Monday, March 4, 2024

BTRTN: Not-So-Super Tuesday Preview

Tom gives a brief preview of what is usually a drama-filled, circle-the-day-on-the-calendar extravaganza that makes or breaks campaigns.  But not this year. 

Welcome to Super Tuesday! 

Well, maybe not so super after all.  Donald Trump will likely sweep every single race on the GOP side and Joe Biden surely will do the same in the Democratic races.  There is not much suspense.  (Check that – none.)  Neither will be able to win enough delegates to secure the nomination quite yet, but both will do so in the coming weeks.  Trump currently has 244 delegates (per the AP), and even if he takes all 865 at stake tomorrow, he will still be short of the 1,215 needed for the GOP nod.  Same story with Biden, for whom the analogous numbers are 206 (that he has), 1,420 (at stake Tuesday) and 1,968 (needed for the nomination).

But wait, did you hear?  Nikki Haley beat Trump in a primary!  She won the District of Columbia contest a few days ago in a romp, 63/33, and, yes, Trump was indeed on the ballot.  They managed to find 2,035 GOP voters to take part in the exercise, which is barely more than what you’d need for a typical polling sample. Haley netted 19 delegates and some badly needed momentum, right? 

Wrong.

There are 16 primaries on Tuesday on the GOP side, and the chart below summarizes them all.  There has not been much polling anywhere, but, as you can see, it has all been devastatingly one-sided.  The DC outcome will not change that.  While Trump continues to show weakness within the GOP to the tune of the roughly 20% of the party that persistently backs Haley, his nomination is secure.  You can expect Haley to do a bit better in the “bluer” states that allow non-Republicans to vote, such as Massachusetts and Vermont.  Haley has also been outperforming her poll numbers in the primaries, that is, losing by a narrower margin than indicated by the polls.  But if any gap-closing happens again on Tuesday, it will not matter much given the gargantuan polling leads Trump is enjoying everywhere.














We’re not going to waste your time with a similar chart for the Democrats.  Joe Biden will once again take on Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson.  Williamson recently, and rather bizarrely, “unsuspended” her campaign, meaning she is back in the, uh, race.  Biden should score over 90% of the vote.

What makes all of this even less super is that, not only are all of these races foregone conclusions, but the two frontrunners are both spectacularly unpopular, even within fairly large segments of their own parties.  American voters are on the verge of creating the very match-up they claim to disdain.

Stay tuned.

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Saturday, March 2, 2024

BTRTN: An Embarrassment of Embarrassments

Tom with the February 2024 BTRTN Month in Review.

FEBRUARY 2024


Our politics are a full-fledged embarrassment.  The departure of Donald Trump from the White House has far from eliminated his pervasiveness.  We suffer still for his peculiar talent of infecting every chance we have to be normal, decent or admirable, and turning it into a national humiliation.  From his own Inaugural, and his insistence on lying about the size of the crowd (of all things to be his first priority), to his pathetic departure, refusing to abide by the sanctity of the orderly transition, instead mounting an insurrection to overturn the outcome, his presidency was an embarrassment.  But, remarkably, everything since has been even worse.  Trump dominates the Republican Party today more than he ever did as president, and our entire political system now seems infected with the embarrassment disease. 

This is not Joe Biden’s fault, although he occasionally contributes to the spectacle.  But it is his burden.  The wonder of Biden’s presidency, and its myriad legislative accomplishments, is seen only by those few with any sense of our nation’s history, but historians will be kind, perhaps even amazed, at how Biden has managed through this national nightmare.

But as for February 2024, let’s hope they bury this month.  It’s hard to know where to begin.  This will be a mind-bending dash through absurdity, so take a deep breath.

We’ll start with the GOP-led House of Representatives.  (They are such a reliable source of embarrassment that we will end with them, too.  And they will make guest appearances along the way.)  Impeachment insanity is their specialty.  Knowing there is widespread skepticism about their Biden impeachment efforts, they set their sights on a more focused target, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas.  They decided to impeach him because they don’t like the way he is doing his job and don’t agree with his policies.  Impeachment has never, ever been used in this manner.  While this is embarrassing enough, even more humiliating was actually failing to pass the impeachment resolution.  Rookie Speaker Mike Johnson violated the Pelosi Rule – that is, never take a bill to the floor unless you know it will pass.  They lost by a single vote, when an ailing Democrat showed up in a wheelchair, an appearance (and vote) the GOP whippers failed to account for.  The recently expelled George Santos (speaking of embarrassment), whose vote would have been decisive, tweeted “Miss me?”

