Arizonans Head to the Polls

It was Arizona's turn to hold their (second) primary yesterday; here are the results that are of interest:

• U.S. Senate: Trumpy Republicans got their crackpot yesterday, as Kari Lake took 54.5% of the vote, dispatching two challengers handily. She'll face off against Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), whose race was uncontested. In 2022, a total of $129 million was spent on Arizona's Senate race. This year, it could top $150 million.
  
  
• AZ-01: Relative to most states, Arizona has an unusually high number of competitive House seats, with three of them. The first of those is AZ-01, which is R+2, and is held by Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ), who barely won his last election. In view of these facts, this seat is a high-priority target for the Democrats.
  
  The blue team is going to have to wait to find out the identity of their horse, however, as there are three candidates in close proximity to each other with 70% of the vote in: Amish Shah is at 24.2%, Andrei Cherny is not far behind with 21.5% and Marlene Galan-Woods has 20.7%. The Democrats will be happy with any of the three; Shah has the most experience in elective office, Cherny is a former state party chair, and Galan-Woods is a woman in a race where abortion rights will be front and center.
  
  
• AZ-03: The seat being vacated by Gallego is not one of the competitive ones; it's far and away the bluest seat in the state at D+24. So, the Democratic primary yesterday was the de facto general election. And Gallego's replacement is... unknown, at the moment. Former Phoenix Vice Mayor Yassamin Ansari is more moderate, and was backed by $1 million in money from cryptocurrency interests. She stands at 46%, with 73% reporting. Former state Sen. Raquel Terán is more progressive, and has the full-throated backing of every individual and group you can think of who cares about progressive politics, abortion access, or Latino/a candidates. She has 42%. If Terán comes from behind to claim the nomination, she'll be in line to be the first Latina to represent Arizona in Congress.
  
  
• AZ-04: This is another competitive district, at D+2. Rep. Greg Stanton (D-AZ) was unchallenged, and he's yet another who will have to wait to see who his opponent will be. Kelly Cooper is a Marine Corps veteran and a businessman; he's currently got 32.4% of the vote with 70% reporting. Zuhdi Jasser is a physician; he's at 27.4%. There isn't a lot of space between the two on the issues; both are running on border security, first and foremost, followed by fiscal conservatism/taming inflation, which may not be compatible goals. Jasser is also a flat taxer, if that is useful to know. The Trumpiest candidate in the race is Dave Giles, but he sits at 23.6%, and is effectively eliminated from contention.
  
  
• AZ-06: This is the last of the competitive districts, at R+3. And it's the only one of the three where the general election matchup is already set. That is because Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R-AZ) easily dispatched a challenge from the right, while former state senator Kirsten Engel (D) was unopposed. Joe Biden won this district in 2020, while Ciscomani and Engel faced off in 2022, with the former winning 50.7% to 49.3%. Needless to say, the Democrats think that with presidential (and senatorial) coattails, Engel has a good chance to avenge her loss this year.
  
  
• AZ-08: This was the battle of the losers. When Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ) announced her retirement from this very red seat (R+10), two different Republicans saw their chance to finally win an election: failed U.S. Senate candidate (and vassal of Peter Thiel) Blake Masters and failed state attorney general candidate Abe Hamadeh. At the moment, with 83% of the vote in, Hamadeh has 29.8% of the vote as compared to 25.3% for Masters. That's a pretty tall mountain to climb; if Masters can't do it, maybe he'll finally go away. Or, alternatively, maybe he'll move a couple more steps down the ladder, and wage a Thiel-funded campaign for vice associate dogcatcher of Maricopa County.
  
  
• Maricopa County Recorder: Speaking of Maricopa County, a generally low-profile election there was very, very high-profile this cycle. You see, incumbent Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer (R) is a traitor. His crime? He says that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. The Maricopa County GOP really should have just strung him up from the highest tree they could find, Nathan Hale-style, but instead the Party ended up running two election-denier challengers. One of the two, Justin Heap, knocked off Richer, 42.4% to 35.9%. Presumably, in the general, the same voters who rallied to defeat Kari Lake and Blake Masters in 2022 will join together to give the job to Democrat Tim Stringham, whose primary was uncontested.
  
