#Presidential Rematches

[deadpresidents]

How many presidential rematches have there been?

When it comes to the major candidates in a general election, this year's election will be the ninth rematch:

•John Adams vs. Thomas Jefferson: 1796 & 1800

•John Quincy Adams vs. Andrew Jackson: 1824 & 1828 (William H. Crawford and Henry Clay were also candidates in 1824)

•Andrew Jackson vs. Henry Clay: 1824 & 1832 (John Quincy Adams and William H. Crawford were also candidates in 1824; John Floyd and William Wirt were also candidates in 1832)

•Martin Van Buren vs. William Henry Harrison: 1836 & 1840 (Hugh L. White, Daniel Webster, and Willie P. Mangum were also candidates in 1836)

•Grover Cleveland vs. Benjamin Harrison: 1888 & 1892 (James B. Weaver was also a candidate in 1892)

•William McKinley vs. William Jennings Bryan: 1896 & 1900

•Dwight D. Eisenhower vs. Adlai E. Stevenson: 1952 & 1956

•Bill Clinton vs. Ross Perot: 1992 & 1996 (George H.W. Bush was also a candidate in 1992; Bob Dole was also a candidate in 1996)

•Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump: 2020 & 2024

[garyconkling]

Presidential Rematches Happen, But Not Often

A 2024 Biden-Trump Rematch Would Be the Seventh in American History Presidential rematches in the United States aren’t common, but they aren’t rare. Of the 59 presidential elections in U.S. history, six (more than 10 percent) have been rematches. The rematch this year between Joe Biden and Donald Trump would be the seventh. For anyone keeping track, the first four rematches resulted in a…

[beemovieerotica]

Trump has openly said he would be a dictator on Day One, reimplementing a Muslim ban, purging the bureaucracy of professional civil servants and replacing them with loyalists, invoking the Insurrection Act to quash protests and take on opponents while replacing military leaders who would resist turning the military into a presidential militia with pliant generals. He would begin immediately to put the 12 million undocumented people in America into detention camps before moving to deport them all. His Republican convention policy director, Russell Vought, has laid out many of these plans as have his closest advisers, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Michael Flynn, among others. Free elections would be a thing of the past, with more radical partisan judges turning a blind eye to attempts to protect elections and voting rights. He has openly flirted with the idea that he would ignore the 22nd Amendment and stay beyond his term of office.

The Biggest Lie Trump–Biden 2024 Rematch Voters Are Telling Themselves

Americans have a normalcy bias. It leads them to believe anyone who tells them that everything is awesome and that a system is “holding”—even as that system is hanging together by way of dental floss...And many journalists have a normalcy bias so acute they wouldn’t know how to cover an authoritarian takeover if it meant that one of the two presidential candidates threatened jail for his political opponents—even as he continues to refer to these journalists as “the enemy of the people.” It also means that they tend to cover “Trump convicted on 34 felony counts” in terms of “how much would this story make us deviate from covering a normal election?” It turns out that we’re normalizing the abnormal, covering the election as a horse race between democracy and illiberalism without mentioning illiberalism or considering the stakes and the consequences, and repeatedly applying a false equivalence to Trump and Biden. We are worried about this baseline assumption that everything is fine until someone alerts us that nothing is fine, that of course our system will hold because it always has. We worry that we are exceptionally good at telling ourselves that shocking things won’t happen, and then when they do happen, we don’t know what to do...The signals are flashing red that our fundamental system is in danger.