Then it was the Senate Republicans’ turn.  Oklahoma Senator James Lankford, as conservative as they come, led the drafting of a hardline border security bill that addressed concerns about the recent massive influx of immigrants.  Biden, playing master politics on his toughest issue, embraced the bill, as did enough Senate Democrats to ensure passage with the assumed GOP support.  But Trump has no real interest in trying to fix the immigration issue, since he needs it for his campaign (especially with a rapidly improving economy), so he ordered Puppet-in-Chief Johnson to kill the bill in the House (I told you the House would be back), which he did.  But GOP Senators, who consider themselves a higher life form than their House colleagues, caved to Trump as shamefully as did Johnson – which is hard to do – and ended up casting only four votes for their own bill: by the furious Lankford and the usual suspects Romney, Collins and Murkowski.

Embarrassment is not the sole province of the Republicans (though they have a more-than-healthy market share).  Consider Fani Willis, the Fulton County District Attorney whose office is prosecuting the case of the century, if not the case in the life of our country, The State of Georgia Versus Donald J. Trump, et al.  In that formulation, she is the embodiment of the State of Georgia.  A judge in Georgia is now determining whether to disqualify her from the case because of her personal relationship – of some kind -- with the lead prosecutor that she hired, Nathan Wade, a man who does not have deep criminal court experience.  If he does disqualify her, the whole D.A.’s office is off the case, and a new prosecutor would have to be found.  That prosecutor would have to review the case to determine whether he/she wants to pursue it, and along what lines.  Not only would this delay the case, but it could jeopardize it entirely.  And this was the one criminal case that Trump could not shut down if he returned to the White House, and also the one that would be televised, so that it might actually influence swing state Georgia voters.  But regardless of the outcome of the judge's deliberations, Willis's behavior, given the stakes, was abominable.  Never was the expression, “what was she thinking” more apt. 

Who’s next?  How about Special Counsel Robert Hur?  In the best tradition of James Comey, Hur was not about to let his 15 minutes of fame be wasted on a simple “no evidence of a crime” statement in the Joe Biden document case.  But his report went beyond even Comey’s editorializing.  Instead of merely ripping Biden for loose handling of national security documents, as had Comey about Hillary Clinton, he proceeded to opine on Biden’s age and memory.  He is neither a qualified medical doctor nor an aging specialist in any way, and what he described is simply not evidence that Biden is not up to the job he occupies.  Hur’s overreaching opinion was an embarrassment to the DOJ and to prosecutors in general.  Like Willis, Hur could learn a simple lesson about boundaries: “stay in your lane.”

Joe Biden, for his part, was not about to let the Hur bombshell go unanswered, so he held an impromptu presser in which he showed outrage, fire and command of the situation.  This was a welcome show of vitality for a man who is plainly being kept away from most public interactions.  Except for one small thing -- that Biden confused the “President of Egypt” with the “President of Mexico,” which thereby totally undercut his vigorous performance and reinforced the Hur narrative, and therefore did nothing to reverse the "aging Joe Biden" narrative.  Of all the times to commit an embarrassing gaffe, sheesh.

We’ve gotten this far without devoting a whole paragraph to Trump (though we did note his pivotal role in the Senate immigration bill humiliation.)  Let’s make amends, since he was a star player (as usual) in the embarrassment follies of February.  How did he debase himself?  Let us count the ways.

·        He rescued Joe Biden from the news cycle after that disastrous press conference by announcing, less than two days later, that Russia should do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries if they did not “pay their bills.”  This is a complete abrogation of NATO’s Article 5, which provides that “if a NATO Ally is the victim of an armed attack, each and every other member of the Alliance will consider this act of violence as an armed attack against all members and will take the actions it deems necessary to assist the Ally attacked.”  Trump’s absurd construction is, of course, exactly what Vladimir Putin wishes to hear.  Trump also took credit for NATO countries upping their defense budgets to closer to the 2% of GDP level that countries agreed to “work toward” in 2005.  In fact, the increase he referred to came mostly in 2015, the year before he was elected president.  That 2015 increase followed years of President Obama cajoling NATO allies to increase their defense budgets, but in reality, was spurred more by Putin’s aggression in Crimea in 2014.