  
• Slow Play: As you can see, the state had some difficulty getting ballots counted in a timely manner yesterday. The reason is a new state law that governs the handling of mail-in ballots, and that was worded in such a way that election officials don't entirely understand what the new rules are. The state legislature is going to try to clarify its intent, and hopefully they will succeed. Having one of the swingiest states take forever to produce results, as a result of confusion surrounding absentee ballots, would be a propaganda bonanza for Donald Trump and his allies.

After a bit of a lull, the next few weeks will feature a run of primaries. More tomorrow. (Z)

Republicans Continue to Be Anti-Democracy...

Maricopa County (see above) isn't the only place where elections are going to be run by people who are election deniers. Rolling Stone decided to take a look at the matter, with distressing results. Among the folks managing this year's election will be at least 70 officials who are on the record as "stop the steal"-ers, with 22 of those having actually refused or delayed certification of results at some point in the past.

The picture painted by the magazine's report is disheartening, to say the least. These folks are swimming in a sea of propaganda, culture wars and conspiracy theories. Many of them have the zeal of true believers, and don't much care if a few pesky laws have to be broken along the way. And while they tend to oversee relatively small numbers of ballots, a state cannot report its results until all the ballots are in. So, in swingy states, these election deniers will be in a position to drag things out, until pro-Trump lawyers can get involved, and throw even more wrenches into the works.

And this is not the only bad news of this sort this week. CNN had a piece about an organization called True the Vote, whose mission is to remove registered voters from the voting rolls. Their primary tool is an app called IV3, which has address information for voters. And what members of True the Vote do is compare the information in IV3 to voter registrations, and file challenges whenever they think something is awry.

There are a few obvious problems here. The first is that the information in IV3 is often inaccurate or out-of-date. The second is that there have been lots and lots of challenges of people registered at legal, but unorthodox, addresses, like rooms at nursing homes. The third is that election officials are actually pretty good at keeping voter rolls updated as local and state laws require, and the challenges submitted by True the Vote waste time and resources needlessly.

Thus far, half a million voter records have been challenged. And while most challenges are unsuccessful, some have succeeded, particularly with "friendly" elections officials. And so, some perfectly legitimate voters have been disenfranchised.

And here's the kicker: Like so many Trumpy operations, this one is ultimately a grift. Certainly, the thousands of people using the IV3 app are serious about "election integrity," as they see it. But the founder of True the Vote, Catherine Engelbrecht, and the director, Gregg Phillips, have been using donations to the organization to line their own pockets, very possibly in violation of federal law.

All of this is reprehensible, and one can only hope that the guardrails of the system will mitigate much of this bad behavior. Nonetheless, it is also clear that, as per usual, if the Democrats want to win the presidential election, they are going to have to run up the score as much as is possible. (Z)

...While Musk Continues to Be Anti-Democrats

Elon Musk has made eX-Twitter into his own personal fiefdom, and along with that, the platform he uses to flog his political agenda for the benefit of a large audience. We had an item on Monday, for example, about the deepfake video of Kamala Harris he posted, in violation of eX-Twitter policies.

Musk has been doing more than that, however. It's one thing to issue forth with propaganda. It's another thing to muzzle the opposition. And yet, the billionaire has crossed that particular Rubicon at least twice in the past several days. Last week, for some period of time, users were barred from following the @KamalaHQ Twitter account. And yesterday, after the group had raised $4 million for the Harris campaign, the eX-Twitter account of "White Dudes for Harris" was permanently suspended (although Musk wants to be loved, and is sensitive to blowback, so we'll see how "permanent" the suspension really is).

Until there is legislation or jurisprudence to the contrary, eX-Twitter is Musk's property, and he can do as he sees fit with it. If he wants to block various Harris-related accounts, that is certainly his prerogative. But this gives permanent lie to the always dubious proposition that the social media companies promote Democrats and censor Republicans. On top of that, Musk is going to reap what he sows. His little toy is hemorrhaging users and money, and it's fair to wonder if it will still be around in 5 years. Meanwhile, left-leaning voters have noticed that Musk also owns a car company, and they are taking their business elsewhere.

And it's not just Tesla that's becoming radioactive. More and more, lefty types are gravitating toward Threads, even with its downsides, as an alternative to Twitter. And so it is that Musk is singlehandedly re-creating the cable news divide, with one side having its channel/microblogging platform and the other side having ITS channel/microblogging platform. (Z)

Project 2025 Director Steps Down...

