Biden Released an Ad with Trump Saying He is Responsible for Ending Roe v. Wade

Just in case you thought abortion wasn't going to be the biggest issue in the election campaign, Joe Biden is making it clear that it will be. The day after the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the 6-week ban passed by the state legislature is fine and dandy, Biden released this ad:

In the ad, Trump brags that for 54 years the anti-abortion forces tried to overturn Roe v. Wade and he finally did it and is proud of it. Then Biden says he wants to make the right to choose legal nationwide. Although he carefully does not use the word "abortion" in the ad, it is pretty clear what he means. The ad makes it pretty black and white and is part of a $30 million ad blitz that will run in seven swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Given that about two-thirds of the country wants abortion to be legal, making the election about abortion is something Democrats want to do but Republicans do not. But if Democrats spend millions on ads focusing on abortion, like the one above, Republicans are going to have to deal with it.

Trump is trying hard to avoid taking a position on what kind of abortion ban is preferable. The problem is that a referendum on abortion will be on the ballot in Florida and he is going to be constantly asked if he will vote for it. There is no good answer, because "yes" will alienate his base and "no" will alienate the suburban women everyone is lusting after. "I don't know yet" is going to alienate everyone. (V)

Trump Raised $66 Million in March

Incredible sums are being raised by both parties. Each one might raise and spend a billion dollars before it is over. Thousands of ads will be bought and television viewers will be sick of them before we hit August, let alone November. Will they change many votes, given how well the candidates are known? Maybe a few, and in close elections, changing a few votes could matter in about half a dozen states.

Yesterday, Donald Trump and the RNC announced that together they raised a mind-boggling $65.6 million in March and had $93.1 million cash on hand on March 31. The March haul beats the $62 million Trump raised in March 2020, but not by much. Biden hasn't announced his March haul yet, but did say that the fundraiser at Radio City Music Hall last week brought in $25 million. At the end of February, the Biden campaign and DNC together had $155 million cash on hand.

Trump is aware that his small donors are getting donation fatigue what with up to eight e-mails a day begging for money and touting all kinds of (phony) matching programs. Consequently, he is going after whales now, something he didn't do in 2016 or 2020. On Saturday, he is hosting an event at Mar-a-Lago where billionaires John Paulson, Robert Bigelow, Steve Wynn, and Robert Mercer will be urged to open their checkbooks. Trump has said he expects to collect $40 million from it, topping what Biden got last week in New York.

The Trump campaign and RNC have created a joint fundraising account called the Trump 47 committee that can legally accept checks up to $814,600. And donors can also donate to the campaign, the RNC, and various (super) PACs in addition. A PAC Trump cares about a lot is the Save America PAC, which is paying his legal bills.

One high-profile (former?) Republican who is not welcome at Mar-a-Lago and who is not going to donate to Trump is George Conway, the former husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway. He is going to contribute $929,600 to a pro-Biden event in D.C. on April 24. This is his first big donation to Biden.

But again, keep in mind that there are not a lot of swing voters left and watching 20 or 30 ads from each side every evening is probably not going to have much of an effect (except to annoy the hell out of people). However, some of the money may go to the ground game—setting up offices, hiring staff, and getting people registered. That may actually matter more than more ads that drive everyone nuts. (V)

Republicans Pushing for More Mail-in Voting Have a Problem: Trump

Republican strategists have finally figured out that having Democrats vote for 30 or so days before an election and Republicans voting only on Election Day is not a good idea. There could be a severe storm on Election Day, long lines, or something else that makes voting difficult then and some Republicans might just skip voting. Consequently, the RNC and other Republican groups are now pushing early voting, a 180-degree switch from their previous position.

Unfortunately, there is a large, orange-colored fly in the ointment: Donald Trump. He strongly opposes it. This is going to make it a hard sell.

At a Trump rally in Erie County, PA, last year, Republican officials approached all 11,000 attendees and tried to hand them applications for an absentee ballot. Only 300 of them took one. With Trump attacking the procedure constantly, things may not go better this year. In Michigan in February, Trump said: "Mail-in voting is totally corrupt." This kind of remark does not encourage his supporters to vote by mail, no matter what the RNC says or does.