·        Trump was also convicted in Court of building his real estate empire by cheating on the valuation of his properties for loan securement purposes. He thereby incurred a $355 million fine, was banned from doing business in New York for three years and the Trump Organization now has to endure on overseer (speaking of embarrassment), among other penalties (such as goodbye Don, Jr. and Eric).

·        In the wake of the death of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, Trump had the utter gall to compare himself to Navalny, a man who voluntarily put his life at risk by returning to Russia to protest Putin after nearly dying from being poisoned by the same.  Trump used a fake bone spur diagnosis to get out of serving in Vietnam, and he is being prosecuted, not persecuted, for crimes he actually committed, not for being an enemy of the state.  But did I really need to waste two sentences explaining the differences between Navalny and Trump?  Apologies.

·        It does not stop there.  Trump has been famously vague on abortion, the GOP’s most vulnerable issue.  But reports stated that Trump was coming around to supporting a national ban on abortions, after 16 weeks, a number that had not yet been proposed in the GOP's contorted national abortion limit conversation.  Why 16 weeks?  Trump explained “It’s even.  It’s four months.”  Ah, science.

·        And finally, for Trump, because we have to cut this off somewhere, there was his court contention that he should be immune from prosecution for any actions he committed while president.  This is simply absurd on the face of it, as the Appeals Court ruling made clear, especially when they asked Trump’s lawyers if their construction allowed for Trump to order the death of a political opponent by the Navy Seals and could only be prosecuted for that act if he was first impeached.  (Trump’s lawyer said, yes, that was their contention.)

The U.S. Supreme Court suffered its own embarrassing moments in connection with Trump.  It is rare that millions tune in to listen to arguments that are presented to the high court, but there was intense public interest in the 14th amendment case, in which Colorado ruled that Trump could not appear on the primary ballot in the state because of his role in the January 6 insurrection.  The justices, including the liberal wing, abased themselves by not addressing the insurrection or any of the major constitutional issues that the case poses, but rather scurried like mice to find exit ramps on trivial issues on which they might decide the case.  Particularly egregious was the newest justice, Kentaji Brown Jackson, who seemed content to focus the case on the absurd notion that the president is somehow not an officer of the United States in the context of the 14th Amendment.  We have not seen such esoteric parsing since Bill Clinton attempted to define the word “is” to his advantage.

The court also decided to hear the immunity case, a waste of time, since they will surely uphold the Appeals Court, but, of course, it is the delay Trump wanted, not the verdict, which he knows is unwinnable.  But the delay itself lessens the odds of Trump being convicted before Election Day, his main legal strategy.

Speaking of supreme courts, the one in Alabama ruled that frozen embryos are children, which led to yet another disastrous post-Dobbs turn for the GOP.  The ruling in effect ended in vitro fertilization in Alabama, an enormously unpopular outcome, given that a full 1 in 6 people worldwide face infertility issues. Trump quickly tried to the walk back the verdict immediately for the GOP, and the Alabama state attorney general said he would not pursue IVF-related crimes -- but it is simply not that easy. Mike Johnson and 125 House GOP members sponsored a bill last year that declared that life begins “at the moment of conception.”  Try wiggling your way out of that one, Republicans (as Alabama Republicans who are trying to craft a legislative fix are finding).  The hypocritical squirming continues.

There’s so much more.  Two presidential candidates found themselves at least somewhat embarrassed in the primaries by opponents who were not even human beings.  Nikki Haley was beaten by “none of these candidates” in the Nevada primary and Joe Biden had a double-figure challenge from “uncommitted” in the Michigan primary.  And don’t forget Tucker Carlson humiliating himself as Putin’s stooge in an interview with the beast, and so on.  But we have to end somewhere, and as promised, it is where we began, with the U.S. House of Representative as they practice the fine art of impeachment with exquisite incompetence, this time with respect to their insane pursuit of Joe Biden.

