Trump Is Gradually Getting More Endorsements

Endorsements generally matter little to the average voter, but Donald Trump cares a lot about them and tries hard to get them. He is beginning to make some progress on that front. The bloc he most wants consists of the 49 Republican senators. Their value is that if enough senators back Trump, the message that sends to Nikki Haley and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) is that they are toast (and burnt toast, at that), ready to be disposed of.

A couple of easy ones were Sens. John Hoeven (R-ND) and Kevin Cramer (R-ND). They naturally supported their own governor, Doug Burgum (R-ND), for as long as he was in (which was not all that long, despite giving folks $20 gift cards for a $1 donation). Trump long ago understood that they had no choice but to support their state's favorite son, but he kept whispering in Hoeven's ear. Hoeven said that Burgum was not only his governor, but also a personal friend. Trump told him that he understood, so he could wait until Burgum was gone. When Burgum dropped out, both North Dakota senators endorsed Trump.

Another recent convert is Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL), who has been in the Senate only 1 year now. She is on the RNC's advisory council and the RNC frowns upon members and advisors from picking sides, but she nevertheless has endorsed Trump. She is not really that Trumpy, but she is young and inexperienced and probably decided that incurring Trump's wrath is not a smart career move. She is also surely aware that 47 of the other 48 Republican senators despise the senior senator from Alabama, Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), for his efforts blocking military promotions. By being a team player, Britt is making it more likely that when something comes up involving Alabama, the Senate leadership is sure to go to her for advice, even though she is only 41 and the junior senator.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the only senator who could pass for a chameleon without getting into a costume, has now endorsed Trump. Does he even like Trump? No, not at all. But he is scared of something Trump might be able to do to him, so he endorsed him—for the moment. But if Nikki Haley catches fire, he could jump off Trump's bandwagon and onto hers in an instant.

Not every Republican senator has endorsed Trump, though. In fact, only 18 of the 49 have. Some of the holdouts are fairly open about it. Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE) noted that 18 < 49/2; in other words, Trump's endorsements are "less than half of the Senate GOP. So it probably reflects his support in the general public. I am not planning on doing any endorsements at this point." (English translation: "Trump's an idiot and a menace and I'm going to pray that someone else is the nominee.")

Trump also got a major endorsement in the House. On Tuesday, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) threw in the towel and said: "I look forward to working with President Trump and a Republican House and Senate." Is he really looking forward to it? Absolutely not. He's probably scared to death of the thought, knowing how Trump dumps on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) all the time. But Scalise knows which way the wind is blowing. (V)

Biden Has Come Out of Hibernation

A lot of Democrats have been wondering: "Where's Joe?" Biden hasn't campaigned at all and they are wondering if he is up to it. Turns out he is and was just waiting for 2024 to roll around to hit the trail. To start with, Biden actually has a strategy. He doesn't want to make the campaign about himself or whether voters like him or not. The question he will pose to voters over and over is: "Do you want me or Donald Trump as your president?" With his approval rating round 40%, this is clearly the right question. Many people dislike him, but if they dislike Trump even more, Biden wins. He knows that. So it will be "I support democracy and America. He supports Hitler." And the more Trump talks about "vermin" and "poisoning the blood of America," the more Biden will harp on this, knowing full well that this kind of talk does not go over well in the suburbs or with independents. Trump's base is lost to Biden, but there are still voters up for grabs.

Biden will open his campaign on Jan. 6, 2024, 3 years after Trump attempted a coup, with a speech at Valley Forge, PA, where George Washington camped out with his troops almost 250 years ago. The President will talk about how Washington led an army to throw out a king who was dictatorial and how fighting for democracy has been a dominant theme in the country's history for 2½ centuries. The events of Jan. 6, 2021, are likely to come up a couple of times.

The next event will be in Charleston, SC, at the Mother Emanuel AME Church, a historically significant Black church where a gunman killed nine people in a Bible study group in 2015. No doubt Biden will bring up the issue to the Black congregants of who is on their side and who is against them, and maybe mention which president fought for and signed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, and what party that president was a member of. Remember, it was the Black voters of South Carolina who saved Joe's bacon in 2020 and he wants to make it clear that they are not forgotten. With Biden's support slipping among Black voters, this is the place to make it clear that he is grateful to them and what he plans to do to help them in a second term.

Kamala Harris will make her own trip to South Carolina later. Her focus there, in Wisconsin, and elsewhere will be reproductive freedom. The Biden campaign needs to deal with her general unpopularity, and one way to do it is to make her the spokesperson for reproductive rights. She's not expected to win over any MAGA base voters, but women, Black voters, and young people are together a much bigger group than the MAGA base. That's who she is going to aim her pitch at. The unsaid message is: "If Biden were to die, then you would get a president whose #1 priority is protecting reproductive rights." This way, instead of being a millstone around Biden's neck, she could become a real positive for many voters in her own right.

