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.