Monica. His influence on film as we know it is almost immeasurable, but the obituary writers took a stab at it here, here, and here.
But I go back to this poignant moment when Jack Nicholson is brought to tears while reflecting on Corman’s contributions to his own career:
An Amazing Light Show
The aurora borealis, kicked up Friday night by the most intense solar storm to hit Earth in 20 years, was visible in once-in-many-lifetimes places like the Gulf Coast and southern California. It created riveting photos of palm trees and Joshua trees framed against the Northern Lights, but I was drawn to the work of the professional and dedicated amateur photographers who seized the opportunity, such as these:
Last night really happened. The best aurora I’ve ever seen! A night I will never forget from northeast South Dakota.#aurorapic.twitter.com/YfnASSGtiw
It gets lost in the myriad headlines at the moment about Rafah, weapons cut offs, Biden, horrific civilian loss of life, etc. But there’s a short piece in the Times of Israel this afternoon that captures a dimension of what’s happening right now in Israel that is mostly off the radar in the U.S. The piece is about a reported blow up between Netanyahu and IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi. Specifically, it has the latter telling Netanyahu that because he refuses to make diplomatic arrangements for the post-war government of Gaza, the IDF is having to go back to fight again in areas it already took over. In some cases they’re having to go back and fight for the same ground a third time!
(Here’s another article in Haaretz on how the IDF is now going back into northern Gaza, which they conquered back in the fall. Privately the IDF says Hamas has reestablished control there because there’s no day-after plan, which is a diplomatic to-do item. If you blow it up and leave why wouldn’t they just go back?)
Netanyahu refuses to do that because there’s really no way to plan for the future without blowing up his governing coalition. But without some plan, the Israeli army is reduced to doing something like pushing water up a hill with its hands. The article is replete with examples of heads of the army or intelligence services trying to get someone to give them a strategy, or actually more than a strategy, just a goal. And it has Netanyahu getting mad because they’re going to the defense minister, himself a former high-level IDF general. It’s not even a question of disagreeing on strategy really — that’s for the political leadership to decide. It’s refusing to come up with any strategy at all.