Another thing Biden is doing is trying to turn the border issue on its head. Republicans are hammering him on it and may try to impeach him about it. He submitted a budget request to Congress for $106 billion for aid to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and securing the southern border. House Republicans so far have refused to even take a vote on the bill. Biden is going to hit them over the head with the bill, claiming that he wants to spend billions to shore up border security and Trump and the Republicans are against that. What's Trump going to say: "Yeah, but voting for border security also gives money to Ukraine and my buddy Putin told me to oppose that"? Most Americans support helping Ukraine, so that won't work. Biden will just keep hitting Trump and the Republicans on their failure to beef up border security, something he wants. If he says it often enough and loudly enough, some people are going to think the problem with the border is that Republicans are refusing to spend money to hire more Border Patrol officers and give them the equipment they need.

So, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) can solve the problem and deny Biden a talking point by just putting the bill up for a vote and letting it pass with largely Democratic votes, right? Wrong. Trump's signature issue is immigration and the border and he is never going to approve letting Biden get a win on it, even if the win is about hardening the border. For Trump, the world is a zero-sum game. If Biden wins, then Trump loses. He is not capable of saying: "I forced Biden to adopt my position so I won this one." Can't be done.

So Trump is going to oppose the bill because: (1) His buddy in Moscow doesn't like the Ukraine funding and (2) He doesn't want to give Biden a win on anything, certainly not on being able to claim he tightened the border because Trump failed to do so when he was president. So if Johnson is scared of offending Trump, he's not going to bring the bill to a vote, which will give Biden even longer to pound the Republicans on failing to secure the border. At a certain point, millions of voters will think the border problem is due to the Republicans' refusal to spend money on it—especially if Biden frames their refusal as being due to their obsession with the debt ceiling, something the voters don't even understand. Hell, even the staff mathematician doesn't understand it because the debt-ceiling law is an attempt to repeal mathematics.

One huge opportunity Biden has—and Trump doesn't—is the State of the Union address. It will be the biggest audience of the year and will dominate the news cycle for at least one day. That can't be an hour-long attack on Trump, which would be off-putting, but he can say America is doing great due to all his achievements as president, which he can talk about at some length. These include strengthening Obamacare, reducing drug prices, beating inflation down, bringing manufacturing jobs back to America (the CHIPS Act), improving the national infrastructure (while creating good jobs), dealing with climate change in the Inflation Reduction Act, enacting a 25% minimum tax on billionaires, and more. Many people will be hearing this for the first time.

One of the many things Biden will likely point out is that the Inflation Reduction Act caps the out-of-pocket costs for insulin at $35/mo. for Medicare recipients. Lilly and Novo Nordisk voluntarily agreed to the same limit starting Jan. 1, for everyone. Now the third major insulin producer, Sanofi, has also agreed to an out-of-pocket cost of $35/mo. This means that almost all the roughly eight million Americans with insulin-dependent diabetes can now get their insulin for $35/mo. This is going to make a huge change in some of these people's lives and it is directly attributable to Biden's actions. When someone now asks him: "What have you done for me lately?" he can now answer: "Do you or does anyone you know have diabetes?"

Biden can also use the speech to hammer Trump for opposing the bill to fund more Border Patrol officers because he is obsessed with the debt ceiling. That's not the real reason, but it sounds plausible since Republicans have often shut down the government over the debt ceiling, so people will believe it. So if Biden plays his cards right and gets a bit of help from Trump, he could neutralize one of the Republicans' biggest issues. The 2024 SOTU hasn't been scheduled yet, but Biden's first two were on March 1, 2022, and February 7, 2023. So, that gives some rough indication of when the 2024 edition will be. (V)

Latina Candidates for Congress Are Pushing Abortion Hard

There are at least seven Latina Democrats running for Congress. All of them are going to make a woman's right to an abortion the centerpiece of their campaigns. Even though most Latinas are Catholics and the Catholic Church is not keen on abortions, all of them see this as a winning issue and will push it for all it is worth.

Most of the Latinas are running for the House, but former representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, an immigrant from Ecuador, is running for the Senate against Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL). While she is not widely known in Florida, there are many Latinos in Florida, so that is a bloc she will target heavily.