The House quest to impeach Biden is, of course, Trump payback.  With such a slim margin in the House, the Biden impeachment is a flat-out political loser for the GOP, a virtual death vote for swing district Republicans like Mike Lawler from NY-17, who serves in a district Biden won in 2020.  Much of the House’s case, flimsy as it was, rested on an FBI informant who claimed to have documented evidence that both Hunter and Joe Biden were paid $5 million by a Ukraine energy firm, Burisma, to buy political influence when the latter was Vice President.  This evidence was never forthcoming, and now the source, who has strong ties to Russian intelligence, admitted that he made the whole thing up.  This shatters the already incredibly suspect case into pieces – and yet Jim Jordan and his gang of dopes carry on.  They know the truth does not matter.

They might make stuff up, but we do not.  All of this actually happened.  In February alone!  It is simply embarrassing beyond belief.

Stay tuned.


KEY METRICS

Joe Biden’s approval rating in February remained at 40%, though his net negative dropped from -14 to -16 percentage points.  His issue ratings remained at the same levels, with an ever-so-slight one point increase on the two economic measures. 

The generic ballot is now a dead heat between the Democrats and the GOP.

The "Bidenometer" dropped slightly from +52 to +49, driven by slight decreases in consumer confidence and a readjusted Q4 GDP, plus a small increase in the price of gas, offset by a modest rise in the Dow.  The +49 level means the economy is in far better shape under Biden than the one he inherited from Trump (see below).


BIDENOMETER

The Bidenometer is a BTRTN proprietary economic measure that was designed to provide an objective answer to the legendary economically-driven question at the heart of the 1980 Reagan campaign:  “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”  We reset the Bidenometer at this Inaugural to zero, so that we better demonstrate whether the economy performs better (a positive number) or worse (a negative number) under Biden than what he inherited from the Trump Administration.

The Bidenometer measure is comprised of five indicative data points:  the unemployment rate, Consumer Confidence, the price of gasoline, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average and the U.S. GDP.  The measure is calculated by averaging the percentage change in each measure from the inaugural to the present time.

The +49 for February, 2024 means that, on average, the five measures are 49% higher than they were when Biden was inaugurated (see the chart below).  With a Bidenometer of +49, the economy is performing markedly better under Biden compared to its condition when Trump left office.  Unemployment is much lower, consumer confidence is higher, the Dow is much higher, the GDP is MUCH higher.  Only the price of gas is higher, which is a proxy for general inflation.

Using January 20, 2021 as a baseline measure of zero, under Clinton the measure ended at +55.  It declined from +55 to +8 under Bush, who presided over the Great Recession at the end of his term, then rose from +8 to +33 under Obama’s recovery.  Under Trump, it fell again, from +33 to 0, driven by the shock of COVID-19 and Trump’s mismanagement of it.  Now we have seen it move upward from 0 to +49 under Biden.

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Monday, February 26, 2024

BTRTN Michigan Primary Preview: The Nikki Haley Moral Victory Tour Persists, Plus Biden Versus Uncommitted

This most peculiar primary season continues in what could be the “Ground Zero” election state in November, 2024.

By all rights, Nikki Haley should have packed up her bags after the New Hampshire primary, and if not then, then surely after South Carolina.  Three straight whippings, including Iowa, and a 20-point defeat in your home state would, in any other year, be enough to send an also-ran home.

But 2024 is no ordinary year.  Donald Trump may be locking up delegates as rapidly as an unopposed incumbent, but Haley is taking a glass-almost-half-full approach to her candidacy.  She clearly believes (even if she does not quite say it out loud) that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy.  She also believes she has a future in a re-defined, more Reaganesque GOP down the road.  And thus she – and her donors – have concluded that her best approach is to fight him for as long as she can.  (Although one major donor, Americans for Prosperity, just backed out.).  She can point to the 40%+ of the vote she received in both New Hampshire and South Carolina as evidence that her voice speaks for a powerful anti-Trump wing of the party, with a far different (and more traditional) vision of the GOP, particularly on foreign policy.  She will likely continue with her candidacy until Trump secures enough delegates to claim the nomination, which will almost certainly occur sometime after Super Tuesday.

But remember this stat from South Carolina:  roughly 20% of Republican voters in the GOP primary said they would NOT vote for Trump in November, according to AP StatCast.  That should be a very sobering statistic for TrumpWorld.  Haley is speaking to these people, reinforcing their misgivings, and also playing at the edges of those who could turn on Trump at any moment, especially the way he has been talking about Russia recently, and given the state of his trials.