[whencyclopedia]

The US presidential election of 1796 was the first contested presidential election in the history of the United States. John Adams, the candidate of the Federalist Party, won the presidency, defeating his rival, Thomas Jefferson, candidate of the Democratic-Republican Party. Since Jefferson won the second most votes, he became Vice President, as was the protocol at the time. In the previous two national elections – the US presidential election of 1789 and 1792 – George Washington had been unanimously voted into office, and the presidency had never seriously been contested. Now, with Washington declining to serve a third term, each political party scrambled to secure support for its candidate. Adams, as the incumbent vice president, was widely viewed as Washington's natural successor, but his association with the haughty, nationalist Federalists led to accusations that he was a pro-British monarchist. Jefferson, likewise, was attacked for his party's support of the bloody French Revolution, and his hypocritical opinions on slavery were brought into question. The use of partisan newspapers to attack the candidates became prevalent in this election, reflecting the increase of factionalism in US politics. At the time, presidential elections were conducted very differently than they are today. Candidates did not run on a shared ticket; instead, each member of the Electoral College cast two votes for whichever candidates they pleased. The candidate who got the most votes was elected president, while the candidate with the second most votes became vice president, regardless of political party. It was for this reason that Adams ended up winning the presidency with Jefferson as his vice president, even though they had been rivals in the election. The partisanship that fueled this election would only worsen four years later, when Adams and Jefferson rematched in the US presidential election of 1800.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

By Gregory E. Williams

With Nikki Haley out of the race, Trump and Biden are officially facing off in a presidential rematch. Both of these deeply unpopular politicians are attempting to get ahead by scapegoating migrants and refugees at the U.S.-Mexico border. In dueling publicity stunts, they both went to the border on Feb. 29., hundreds of miles apart in Texas. Despite the polarized rhetoric, there is little substantive difference between their approaches to immigration. 

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

No 2nd Debate for POTUS

"Brothers" Discuss: Did Donald Trump lie?

The Germany-based company responded to a request for comment from Just The News.“The resemblance is striking,” the company told Just The News. Read more on this story from Just The News reported: Manufacturers of the earrings said on Wednesday that the resemblance between Harris’ earrings and their audio earrings “is striking.” “We do not know whether Mrs. Harris wore one of our products. The resemblance is striking and while our product was not specifically developed for the use at presidential debates, it is nonetheless suited for it,” Malte Iversen, managing director at Icebach Sound, told Just the News on Wednesday. “To ensure a level playing field for both candidates, we are currently developing a male version and will soon be able to offer it to the Trump campaign. The choice of colour is a bit challenging though as orange does not go well with a lot of colours. “Currently, we are unfortunately out of stock and also busy preparing a lawsuit against a big Chinese tech company breaching our patents,” Iversen continued. “We are talking to investors in order to ramp up operations accordingly and are confident that we will ship again very soon.”

As The Gateway Pundit readers probably know, the Harris campaign called for a rematch immediately following Tuesday’s debate in Philadelphia.

Trump's Response on Truth Social:

KAMALA SHOULD FOCUS ON WHAT SHE SHOULD HAVE DONE DURING THE LAST ALMOST FOUR YEAR PERIOD. THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!

When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, “I WANT A REMATCH.” Polls clearly show that I won the Debate against Comrade Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ Radical Left Candidate, on Tuesday night, and she immediately called for a Second Debate.

She and Crooked Joe have destroyed our Country, with millions of criminals and mentally deranged people pouring into the USA, totally unchecked and unvetted, and with Inflation bankrupting our Middle Class.

Everyone knows this, and all of the other problems caused by Kamala and Joe – It was discussed in great detail during the First Debate with Joe, and the Second Debate with Comrade Harris. She was a no-show at the Fox Debate, and refused to do NBC & CBS.

Linsey Davis & Kamala are sorors.

[democracyunderground]

By Kanishka Singh

(Reuters) - "Republican former President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he will not debate Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, hours after Fox News invited the two presidential contenders to participate in a possible second debate on either Oct. 24 or Oct. 27.

Trump and Harris debated each other for the first time on Sept. 10. Trump has said there would not be another debate before the Nov. 5 election. He rejected a past invitation from CNN for an Oct. 23 debate, accepted by Harris.

Trump and Harris face each other in what polls show to be a tight race for the Nov. 5 U.S. elections.

In its statement, Fox said a second debate "would present an opportunity for each candidate to make their closing arguments."

Last week, Harris' running mate and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz debated Trump's running mate and U.S. Senator JD Vance.

