The 24 Seven - 5/14/24
The top seven stories shaping the race for the White House
Welcome to The 24 Seven – 24sight’s daily roundup of the top seven stories shaping the race for the White House. If you see something we missed, have some suggestions or care to share a hot tip, please drop us a note: info@24sight.news.
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Tom, Pilar and Warren
1 Bonfire of the vulgarities
Former president Donald Trump paid his former longtime lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen $130,000 to hide an affair he had with porn star Stormy Daniels because he was worried it would hurt him with women voters, Cohen testified in the criminal trial of Trump.
Trump’s high-powered team of lawyers have argued that Trump was trying to protect his wife from finding out about the affair, not to hide it from voters. But Trump himself, in 2016, said he was concerned it would turn women against him at the ballot box.
“‘This is a disaster. Total disaster. Women are going to hate me. This is really a disaster. Women will hate me. Guys may think it’s cool, but this is going to be a disaster for the campaign,’” Trump said, according to Cohen’s testimony.
In spite of a circus of a trial with plenty of lurid distractions — from Cohen painting the former president with a fecal insult to Daniels testifying their sex was not great — and a worn-down Trump struggling to stay awake, the realpolitik of the first ever criminal trial of a former president has come into sharper focus with each week.
Trump was worried he’d lose the election if the affair got out.
That’s the testimony from his own former aides, given under threat of being charged with perjury if it turns out to be a lie. Trump has yet to subject himself to this long-tested form of verification. He still has that option.
2 Running Mate: Season 38
Trump’s counterprogramming to his multiple trials, the “veepstakes” – like a sweepstakes, many will enter or be floated by Trump, only one will win – converges with the main story this week, as his retinue of supporters head to the Manhattan courthouse to appear with him.
Venture funder turned senator J.D. Vance, a friend of Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., appeared behind him Monday. Sen. Tim Scott, the South Carolina Republican who launched his career in the ‘90s saying his goal was to become vice president, is pondering a turn in the hallway with Trump, Semafor reports.
Unlikely to appear: former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley.
Axios scooped last week chatter that Trump wanted to woo Haley to his ticket, just a few days after she surprised him picking up 22% of the Republican primary vote in deep-red Indiana. Trump himself later said that he didn’t want to pick Haley. Which doesn’t mean he won’t try to get her.
Showing up in court is much in line with Trump’s hallmark political loyalty tests.
Former Vice President Mike Pence spent four years showing his fealty nonstop, from taking his water off the table in synch with Trump, to joining in a cavalcade of plaudits for Trump at a 2017 Cabinet meeting.
He finally broke with Trump over the former president’s efforts to overthrow their joint election loss. After leaving the White House, Pence turned that higher loyalty into a line in his stump speeches, “Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president.”
3 Will Maryland get a Black senator?
Maryland, home to one of the largest Black populations in the country and a long-thriving Democratic machine, has never elected a Black senator. (The state only recently elected its first Black governor, Wes Moore.)
Some of that can be chalked up to the old alliance of Southern Democrats and urban and suburban Democrats which have dominated state politics for decades. (It’s only in the past few decades that Southern Maryland’s tobacco crops were replaced with soybean and corn crops in the wake of the historic 1998 tobacco settlement.)
Today, the state will decide if the executive of Prince George’s County, historically a home for prosperous Blacks in America, Angela Alsobrooks advances to a general election battle with wine and beer tycoon David Trone, one of the state’s eight members of Congress. The winner will face former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan in November in what promises to be one of the tightest races in the country.
The last Black politico to make it to a general election Senate battle was also from Prince George’s County: former Republican National Committee Chairman and former Md. Lt. Gov. Michael Steele. Steele was considered a strong contender for a Republican running statewide in traditionally Blue Maryland, but still ended up losing to then-Rep. Ben Cardin by 10 percentage points.
For more on Maryland’s surprisingly nasty Democratic primary, recommend our friends at Maryland Matters and The Baltimore Banner – part of the wave of new outlets picking up the slack from legacy media. Key dynamic: how will Black voters in populous Baltimore City sway?