Donald Trump has come to the realization that while the base loves Project 2025, the rest of the country is repulsed by it. And so, he's spent the last few weeks claiming ignorance of the whole thing. That's not moving the needle, however, and so yesterday Project 2025 director Paul Dans fell on his sword and resigned his position.

We are struggling to see how this changes anything. It remains the case that:

• Dans is still gung-ho about Project 2025, and said as much in the e-mail announcing his resignation.
  
  
• Trump's claim that he does not know about Project 2025 is WAY different from him saying "I would never do any of these things."
  
  
• Even if Trump promised he would never do any of these things, few people would believe him, because he's so truth-challenged, and because he's clearly been trying to hedge his bets here. He LIKES Project 2025, particularly what it will do for him in terms of exciting the base and, potentially, making him a more powerful president.
  
  
• The fingerprints of Trump's running mate, J.D. Vance, are all over Project 2025. Not only did he write the intro to the upcoming book promoting Project 2025 but, according to a new report from Media Matters, he's a part of several organizations that helped shape Project 2025, he's friends with most of the key players who helped write Project 2025, and he's been on many different podcasts singing the praises of Project 2025.

We've previously predicted that, once the general election started, it was going to get tough for Trump to keep being all things to all voters—fanatical for the fanatics, but reasonable for the independents/moderates. Project 2025 would seem to be a pretty good example of this; the former president is trying to stake out a middle ground, and is pleasing nobody.

Abortion access is another example of this. Yesterday, Alexandra DeSanctis, writing for National Review, noticed that Trump and Vance have gone a bit soft on abortion access. Referring to the Dobbs decision, she writes:

Evidently convinced that softening on abortion is a wise political move, Trump and Vance have chosen to grossly mispresent the Court's ruling in order to justify their newfound support for chemical abortion. It's buck-passing of the most devious sort, a half-hearted shrug at a ruling that never happened to give themselves cover as they wink at the vast majority of abortions.

She concludes:

It's one thing for pro-lifers to reluctantly embrace the Republican ticket as the only alternative to the abortion extremism. It is another thing entirely to do so while ignoring this egregious shift in favor of legal abortion and pretending that the party and its nominees are as pro-life as ever.

It would not be well for Trump if other anti-choice voters begin to see things similarly.

Obviously, the people who like Project 2025 and Dobbs are never, ever going to be Kamala Harris voters. But if some percentage of Trump's base becomes persuaded that he's now just another politician, and that he won't follow through on his policy promises, they could stay home on Election Day, or maybe vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And if a candidate is running a base-only strategy, they just can't afford too many defections from the base. (Z)

...But J.D. Vance's Past Keeps Catching up with Him...

A couple of weeks ago, it was an endless parade of bad news for the Democrats. Now, the pendulum has shifted. Didn't Newton have some sort of law about this?

With J.D. Vance anointed as Donald Trump's running mate, the media is going through his past interviews and speeches with a fine-toothed comb. And they are striking oil everywhere. Much attention has been paid to his 2021 comments during a Tucker Carlson interview, in which he smeared childless women in general (and Kamala Harris in particular) as "childless cat ladies," and suggested that childless people are less worthy of citizenship than people with kids. As it turns out—surprise, surprise!—that was not just a one-off. CNN and Media Matters have already found a bunch of others:

• Vance once sent a fundraising e-mail railing against "radical childless leaders in this country."
  
  
• On a podcast, he described childless people as "more sociopathic" and "less mentally stable."
  
  
• He tweeted that: "Our country's low birth rates have made many elites sociopaths."
  
  
• Immediately after the Carlson appearance, he sent an e-mail to supporters that said: "Did you see me on FOX Primetime recently? I needed to speak DIRECTLY to patriots like you about the serious issue of radical childless leaders in this country."
  
  
• Not long thereafter, he sent another e-mail that said: "Our country is basically run by childless Democrats who are miserable in their own lives and want to make the rest of the country miserable too... What I want to know is: why have we turned our country over to people who don't have a direct stake in it?"
  
  
• During an interview with Sebastian Gorka, he described Kamala Harris as part of a "childless cabal of people who don't really care about the future."
  