One two-time Ohio Trump voter, Linda Ragsdale, said: "Things conveniently get lost. Especially when concerned with Trump votes." Now, it is true that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy did his best to slow down the mail around Election Day in 2020 because he knew more Democrats than Republicans vote by mail. He might try that again this year, but he certainly does not know which ballot envelopes contain Trump votes in order to slow them down, even if he wanted to slow the Trump votes, which he definitely does not. DeJoy cannot be fired by the president or Congress. Only the USPS Board of Governors can do that. Governors are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Currently, the 11-member board has three Democrats, four Republicans, two independents, and two vacancies. On March 4, 2024, Joe Biden nominated former Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh to one of the vacancies but the Senate hasn't confirmed him yet. (V)

Trump Got The $175 Million Bond from a California Supporter

Judge Arthur Engoron ordered Donald Trump to post a $454-million bond to stay seizure of his properties in the New York fraud case. Trump said he couldn't find a single company to put up a bond that big. Nobody thought of the idea of getting nine companies to put up $50-million bonds and have Trump put up the final $4 million himself. So an appeals court reduced the bond to $175 million and Trump posted it. So who backed the bond?

It has come out that the bond was posted by a company owned by a California billionaire Trump supporter, Don Hankey. Hankey was a former car salesman who came to realize that many sales failed because the buyer had poor credit and was unable to get a loan. He saw dealing with people who were poor credit risks as a golden opportunity and built a huge business loaning money to people who were poor credit risks, charging a huge interest rate, and using their cars as collateral. His company repossesses 250 cars a day due to repayment problems. Hankey likely falls under the dictionary definition of loan shark.

So it appears that Hankey took Trump on as a customer because: (1) He is a Trump supporter and (2) He is used to dealing with people who are poor credit risks. He makes the business work by charging them an arm and a leg and demands that the loan be fully collateralized. The terms of his deal with Trump have not been released, but presumably Trump had to put up a fair amount of collateral and pay an outrageous fee.

However, Trump is not out of the woods. The appellate court could take its time deciding whether the $454 million penalty is appropriate. After the decision, Trump could appeal again to the state Court of Appeals, which is the highest court in New York. The whole process could easily take months and extend past the election, even into a second Trump presidency. If Trump finally lost the case while he was president, he could be ordered to pay up. But what if he refused? The bond would cover $175 million of the fine, but collecting the rest could prove difficult. This is why NY AG Letitia James wanted a bond that covered the whole penalty, but she didn't get her way. (V)

Nebraska Is Considering Moving to Winner-Take-All

Forty-eight of the 50 states award all their electoral votes to the statewide winner. Nebraska and Maine give one electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district and two electoral votes to the statewide winner. Sometimes that matters. In Nebraska, NE-02 (Omaha) has a PVI of EVEN and Democrats sometimes win one electoral vote there, as Joe Biden did in 2020. Since Republicans expect the presidential race to be close in 2024, they want to change the rules wherever they can to help Donald Trump.

So, a bill has now been introduced in the theoretically-nonpartisan-but-actually-Republican-controlled unicameral state legislature (the state Senate, since the state House was abolished in 1934) to go to winner-take-all like 48 of the other states. In practice, this could result in one more electoral vote for Donald Trump this year. Trump is pushing hard to get the bill passed. Every little bit could help, after all.

The bill was introduced by state Sen. Loren Lippincott (R). He doesn't want to have a straight up-or-down vote on it because the state Senate has a filibuster and he doesn't think the votes for cloture are there. Consequently, he wants to attach it as an amendment to some other bill that would have the votes to overcome a filibuster.

Yesterday, one Democrat, Mike McDonnell, switched to the GOP, which would give it just enough votes to break a filibuster on a stand-alone bill. But McDonnell said he would still vote against the change. Charlie Kirk, CEO of Turning Point USA, has now urged his 3 million followers to try to pressure the governor and legislature to do everything they can to get the bill through. Kirk asked Nebraskans to "demand their state stop pointlessly giving strength to their political enemies."