"THERE WILL BE NO REMATCH," Trump said on his Truth Social platform. "SO THERE IS NOTHING TO DEBATE."

Trump said it was very late in the process now to have a debate.

Trump faced then-Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. President Joe Biden in a debate in late June.

Biden stepped aside as presidential candidate less than a month after the disastrous performance. Trump had built a lead against Biden following the debate but Harris took over as candidate after Biden bowed out and her entry has tightened the race, with some polls showing she has a narrow lead.

In their Sept. 10 debate, Harris put Trump on the defensive with a stream of attacks on his fitness for office, his support of abortion restrictions and his myriad legal woes."

(Reporting by Rami Ayyub; Editing by Christopher Cushing)

what a coward. even in a safe space like fox.

[redistrictgirl]

As of August 11th, 2024, the race for president is a dead heat.

Let's begin looking at my forecast by understanding what it represents. This map represents the median expected outcome of the presidential election - a slight win for Vice President Harris. The coloration of each state does not necessarily represent the expected margin - the less a candidate is believed to have an advantage and the more undecided voters there are in a state, the closer it moves to a lighter color. In short, the coloration represents the probability a candidate wins a state. With that foreword out of the way, let's look closer at some interesting states:

Arizona and Wisconsin are the two closest states, where Ms. Harris has a theoretical advantage. Really, these states are a coin toss. The good news for the Vice President is that polarization means that the outcome of each state isn't particularly independent, though they are different demographically, with white high school graduates and rural voters having more sway in WI and Hispanic and college-educated voters being more important in AZ.

Nevada isn't particularly important for Electoral College math outside of more fringe scenarios, but it's nice to have for downballot implications and a good temperature check for demographically-similar Arizona. Ms. Harris, then, will be pleased to have a slim edge in the state.

Pennsylvania, by contrast, is pivotal - if former president Trump wins the state, you can reasonably assume that he will win the Electoral College, given its high weight and modest resemblance to Wisconsin. However, Mr. Trump has fallen a good deal behind the Vice President in this state, with only about a one-in-three chance to carry the state. He is behind by a similar margin in Michigan, which is also demographically similar to Pennsylvania.

The South Atlantic states of North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida seem to be a bastion of strength for the former president. He has around a two-in-three chance of winning the former two and is a heavy favorite in the Sunshine State. Mr. Trump must sweep these states for the most straightforward path to the presidency.

Some fringe swing states include Minnesota, the New England states of Maine (at-large) and New Hampshire, and Virginia in Ms. Harris' column, and Texas, Iowa, Alaska(!!), and Maine's second congressional district in Mr. Trump's corner. If one of these polities flips in spite of only having 5-15% odds to do so, expect the candidate who snags it to be having a very good Election Night elsewhere.

Overall, this election is much, much closer than it was a month ago when it was a 2020 rematch. Vice President Harris has shown surprising strength in the Blue Wall and mounted a real comeback in the Southwest, but former President Trump has kept some momentum in the Southeast. In many ways, this map sticks closely to what I call the post-Dobbs coalition (for its applications in 2022), with less religious voters reverting back to the Democratic Party but minorities depolarizing in their place. This is bad news long-term for GOP aspirations, as it makes their gains very inefficient, primarily targeting safely blue states and heavily red states. It's quite the stark reversal from the early Trump era, and I'm curious to see whether that crystallizes throughout these three long, winding months.

[damphexagon]

Fellow Leftists of Tumbler Dot Com ...