BOLD PAC, the campaign arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, plans to "lean in very hard" on this issue in 2024. The executive director, Victoria McGroary, said: "We know that we are on the right side of the argument. We know that voters hate the Republican position and that it is key to our path to victory." Among all Latinos, 57% say that abortion should be legal in most or all cases. Among young Latinos, it is 72%. A poll of eight key states done by UnidosUS, a Latino civil rights organization, found that 71% of Latinos opposed efforts to make abortion illegal. Even Latinos who are relatively conservative think that the decision to have an abortion should be made by the pregnant woman, not by politicians. Latinos have been slowly drifting away from the Democrats, but McGroary thinks this issue may bring them back.

Activists in Arizona, Florida, and seven other states are trying to get initiatives on the ballot in 2024; these initiatives would offer an up-or-down vote on abortion. In New York and Maryland, such initiatives have already been approved. The Democrats' hope is that some marginal voters will turn out just to vote on the initiative and while they are there, they will vote for Democrats who are pro-choice.

Last month, a Texas woman named Kate Cox tried to get an abortion when she learned her fetus had a fatal genetic disease and would not survive long, if at all. She went to court in Texas and lost. Now she is going to be the poster child (woman?) for abortion rights. We wouldn't be surprised if she turned up in a few TV ads later this year. First-person testimony makes for powerful ads. Will this be the magic bullet for Latina candidates? They sure hope so. The only fly in the ointment is that these ballot measures also drive up turnout on the other side. (V)

Election Expert Trump Hired to Find Fraud in 2020 Found None

Ken Block is an election security expert. In 2020, Donald Trump hired him to look for election fraud. After a careful search, he didn't find any and told Trump. He also told then-Chief-of-Staff Mark Meadows. So what did Trump do? He lied and has been saying for 3 years that there was fraud. Block finally had enough and wrote an op-ed for USA Today telling his story. He also wrote a longer version of the story as a book that will come out March 12.

Block also gave a deposition to the Jan. 6 Committee. The Committee gave all its material—including the transcript of Block's deposition—to Special Counsel Jack Smith. So when Trump tries to argue at his trial that there was fraud, so he was the lawful president, Smith is going to counter with: "The election security expert you hired told you that there wasn't any fraud, so you knew all along that you lost." Smith also subpoenaed the data from Block, which he turned over as required by the subpoena. The nice thing about computer data is that you can give it away and still have it. So did anybody else subpoena the data? Yup. Fulton County DA Fani Willis also did, and Block gave it to her as well. So both Smith and Willis now have the data and Block's analysis and conclusions.

The documents Smith and Willis have also discuss how Block came to his conclusions and why he believes there was no systematic fraud. And of course, he is available for in-person testimony in any courtroom where the prosecutor wants him.

In the op-ed, Block also talks about (and condemns) the constant stream of lies from Trump and Rudy Giuliani about the election. He noted that a judge determined that Giuliani had lied about two Georgia election workers having committed fraud and ordered him to pay the workers $148 million. Giuliani repeatedly said that he had evidence of fraud. Block said that if such evidence existed, his study would have turned it up and it didn't.

Block said that in cases where there is fraud, it is generally detectable, quantifiable, and verifiable. His analysis of the 2020 election doesn't show any serious fraud and he hasn't seen any evidence of serious fraud from anyone else's study and analysis. He also noted that although there was a very small amount of double voting, it was bipartisan, with as many Republicans as Democrats voting twice. He also found a very small number of deceased people voting and even these may not have been fraud. Eight states have statutes specifically allowing early votes by people who subsequently die before Election Day to be counted. Eleven states have statutes saying that an early absentee vote of someone who dies before Election Day may not be counted. In the other states, the law does not deal with this possibility. In no state is casting a vote and then dying before Election Day considered fraud. In practice, once the ballot is removed from the signed envelope and put into the hopper of the counting machine, there is no way to retrieve it, even if the local election board learns that a voter died before Election Day in a state where such votes may not be counted. Of course, if a person dies and then someone else casts a vote in his or her name, that is definitely fraud, but Block said very few votes were cast by dead people. Block is not a Democratic sympathizer. He ran for governor of Rhode Island in 2014 as a Republican and lost. (V)

Haley Is Now in Second Place

In the FiveThirtyEight polling average, Nikki Haley has now surpassed Ron DeSantis and is in second place nationally for the GOP presidential nomination. This is the first time she has been ahead of DeSantis in this average. Haley is also ahead of DeSantis nationally in The Hill's average and is statistically tied with DeSantis in the RealClearPolitics' polling average. Of course, when new polls come in following her inability to figure out what the hell caused the Civil War, that could change.