Of course, when the current law about electoral votes was adopted, it was seen as more democratic than a system that gives 100% of the electoral votes to a candidate who gets 51% of the statewide vote (or, depending on circumstances, less than 51%). In fact, if every state adopted the Nebraska/Maine system, some of the objections to the Electoral College would go away. In particular, instead of candidates spending close to 100% of their effort in seven states, they would be battling over the 87 districts in 28 states that are between R+5 and D+5 (inclusive). Blue states like California don't want to do this because there are red districts in the state. Red states like Texas don't want to do this because there are blue districts in the state. It would only work if done nationally, all at once.

One problem the bill has is that the legislative session in Nebraska does not run all year. In fact, there are only 6 more working days, so it is pretty much now or never for the bill. (V)

Trump's Motion to Delay His First Trial Is Rejected

In a last-ditch effort to avoid going on trial later this month, Donald Trump's lawyers made a motion to delay his hush-money trial until after the Supreme Court rules on the presidential immunity case now on the Supreme Court's docket. The judge countered with an offer to delay it until after the next solar eclipse, which happens to be April 8. No, actually the judge didn't offer that, but it makes as much sense. The hush-money case is about trying to hide payments made to Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet about a short affair she had with Trump, which she described as the worst 90 seconds of her life. The affair happened before he was president and while the cooking of the books did happen after he was inaugurated, that doesn't relate to any official actions he took as president. Cooking your company's books is not part of the job description of being president.

In any event, Judge Juan Merchan rejected the motion and confirmed that the trial will begin on April 15, as scheduled. This could be the only one of the four cases in which Trump has been criminally charged that goes to trial and gets a verdict before the election (see below). Still, it creates the possibility that Trump will be a convicted felon on Election Day. For voters who aren't paying attention, the possibility that Joe Biden will be running ads telling everyone that Trump is a convicted felon could be actual news that might move some votes. (V)

Jack Smith Pushes Back on Aileen Cannon

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon is slow-walking the trial of Donald Trump for holding classified documents he had no right to take with him after he left the White House. She is also working on jury instructions now, despite the trial probably being many months away. She has asked both Special Counsel Jack Smith and Trump's lawyers to propose jury instructions based on two scenarios. The first proposal assumes the president has the authority under the PRA (Presidential Records Act) to categorize any record as personal, rather than belonging to the government. The second proposal would let the jury examine individual documents and let them decide if they belonged to the president or the government.

Smith filed a motion arguing, in no uncertain terms, that both proposals are wrong and are based on a fundamentally flawed legal premise that the PRA grants the president or anyone else the authority to label government documents as personal. He said that all the seized documents are unquestionably presidential documents, many of them classified. The president can declassify documents, but there is a specific procedure for doing that and Trump did not follow it. There is no telepathic declassification procedure. He also said that the jury should be asked simply to determine whether Trump willfully kept national defense secrets at home without any authorization to do so. Smith said that if the judge goes with either scenario, he would appeal the decision. That would be a win for Trump, of course, since his goal is to delay the trial until after the election.

So by proposing only scenarios that Smith says are simply unacceptable, Cannon is practically forcing an appeal and thus a major time delay. She may lose on appeal, but if her goal is to help Trump by buying time, this strategy could well work. If she's merely incompetent, well, Trump still gets what he wants, which is time. (V)

RFK Jr. Asked Tulsi Gabbard to Be His Running Mate and She Refused

Last week, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. introduced his running mate, Nicole Shanahan. Shanahan has never served in government in any form and has no qualification to be president should the need arise, but she was formerly married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin and the divorce left her extremely wealthy. This is why Kennedy picked her, despite her being totally unqualified.