I come to you all with a confession, head bowed, filled with shame. I just don't know if I can go on if I don't get this off my chest. So here goes ... I like Kamala Harris. There, I said it. The thing is, I expected this year's election to be another thing to be crushed by. Even the last one that the lesser-of-two-evils candidate won a Pyrrhic victory in sucked shit. I'd emotionally steeled myself for an unwinnable rematch between Ancient Braindead Republican and Trump, followed by 4 years of degradation of civil rights, new mass deportations, worsening environmental destruction, and so forth. And now that... appears to maybe not be going to happen. I know people are not willing to like Harris, because a vote for her is not a vote for The Revolution. Pretty much by definition, you cannot vote a revolution -- after all, a system will never give you the tools you need to dismantle it. But it is a vote for something better, and not in the same way a vote for Biden was for something (only) better than a vote for Trump. You have a woman of color, the youngest serious candidate since Obama, who has promoted and voted for progressive policies for years, not just as something she adopted out of nowhere to get elected (to inevitably abandon immediately after). Within the constraints of what a two-party election can offer, this is what we've wanted. I know the big one for a lot of people right now is the U.S. supporting and financing Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people, which is a great tragedy and a national disgrace that should be ended immediately. What I don't get though is why it's making people hate the candidate that most opposes it. Trump is all in, and Biden weirdly maybe even moreso. On the other hand, you have a candidate who refused to attend what basically amounted to a party for Netanyahu, and instead met with him to tell him, from the sounds of the press release at least, get your shit sorted out for a withdrawal from Gaza. When picking a Vice-Presidential candidate, she could've picked the "moderate" Zionist who would've swung a must-win state and most likely won the election, but instead she went with the pro-labor pro-education progressive unknown. To me, that says a lot, about policies but also about personal integrity. I know some would like something more forceful and explicit, but you do need to keep in mind who the average USAmerican voter is and remember that winning does matter. And she is winning. Not by a lot, but steadily by a little more every single day for the past weeks. So I guess what I'm saying is... can you just let me, us, be happy? Maybe just a little bit? I know things are still bad in many ways and regardless of the results of this election the United States is likely to remain a force of destruction in the world. No election result is a substitute for revolutionary action. But as far as elections go, this is more than we could've hoped for in any election since 2016, except the DNC is on board instead of running interference. It's not a guarantee, but things from Medicare For All to the Green New Deal to an actual end of the Israeli genocide of Palestine are more likely now than they have been in a long time. And if nothing else, can't we at the very least take pleasure in Trump's impotent tantrums and visible suffering? I thought we could all at least agree on that. Let me have this. Harris/Walz 2024.

[tiggymalvern]

Nobody I know wanted Biden to run again. Nobody wanted a Biden-Trump rematch and all the polls said so a year ago or more. Biden should have declared two years ago that he would be a one term President, the Dems should have held primaries for his replacement and we should have been bigging up our new candidate all this time. Chances are we would have got someone like Gavin Newsom.

But Biden didn't. And now it is, quite simply, too late. There are four months left until the election. All the funds that Biden has been raising all this time for his campaign cannot simply be transferred to a new candidate. That would be illegal. There is not time for a new candidate to be chosen, raise funds and run. It is impossible to win that way. So we're stuck with Biden, even if the chances of him winning are shrinking by the day.

There would barely be time to replace Biden with Kamala by default, even if we announced that today, and a lot of Dems dislike Kamala. Plus I have serious concerns that a large enough percentage of the American public simply will not vote for a woman for that to tip the balance. Even if only 2 or 3% of Independents are misogynistic enough for that to be a factor, those are the margins this election will be won on. I honestly believe that was a factor in Hillary losing in 2016, along with the fact that people just didn't like her. Kamala is also a woman who is not considered 'likeable'.

Dems need to STOP calling for Biden to stand down. Anyone publicly stating that he needs to be replaced is just doing Trump's work for him. We need to put up, shut up, hold our noses and vote for goddamn Biden, even if he is going senile or has Parkinson's. There are plans in place for that. This is why we have a Veep and an entire Presidential staff - because there are plans for a sick or dead President. There are no plans to stop an authoritarian President who has been given immunity in advance for anything he might do.

[inwokewetrust1981]

More Democrats than Republicans open to third-party presidential candidate

Black voters (52%) say they're open to considering a third-party or independent presidential candidate in a Biden-Trump rematch.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Bully Pulp stevebrodner.substack.com

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 12, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Sep 13, 2024

Today, Trump backed out of another debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. He tried to spin his fear as a sign of strength, claiming that “Polls clearly show that I won the Debate,” and so there was no reason to debate again, but boy, is that going to be a hard sell. 