  
• In a speech, Vance described childless Americans as "evil" and declared: "It's not good. It's not healthy. You see the obsessive, weird, almost humiliating aggressive posture of our media and you wonder how could these people possibly seem to be so miserable and unhappy? Well, the answer is because they don't have any kids. Kids are the ultimate way that we find self-meaning in life, whether your own children, your grandchildren, your nieces and nephews."

In short, the sentiments expressed on the Carlson show reflect a worldview that Vance really ascribes to, and that he has reiterated, over and over again, across many different media.

Needless to say, his positions worked OK for an election in red Ohio (although even then, he underwhelmed). But these positions are losers in a national election. And we're not sure there's a solution for Vance here. There's just too much footage and audio of him saying this wild (and weird) stuff. And he doesn't actually want to back off of his position, anyhow, because the base eats it up. The only way this doesn't hurt the Vance-Trump ticket is if Vance's wacky ideas on childless people become old news, and are forgotten by voters. With less than 100 days to go, and given how insulting and judgmental his views are, we doubt that will happen. (Z)

...Plus, It's a "Weird" Ticket

For several months, Gov. Tim Walz (DFL-MN) has been describing Donald Trump as "weird." That descriptor did not land for a good long time, but then J.D. Vance joined the ticket, and... it took off like wildfire.

It is not too surprising that Vance was the tipping point here. To start, a lot of his ideas are, well, weird (see above). Maybe not to the people he's pandering to, but to pretty much everyone else. On top of that, we currently live in the television age. And whether it is fair or not, a politician's appearance is a big part of how people respond to them. In Vance's case, well, he's got a weird face. It's overly round (oval is instinctively preferred), he's got a weak chin, his eyes are slightly asymmetric, are unusually narrow, and are blue. All of these things tend to work against him on a subconscious level. Vance clearly knows this, and grew a beard to obscure some of his less appealing features. Maybe it was an improvement, but it also means he looks sinister. There is a reason that the last time the U.S. elected a bearded president was 130 years ago.

In any case, the "weird" bit has spread widely in the last week; even the Kamala Harris campaign has embraced it:

As you can see, the Harris campaign agrees with us that Project 2025 is one of the millstones that cannot be removed from the necks of Trump and Vance.

Some commenters have expressed the view that this sort of personal attack amounts to playing the game on Trump's terms, and could rebound on the Democrats. For example, The New York Times' Thomas Friedman writes:

For a few days this last week I started to believe that Kamala Harris and the Democrats could come from behind and beat Donald Trump. But then I started to hear Democrats patting themselves on the back for coming up with a great new label for Trump Republicans. They are "weird."

I cannot think of a sillier, more playground, more foolish and more counterproductive political taunt for Democrats to seize on than calling Trump and his supporters "weird."

There have been other pieces like this in the past few days, though it can be hard to know which ones are expressing real concerns, and which ones are more like concern trolling.

For our part, we are inclined to disagree with Friedman, et al. There are a number of pluses to "weird":

• It does a pretty good job of crystallizing what the Democratic base, and what many undecided voters, already think about Trump and Vance.
  
  
• It's relatively mild, in contrast to something like "deplorables," which was like waving a red flag in front of a bull.
  
  
• It's adaptable; and can be replaced/reinforced with words like "creepy" (see above), "strange," "odd," "off," and "kooky."
  
  
• It doesn't make a moral judgment. If you say that Vance is evil or immoral because he believes [POSITION X], then you are saying that anyone who agrees with him on that issue is also evil or immoral or whatever. On the other hand, Vance and/or Trump can be weird without those who agree with them on (some of) the issues being weird.
  
  
• It's short. You can fit it in a tweet, a headline, or a text message. You can put it on a shirt, a hat, or a bumper sticker.

We suspect that the Harris campaign will probably back off of using "weird," but maybe not. And even if they do, it's entirely plausible that the characterization could have real staying power, to the detriment of the Republican ticket. You can never know what word or phrase or idea will do the trick, but when you find one, you run with it.