4 Portrait of an Insurrectionist
The disgraced architect of Trump’s failed effort to overthrow the 2020 election, John Eastman, is set for a star turn this weekend at the California Republican Party’s convention. A hard right faction within the state party is hosting Eastman for a feting Friday night, notable though that it’s not officially sponsored by the state party.
Randy Berholtz, a top official in the California Republican Party, is pushing a resolution at the upcoming California GOP convention this weekend, urging the party and its affiliated lawyers to support Eastman, despite his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
“As Benjamin Franklin said in the early days of the American Revolution, ‘We must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately,” Berholtz wrote in an email to state party members obtained by 24sight News.
For a cool $100, party members can hang out with Eastman and get their photo taken. (It’s $25 for each additional person who wants in on the photo.)
5 Secret voters
The latest hair-raiser in political circles was the New York Times/Siena poll showing Biden trailing Trump handily in key swing states. (The second release from the poll, Tuesday, reiterated that third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to eat into Biden’s support among young and minority voters, potentially setting him up as the key spoiler in November.)
But the ever-expanding political polling industry has come up short routinely every two years since famously whiffing on Trump’s surprising upset in 2016. (One of the best post-election analyses, a frank admission from veteran pollster Patrick Murray at the Monmouth Poll, is worth re-reading.)
Polling is both science and art, and the core determination is built on methodology, the proprietary meat of every poll built on who pollster to talk to and how they ask questions. Look for more over at the 24sight Pod soon, we’ve got two of the best in the industry with some great insights.
6 ‘We have failed our children’
The national split over reproductive rights rages on in Louisiana, as conservative lawmakers in House Speaker Mike Johnson’s backyard beat back attempts to modify the Pelican State’s near-total abortion ban.
reports that Louisiana Republicans in the statehouse recently blocked legislation that would have carved out exceptions for child rape or incest to the existing law – which currently prohibits abortions unless the mother’s life is endangered or the pregnancy is deemed “medically futile” (a non-medical term that remains open to interpretation) – for children younger than 16 years old.“We have failed our children,” Democratic state representative Delisha Boyd wrote online after Republicans killed her bill, tagging Vice President Kamala Harris in said message to alert the White House about the defeat.
Meanwhile, Republicans in the state senate are working to criminalize abortion drugs mifepristone and misoprostol in order to curb their use and distribution.
7 Shaking up presidential predictions
An American historian and a Russian geophysicist walk into a bar …
While this type of setup seems unlikely to produce big laughs (unless it devolves into a jaw-dropping “The Aristocrats” scenario), the real-life interaction worked out pretty great for American University professor Allan Lichtman.
Veteran political reporter
interviewed Lichtman about the true/false “keys” he developed to predict the next occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW. The 13-point system, which Lichtman said he pieced together with the late earthquake expert Vladimir Keilis-Borok, has correctly identified nine out of the last 10 presidential winners.While it’s still too early for Lichtman to name who he expects to win this fall, he notes that Biden is currently trending toward getting a second term.
One thing he’s sure about, however, is that political polls are basically garbage.
“The keys demonstrate that American presidential elections are primarily votes up or down on the performance and strength of the White House party. In other words, it is governance, not campaigning, that matters,” Lichtman told Cilizza, adding that “polls serve the useful, if misleading, purpose of creating the day-to-day drama of the so-called horserace that the media covers each day.”
Coda: Farewell to a newsman
Ken Kusmer spent four decades working the beat for the Associated Press in Indianapolis. He died last week at his home there after a brief illness. Kusmer was persistent in his reporting and persnickety in his copy. I always laughed when I’d call from the Statehouse shack and he’d pick up the phone back at the bureau with a thoroughly grizzled, “Yeah?”
He earned it and he taught us, holding power to account with his award-winning investigations, ranging from the state’s flawed attempt to privatize key components of the state’s Medicaid system to the Indianapolis Baptist Temple’s fight with the IRS over not withholding employment taxes.
To be bold, you must be thorough. Anything less is bullshit.
“‘He was a great storyteller and also a persistent interview,’ said his former wife, Jodi Perras. ‘He epitomized the value of a free and independent media. He pursued the truth about leaders in government and business and religion who were accused of violating the public trust.’”