First of all, as journalist Ahmed Baba points out, “This man has never, in his life, denied a stage with millions of viewers…. Trump’s post-debate internal polls must be brutal.” Second, he hardly looks dominant as TikTok is overflowing with memes making fun of his “They’re eating the dogs” moment and as Vice President Harris made fun of his “concepts of a plan” to replace the Affordable Care Act to a packed 17,000-seat stadium in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Tim Miller of The Bulwark wrote: “Impotent Trump was too intimidated to even look Kamala’s direction at the debate and now he wusses out of the rematch. Cannot recall a more dramatic demonstration of beta weakness in a campaign setting.” Harris posted on social media that “we owe it to the voters to have another debate,” and reiterated that sentiment to her cheering supporters in Greensboro.

In a speech to about 550 people in Tucson, Arizona, Trump insisted he had scored a “monumental victory” in the debate, referred to Minnesota governor Tim Walz as the vice president, slurred his words, and appeared to be having trouble reading off the teleprompters. CNN tonight compared one of Trump’s 2016 debates with Hillary Clinton to his performance on Tuesday, and the difference was stark.

Psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman wrote in The Atlantic today that Trump is showing signs of cognitive decline. His tangents and inability to get to a point suggest “a fundamental problem with an underlying cognitive process.” “If a patient presented to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness,” he wrote.

Trump continues to try to dominate the political debate by refusing to back off any of his assertions, doubling down on the lies about immigrants eating pets and teachers giving students sex change operations. He called Harris a “Marxist communist fascist socialist,” clearly just stringing words together.

Meanwhile, he is giving off vibes of desperation. This afternoon he announced he would launch his crypto platform “World Liberty Financial” on X Spaces on September 16, hardly the sign of a presidential candidate convinced he’s about to regain his position as the leader of the free world.  

It has been notable for a while that Trump’s wife, Melania, is nowhere to be seen, and Trump has begun to cling to provocateur Laura Loomer, who has vowed utter loyalty to Trump and is evidently quite happy to be seen with him. This is a problem for the Republican Party because of her history of conspiracy theories and open racism. As Joe Perticone and Marc Caputo of The Bulwark note, Loomer has referred to Vice President Harris as a “drug using prostitute,” for example, and suggested she has not given birth to children because “she’s had so many abortions that she damaged her uterus.”  

Loomer’s extremism has made other Trump supporters urge him to keep her at a distance, sparking an embarrassing public fight. Two of those trying to get Trump to isolate Loomer are Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Their chilliness prompted Loomer to fight back on social media, questioning Graham’s sexual identity and calling attention to Greene’s extramarital affair and comparing her to a “hooker.” 

The public fight between Loomer and Trump’s more restrained supporters—and who would have thought Greene would fall in the “more restrained” category?—illustrates something Josh Marshall pointed out in Talking Points Memo today. 

Marshall noted that the Republicans are essentially running two campaigns for president in 2024. One is run by Trump himself, and it is based on Trump’s personal grievances and stories from his rallies that have little relationship to reality. In 2016, Trump blew up the American political scene with his idiosyncrasies, and his unique style led him to the White House. But 2024 is a different moment. The campaign is faltering as Trump appears increasingly unhinged, afraid to be on a stage with Harris, and seemingly unable to distinguish fact from fiction. 

The other campaign is being run by Trump’s campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who quietly recognize that Trump is in decline and are trying to run a much more traditional campaign. Like Lindsey Graham when he drew Loomer’s wrath, they keep urging Trump to talk about the economy and to dial back the craziness to avoid driving off voters interested in stability. While they are unable to contain Trump, they are trying to win the election by hammering away at swing state voters with ads attacking Harris and trying to make her look radical. 

If Trump were to win under these circumstances, it seems likely that he would not be the driving force in his own administration. The power of the office would then be wielded by Vice President J.D. Vance, a reality we should confront in the few weeks left before the election. Vance is a religious extremist, of course, whose recent willingness to smear Haitian immigrants with a lie so long as it might enhance the Republicans’ chance of winning was despicable.  

