The 24 Seven: Election Fraud Endgame Edition
24sight News highlights the seven most important stories shaping the race for the White House
Welcome to The 24 Seven – 24sight News’ twice-weekly roundup of the top seven stories shaping the race for the White House. If you see something we missed, have some suggestions or need to share a hot tip, email us: tom@24sight.news and warren@24sight.news.
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Tom and Warren
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1 Stoking election fears
Speaker Mike Johnson and House Republicans are playing to the MAGA base by teeing up a batch of election-related bills designed to bar non-citizens from voting in federal elections.
This is already illegal under current law. But the GOP leaders involved in this one-sided effort — there is no indication that the Democratic-led Senate or Biden White House would support these partisan proposals — insist their intuition trumps demonstrable evidence in this case.
While conservative hardliners are confident their vibes-based legislating will pay dividends at the ballot box, House Administration Committee ranking member Joe Morelle is worried they may be providing cover for 2020 election deniers ready to raise hell if Joe Biden beats Donald Trump again in November.
“I believe this is the setting, the pretext for objecting to the 2024 election results if they lose,” the New York Democrat toldPunchbowl News. “As we used to say as kids, ‘heads I win, tails you lose.’ So this is they win either way.”
2 Always around
Former Trump advisor Paul Manafort’s been plugged back into the Trump campaign since last year, we scooped yesterday. Our sources tell us he’s been back channeling advice through co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita and longtime Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio.
Manafort, who has longstanding relationships with LaCivita and Fabrizio, was chipping away at the defenses the current campaign team has erected around Trump, trying to get back in directly with the embattled former president. But Republican sources told 24sight News the effort failed and Manafort never reconnected with Trump himself.
Instead, Manafort reviewed polling data for Fabrizio and made messaging suggestions like saying Trump should hammer President Joe Biden on high mortgage rates — which seemed to work. And helped advise on selecting delegates to the Republican convention in Milwaukee and restructuring state Republican parties, Republicans familiar with the efforts told 24sight.
The Trump campaign responded that Manafort has never worked directly for the 2024 campaign and that they can’t monitor everyone staff interacts with.
LaCivita called the story “horseshit” and said he was blocking reporter Tom LoBianco.
3 Haley caves
After spending months on the campaign trail deriding Biden and Trump as too old, too untrustworthy, and mentally unfit to inhabit the Oval Office, former 2024 GOP presidential challenger Nikki Haley said she’ll back the presumptive nominee this fall.
“I will be voting for Trump,” Haley said Wednesday during a Hudson Institute event.
The former South Carolina governor and Trump administration alumnus qualified the falling in line behind the man who bested her in the GOP primary fight as a binary choice between a twice-impeached former president who “has not been perfect” and the sitting Democratic POTUS she characterized as “a catastrophe.”
It’s unclear whether Haley supporters will also tuck tail and follow her back into the fold. Her fans have continued to register their aversion to Trump’s comeback bid by lodging double-digit protest votes in state primaries months after she dropped out of contention.
4 Rick Scott’s ‘dramatic sea change’
Florida Republican Rick Scott has launched another bid for Senate GOP leadership, officially jumping into the race to replace Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell this fall.
McConnell beat back Scott’s last attempted power grab in November 2022, collecting 37 votes from the 49-member conference to Scott’s 10.
But with McConnell stepping down amidst increased restlessness from conservative colleagues who admire the House Freedom Caucus’ ability to drag House GOP leadership further to the right in policy fights, Scott is appealing to fellow hardliners craving something other than what leadership hopefuls Sens. John Thune of South Dakota and John Cornyn of Texas are offering.
“This is not a time to make small adjustments. I believe we need a dramatic sea change to save our country,” Scott wrote in a letter to Senate Republicans.
He also pledged to be more transparent about decision making, volunteered to spearhead crafting a “positive, aspirational agenda” for the party to run on (no mention of dusting off his polarizing “Rescue America” plan), and vowed to exact a higher price for working across the aisle.
“We too often take votes that divide us and unite Democrats,” he wrote.
5 The Pence parallax
With the GOP “veepstakes” entering its most heated phase, the formal vetting by Trump and his team about what would differentiate this running mate from the last one is ramping up.
The Biden campaign has been harping on primary challenger turned Trump cheerleader Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., for repeatedly deflecting questions about what he would have done on Jan. 6, 2021, if he was in Pence’s place.
One of the possible contenders, venture capitalist turned Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, has said he doesn’t think January 6th was so bad and that threats to hang Pence were just a bunch of nothing.
But unlike Vance, who was not in Washington during the deadly siege at the U.S. Capitol and didn’t experience the violence firsthand, government officials who tried to stop the attack — while Trump watched the chaos unfold on television — said they began discussing scenarios in which the vice president was murdered by Trump’s fans and they had to invoke the 25th Amendment.
Haley is toying with a return to a second Trump administration, after carrying the banner for disenchanted and disenfranchised Republicans and conservatives during her failed presidential primary run.
It’s a good reminder that we’ve already seen what roll a vice president plays in a Trump administration … and how it ends.
Pence acted as a close partner and advocate for Trump, placing guardrails where possible and channeling conservative priorities to the Oval Office. He also raised money hand over fist for Trump and defended him through scandal after scandal … until Trump threw him under the bus for refusing to overturn the 2020 election results.
6 Spoiler Alert
Third party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is starting to hit one of the key benchmarks to make the debate stage: secure at least 15% support in at least qualifying polls for the first debate being hosted by CNN at the end of June. CNN mandates that candidates also qualify for enough state ballots to win at 270 electoral votes in order to appear on stage.
7 All aboard!
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