So, the Nikki Haley Moral Victory Tour continues (or, as Mitch McConnell might have it, “persists”) on to Michigan for another primary tomorrow, Tuesday, February 27.  She will continue to focus on more moderate states – swing states and blue states -- in the coming week, making stops in Virginia, North Carolina, Minnesota, Colorado and Massachusetts (as well as Utah).  She may not win any of them, but she will find a reasonably sizable voting audience that will welcome her message and appreciate her willingness to take on Big Orange at some personal risk – political and otherwise.

It seems unlikely that she will reach that same 40% level in Michigan, which is neither a reasonably reliable blue state (like New Hampshire, which backed the Democrat in the last five presidential elections) nor her home state (like South Carolina).  A loss in Michigan -- especially a bigger one -- will continue to erode the rationale for her candidacy, but she will not let that deter her and will compete across the Super Tuesday primaries – in 16 states and territories – on March 5.

But for now, Michigan will not be pretty for Haley.  BTRTN predicts that Donald Trump will win the Michigan GOP primary by roughly a 70/30 margin.   The drumbeat for Haley to drop out to “unify the party” will then bang ever louder. 

Perhaps the more interesting primary is, for once, on the Democratic side.  Joe Biden did extremely well in the symbolic New Hampshire primary, scoring 64% of the vote as a write-in candidate (he skipped the primary since New Hampshire defied the new primary schedule that Biden backed, which put South Carolina first), and following up with a massive 96/2/2 win over Marion Williamson (who had already dropped out) and Dean Phillips in South Carolina.  Phillips’ ballyhooed run against Biden on the “age” issue has gained zero traction.

But the dynamics in Michigan are quite different, and Biden is locked in an unlikely battle on the ballot with the “uncommitted” line, which essentially represents a proxy vote on the part of Arab-Americans (and other Democrats) protesting Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas War.  Arab-Americans are a potentially pivotal constituency in the Wolverine State, numbering roughly 200,000 registered voters, who, by some estimates, backed Biden in 2020 with 70% of their vote.  Biden won Michigan by 154,000 votes in 2020, so you can see that the Arab-American numbers were significant in his victory.  But his support amongst them has evaporated, and polls (from November) show only 16% of Arab-American Democrats are backing Biden. 

This is, of course, because of Biden’s initial embrace of Bibi Netanyahu and Israel in the wake of the horrific terrorist attack of Hamas on Israel last October 7.  But as the civilian body count rose, tolerance for Biden’s full-throated endorsement evaporated among many, including the youth vote and, naturally, Arab-Americans.  Biden has been sprinting toward a more peace-seeking position ever since, pressing for hostage release, humanitarian aid, IDF battle plans that minimize civilian casualties, and a quick end to the fighting.  It is unclear whether these actions have made a difference to Arab-Americans, but clearly the protest is evidence of discontent.

A group of Michigan politicians, led by Michigan House majority leader Abraham Aiyash, with support from U.S. rep Rashida Tlaib (a ”Squad” member) is calling for Michigan Democrats to vote for the “Uncommitted” line in protest of Biden’s policies.  While Biden will win this primary, the key question is how many votes the “Uncommitted” line will garner.  The protesters say they are seeking 11,000 uncommitted votes, symbolically representing the margin of Trump’s win in Michigan in 2016.  But in 2020, in a routine primary that Biden won en route to the White House, the uncommitted line won 19,000 votes out of nearly 1.6 million cast.  So, a better indicator of the depth of the anger might be how much more than 19,000 the protest generates.

Michigan could very well be “Ground Zero” on Election Night for the Democrats.  If Biden can win Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where he is doing relatively well in the polls (generally even with Trump, while he trails him by a small margin in other swing states, including Michigan), he only needs Michigan’s 15 electoral votes to get to the 270 he needs to win the election.  Biden will surely remind voters that Trump would have embraced Netanyahu even more tightly than he did and likely would have ignored hostile world opinion on Netanyahu's prosecution of the war, and thereby secured no aid or hostage relief.  But Biden must also deal with the threat of protest votes for third party candidates, convincing voters this fall that a vote for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. or Jill Stein is really a vote for Trump.

And Michigan could also be the decisive race in the Senate, one of several very close races that the Democrats must win to have a change to keep control of the Senate.

Stay tuned!