If Haley does manage to come in a clear second in most states, that raises the question of whether Trump will consider her as his running mate. Being a serious vote-getter does have its advantages. On the other hand, Trump has to consider whether his voters will be able to stomach an "uppity" woman of color, especially one who has said unkind things about him. And if his former campaign chief, Corey Lewandowski, were to tell him at great length about all the admirable qualities Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD) has, he might decide that she was a better choice.

In other polling news, RealClearPolling now has Trump at 62.7%, with Haley indeed second and DeSantis third (by 0.1%). Trump's lead is 51.7%. It's tough to blow a 50+% lead in a couple of months. This enormous lead also means that even if everyone except Haley drops out, and all the non-Trump voters go for Haley, she still won't be anywhere near Trump's percentage.

On the other hand, in Haley's favor is that she is now bringing in big time money. She just announced that her haul for Q4 2023 was $24 million, up from $11 million in Q3 and $7 million in Q2. In total, since she announced her run, she has raised $50 million from 180,000 donors. She had 83,000 new donors in Q4. And this is all hard money, separate from the millions the Koch network is going to spend to support her, independent of her campaign. (V)

Impeachment Fever Grips the House

House Republicans have formally voted to investigate the possibility of impeaching Joe Biden because he, well, he is a Democrat and the Democrats impeached one of their guys. Twice. But some cooler, wiser heads have realized that impeaching Biden might not be a good move because they know what happened to the Republicans after they impeached Bill Clinton in 1998—and he actually committed a crime (perjury), whereas Biden hasn't committed any crimes.

Consequently, House Republicans now have a backup plan. The Homeland Security Committee has scheduled a meeting for Jan. 10 to consider impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Mike Johnson has approved the plan. This way, if the Republicans get cold feet and decide that impeaching Biden and then losing a couple dozen swing seats in 2024 is not worth it, they can impeach Mayorkas. That will please their base and do far less damage because most Americans have no idea who Mayorkas is and probably can't even pronounce his name correctly.

The nominal charge against Mayorkas is that he has failed to enforce the immigration laws he took an oath to enforce. White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre called the whole thing a "political stunt."

We're not so sure this stunt will work out so well. Remember, as described above, Biden is going to hammer the Republicans for not providing the money to increase border security. If the Republicans impeach Mayorkas for not defending the border, he is going to loudly proclaim: "I wanted to defend the border better, but you jerks refused to appropriate the money I needed to do so. So whose fault is this?" In the court of public opinion, that might sound like a pretty good defense. If so, who is going to get the blame in Nov. 2024? Might just be the Republicans. (V)

Biden Won't Have Competition in North Carolina Primary

Rep. Dean Phillips (DFL-MN) has launched a pointless bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. So has Marianne Williamson. They will both be on the New Hampshire primary ballot. Biden will not be on the ballot, although Democrats can write him in. If Joe Biden loses New Hampshire, the headlines the next day won't be kind to him.

Phillips and Williamson also want to get on the ballot in other states, but the DNC is fighting that everywhere. Yesterday, the DNC won a round when the North Carolina Board of Elections unanimously decided that Biden will be the only Democrat on the ballot. There is a state law that requires 10,000 registered members of a party to sign a petition to add a candidate to the ballot and Biden is the only Democrat who made the cut. And if Biden wins New Hampshire on write-in votes alone, that pretty much finishes up all the other would-be Democratic nominees. (V)

Former Kentucky County Clerk Kim Davis Has to Pay Another $260,000

Remember Kim Davis, the former Clerk of Rowan County, KY, who famously refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2015, after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriages? She is an evangelical Christian who said that her personal religious belief in a Supreme Being trumped the Supreme Court. So she refused to sign the marriage licenses of same-sex couples in the county. This meant they couldn't get married.

Some of them went to court. Federal Judge David Bunning ordered her to sign the marriage licenses and she refused. Bunning then found her in contempt of court and gave her an all-expenses-paid 5-day vacation in a Kentucky jail. Bunning is a staunch conservative and was appointed to the bench by George W. Bush. He is the son of the late Kentucky senator (and baseball player) Jim Bunning (R).

When Davis got out of the clink and went home, two more Davids, David Ermold and David Moore, who were denied a marriage license by Davis, decided to sue her. In Sept. 2023, a jury awarded them $100,000 in damages. That was the good news. Now David #1 (Bunning) is back in the act. He ordered Davis to pay Davids #2 and #3 another $260,104 in attorneys' costs and fees. Thus the bill for her "brave" (but illegal) stand is now a tad above $360,000.

Davis is represented by the Florida-based Liberty Counsel, a nonprofit group that provides pro bono litigation services for Christians who don't want to obey federal laws because they feel their religion entitles them to do so. They are planning to appeal the case. (V)

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