(Z) may have told the story of the time, in 2004, that he assigned students to write an essay responding to the outcome of the presidential election. And every single student, more than 150 of them, regardless of their political leanings, mentioned the phrase "flip-flopper" in their assessment of why John Kerry lost. Clearly, that framing penetrated deeply the psyche of the electorate. "Weird" is much less calculated and deliberate than "flip-flopper" was, but could it have a similar impact, particularly now that we are in the social media age? We wouldn't bet against it. (Z)

Budget Can Is All Set Up to be Kicked, Yet Again

House Republicans would very much like to pass spending bills for FY 2024-25. First, because they know that if there is no budget in place by the time the new fiscal year begins, the current budget will largely dictate ongoing spending, and the priorities of Joe Biden will remain well-supported. Second, because they would like to show the country, heading into the election, that House Republicans can actually govern.

The only fly in the ointment here is... House Republicans can't actually govern. Sure, they can come together on the occasional articles of impeachment or resolution advising Kamala Harris that she's personally responsible for everything that's gone wrong since the Black Plague, but they can't actually produce viable legislation. Go ahead, name one meaningful bill that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has shepherded through the House based on Republican votes. We're waiting. The meaningful bills that HAVE passed the lower chamber during Johnson's tenure were passed with both Democratic and Republican votes, normally more of the former than the latter. This will happen when one leads a conference where the margin of error is less than 10, and the number of nutters is considerably more than 10.

The fundamental division in the Republican conference was on display during the wrangling over the spending bills. On one side were the nutters. They wanted to do what they always want to do, and to pass spending bills loaded with messaging amendments (The State Department cannot pay to stage drag shows! No federal funding for schools that teach evolution! No abortions in space!) and with drastic cuts to social programs. Such bills will never get a vote in the Senate, with the looney-tooniest stuff giving Democrats plenty of cover for tossing the legislation in the garbage.

On the other side were the more sensible Republicans. Their preferred strategy was to pass bills that reflected Republican priorities, but that were within the realm of reason. In other words, they wanted to make an opening bid, in hopes of steering the overall negotiations with Senate Democrats in a Republican direction. And, in the end, the more sensible Republicans torpedoed the crazypants stuff, while the nutty Republicans torpedoed the more reasonable stuff, and so no spending bills were passed. Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), who is on the more sensible side, observed that many of his colleagues "want the appearance of fighting more than they want conservative wins" and that they would rather "get nothing than something."

So, Johnson & Co. have given up. Indeed, the House isn't even in session right now, and won't be back until... September 9. Then, they will be back for a total of 13 workdays before adjourning for the entire month of October and the first two weeks of November, so that members can campaign. The government's fiscal year begins on October 1, and so House Republicans are going to be stuck agreeing to a continuing resolution, unless they decide they'd like to shut down the government 5 weeks before an election. (Z)

Today's Presidential Polls

Kamala Harris continues to get a lot of good polls, given that she's only been the Democrats' candidate for about a week. Yes, it's possible she's in a honeymoon phase right now, and that her numbers are artificially high. But, again, it's also possible that she's got room to grow her support, whereas Donald Trump probably doesn't.

The question of "northern" vs. "southern" route continues to be an interesting one. The numbers in Michigan and New Hampshire argue for "northern." On the other hand, the numbers in Pennsylvania (not great) and Nevada argue for "southern." (Z)

State	Kamala Harris	Donald Trump	Start	End	Pollster
Arizona	47%	49%	Jul 29	Jul 30	PPP
Arizona	49%	47%	Jul 24	Jul 28	Morning Consult
Florida	42%	49%	Jul 24	Jul 27	U. of North Florida
Georgia	47%	47%	Jul 24	Jul 28	Morning Consult
Georgia	48%	47%	Jul 29	Jul 30	PPP
Michigan	53%	42%	Jul 24	Jul 28	Morning Consult
North Carolina	46%	48%	Jul 24	Jul 28	Morning Consult
New Hampshire	50%	46%	Jul 26	Jul 28	Emerson Coll.
Nevada	47%	45%	Jul 24	Jul 28	Morning Consult
Pennsylvania	46%	50%	Jul 24	Jul 28	Morning Consult
Pennsylvania	47%	48%	Jul 29	Jul 30	PPP
Wisconsin	49%	47%	Jul 24	Jul 24	Morning Consult
Wisconsin	49%	47%	Jul 24	Jul 28	Morning Consult

Click on a state name for a graph of its polling history.

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