Now it has come out that Shanahan wasn't Kennedy's first choice. Before popping the question to Shanahan, Kennedy popped it to former representative Tulsi Gabbard and she said no. Gabbard refused to explain why she refused the potential bucket of warm liquid. She did say the two of them met multiple times to discuss the offer, but in the end, she wasn't interested. Was Gabbard the only other one Kennedy asked? He's not talking.

Gabbard used to be a Democrat and even ran in the Democratic presidential primary in 2020, but she is way out of step with the Democratic mainstream and got nowhere. She later left the Party, just as Kennedy did. Gabbard's name often appears on pundits' list of veepable women. We're not convinced that makes sense. She doesn't bring in any demographic or state and she doesn't have any expertise on some subject that would be useful in a presidential administration. (V)

Trone Leads in Democratic Senate Primary in Maryland

The Senate election in Maryland would have been a snoozer if Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) had decided to run for reelection. But his retirement, plus the fact that former Maryland governor Larry Hogan (R) has jumped in, has possibly made it a competitive race. Two Democrats are battling for the Democratic nomination: Rep. David Trone (D-MD) and Prince George's County Executive Angela Alsobrooks. Which one wins could determine the outcome of the Senate race.

Trone, who is white, owns Total Wine & More, the largest privately owned beer, wine, and spirits retailer in the U.S. He is extremely wealthy and could make up for not being as well known as Hogan by carpet-bombing the state with ads introducing himself and attacking Hogan. Alsobrooks is Black and could turn out large numbers of Black voters, who make up 31% of the state's population, the fourth-largest percentage of any state in the country and the highest one outside the Deep South. The two of them obviously bring different advantages to the race.

Now we have a Goucher College poll of the primary. It has Trone at 42% and Alsobrooks at 33%. The primary is on May 14.

The poll also asked about the general election. In a Trone-Hogan race, Hogan is ahead 43% to 42%. In an Alsobrooks-Hogan race, Hogan is ahead 44% to 40%. But note that Alsobrooks' strength (that she is Black) is already well known, but Trone's advantage (that he can bury Hogan in negative ads), hasn't been deployed yet, so he has plenty of room to grow. Democrats were not counting on a competitive race in such a blue state, but Hogan has suddenly created one. (V)

DJT Is the Most Shorted Stock in the Country

We already noted this briefly earlier this week, but it's worthy of a bit more attention. If you are convinced that some stock will go up in value, it is easy to make money on it: just buy the stock and later sell it when it has gone up. But can you make money when you are convinced a stock will go down? Yup. Wall Street has thought of that. You borrow the stock from someone who owns it, sell it, and buy it back when the price goes down and return it to the owner cheaper, but otherwise undamaged. This is called short selling and is quite common. The lender always charges a fee when lending the stock, so it has to drop more than the fee to make a profit short selling. It's also very risky because if the stock price doubles or triples before the deadline for returning it, you have to buy it back for a much higher price than you sold it for. Nevertheless, so many people feel that Donald Trump's TMTG (Trump Media and Technology Group, ticker symbol DJT) is so overvalued at $48.81 (yesterday's closing price), that DJT is the most shorted stock in the country. If it drops precipitously, the people shorting it will make out like bandits. But if it drops only a little, or not at all, they could lose a lot of money.

A. Lot. of. Money. In March, short-sellers of DJT lost $126 million, expecting it to collapse when TMTG merged with Digital World Acquisition Company. Not only did it not collapse, but it has gone up from its $36.94 pre-merger price.

Shorting DJT isn't so easy. There are 137 million shares of the stock outstanding, but 132 million are owned by Trump and insiders, and they are not lending them to be shorted. That leaves only 5 million that could be shorted. And 4.9 million of them are already on loan being shorted. This means the fee lenders can charge is now enormous, which in turn means the stock has to take a huge nosedive to make shorting profitable.

And there is more. There are DJT warrants being traded as well as puts and calls. If you want to get into the weeds on this, try this article. But the bottom line is that there are many investors who think DJT is wildly overvalued and are willing to put their money where their minds are. (V)

Note: Sometime on Thursday, The New York Times issued a correction that DJT is not the most shorted stock, it is the most shorted SPAC stock.

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