Aside from the Christian nationalism and the lies, Vance recently said he sees American history as “a constant war between Northern Yankees and Southern Bourbons, where whichever side the hillbillies are on, wins.” The Northern Yankees in the late nineteenth century stood for protecting the right of all men to equality before the law, while the Southern Bourbons—probably named originally for Bourbon County, Kentucky, before the name came to represent those who supported the idea of royalty—wanted to get rid of the Fourteenth Amendment that protected Black rights, and the Fifteenth Amendment that established the right of Black men to vote. 

Vance said today’s “Northern Yankees” are what he calls “hyper-woke, coastal elites”: the ones trying to protect equal rights. “The Southern Bourbons are sort of the same old-school Southern folks that have been around and influential in this country for 200 years,” Vance said. Or, as people understood it in the late nineteenth century, they were former Confederates who opposed Black rights. “And it’s like the hillbillies have really started to migrate towards the Southern Bourbons instead of the Northern woke people,” he concluded, in an evident hope that they would control the American future. 

Extremist Republicans used to hide that sentiment. Now the man who could become the acting president is openly embracing it. 

At the same time MAGA leaders are trying to turn out their base, they are also working to make it harder for Democrats to vote. Yesterday, the Republican-controlled North Carolina Supreme Court decided to permit Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to have his name taken off the ballot in that state, although, as Mark Joseph Stern reported in Slate, he did not ask to be removed until four days after he withdrew from the race, which was five days after the deadline for withdrawing. 

By the time he withdrew, county election boards were already printing ballots, and the court’s decision will require nearly three million ballots to be destroyed and new ones designed and printed. According to North Carolina’s state election director, this will take 18 to 23 days and will cut into early voting. North Carolina law requires state officials to mail ballots to Americans living abroad and to service members by September 6, the day that early voting was supposed to start.  

As Stern points out, Trump and Harris are effectively tied in North Carolina, and early voters there skew Democratic. 

Last night, musician Taylor Swift won seven awards at the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards, mostly for awards surrounding her song “Fortnight.” In her acceptance speech for “Video of the Year,” she said: “[T]he fact that this is a fan-voted award and you voted for this, I appreciate it so much. And if you are over 18, please register to vote for something else that’s very important coming up, the 2024 presidential election,” Swift said, although she could hardly be heard over the roar from the crowd at her call for them to vote.  

Pollster Tom Bonier has been following registration numbers and said that there has been a massive increase in voter registrations after Swift’s endorsement of Harris. “This intensity and enthusiasm is really unprecedented at this point. It’s even bigger than what we saw after the Dobbs decision in 2022.”

Today, Republicans in North Carolina sued to overturn the decision of the state election board that students and employees of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill can use state-approved digital IDs as identification for voting. 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Nate Silver at Silver Bulletin:

A fellow Substacker messaged me the other day to ask why President Trump’s approval rating had been so resilient despite problems in the economy and elsewhere. I argued that it hadn’t been, really. In our approval rating tracker, Trump started out at a +11.6 net approval rating, a much better opening number than in his first term. But now, he’s in the red at -2.2. So there’s actually been a fair amount of movement:

From the first full day of his presidency, Jan. 21, through yesterday — March 21: conveniently exactly two months later — Trump’s net approval rating has declined by 13.8 points, so around 7 points per month. A president can’t afford that rate of decline for long. Extrapolate out the trend, for instance, and Trump would be at a -27.6 by July 21, a -51.2 on Nov. 21, and so forth. Fortunately for Trump, that’s not how any of this works — and such crude linear extrapolation will almost certainly lead to bad predictions. There are two reasons for this. First, the decline he’s experienced is quite typical for new presidents. Let’s start the clock on Feb. 1 rather than Jan. 21, though, since approval rating polling is often sparse very early in a president’s term. Here’s how the past five presidents before Trump — including Trump himself in his first term — saw their numbers trend between Feb. 1 and March 21 during their first year in office.2 If you squint, you might say that Trump’s decline is a bit worse than average — but really only a bit. A president’s disapproval rating typically increases early on, partly because some voters who were initially on the fence and say they were undecided, perhaps out of a sense of hopefulness for a new president, instead begin to tell pollsters they disapprove of his performance. That’s been true for Trump 2.0, as it has been for all recent presidents. Sometimes, a president’s approval rating is relatively unaffected, however: his disapprovers come out of the woodwork, but his supporters stay with him. In this case, however, Trump has also lost some support among voters who supported him earlier on: his approval rating has declined by a couple of points. Considering he only won the election by 1.7 points in the tipping-point state, Pennsylvania, it’s at least plausible that he wouldn’t win a rematch against Kamala Harris today — although that’s holding Harris’s numbers constant when instead Democrats' numbers have also cratered. Voters are in a grumpy mood toward everybody in politics these days.3 Also, there’s reason to think Trump has a relatively high approval floor. The country is highly divided, and Trump’s supporters are passionate, even if they now constitute a slight minority of the country. In our historical approval numbers, Trump’s first term featured among the lower average approval ratings (41.7 percent, based on the final number at the end of each day of his term) but also the narrowest spread of any presidential term since the dawn of approval ratings. Judged by the 95th percentile range of his daily numbers4, Trump’s approval numbers had a floor of 37.8 but a ceiling of 45.0 during his first term. It fluctuated, but not by much. And now Trump is even more of a known commodity: he’s been the dominant figure in American politics for almost a decade now.

[...]

Where Trump might be vulnerable

If Trump’s numbers get worse, it by definition means that some groups of voters turn on him. So which groups might those be? One theory is Last In, First Out (LIFO): that the most recent converts to Trump will be among the first to abandon him. Roughly three groups come to mind here:

Young voters. Trump actually won young voters overall in 2024 in some cuts of the data. (Keep in mind that there’s no hard-and-fast way to know: all methods for breaking down election results by demographic groups rely on statistical extrapolation or polling.) In other data sources, Harris did — though by much narrower margins than Democrats typically attain, and she probably lost young men even if she won among young women. But young voters are less partisan than older ones, and notoriously fickle and influenced by social media trends. And keep in mind that an 18-year-old who voted for Trump last year was just 10 years old at the start of Trump’s first term. It wouldn’t be the first time that teenagers initially support a trendy product to piss off their parents but then get a sense of buyer’s remorse.

Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans and Black men. These groups also shifted heavily toward Trump, though there’s some debate about the magnitude of the change among Black voters. (It’s pretty clear that Black men have increasingly supported Trump, but polls differ on whether Harris gained or lost ground among Black women as compared to Biden in 2020.7) In my predictions column just after the inauguration, I basically operated on the assumption that the recent trend toward racial depolarization — increasingly, Democrats are holding their own among white voters while losing ground among minorities, meaning that the racial gap is narrowing — might actually be a robust one. Black and Hispanic voters are sometimes described as having had “loyalty” to Democrats: I’m not sure I love that framing, but once loyalty is gone, it can be hard to get back. Moreover, most of the shift has been among younger Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters, for whom the Civil Rights Era is now at least two generations removed. But, we’ll see: there’s something to the LIFO theory, too.

Riverian types. What in the heck do I mean by this term? It comes from my book, and it loosely refers to Silicon Valley and Wall Street, but more broadly to a community (“the River”) of quantitative types who are competitive and risk-tolerant. And generally also highly successful financially; these are elites, part of the literal 1 percent. Because of that, they have only a trivial direct influence on election results (especially since many of them live in New York or California) and approval rating numbers. But they can influence them indirectly through their financial leverage and their media presence. I’ve argued recently that there’s some reason to expect a shift among this group, especially Wall Street types who didn’t take Trump’s tariff threats seriously enough. Within Silicon Valley, meanwhile, there’s a lot of groupthink, even if Silicon Valley thinks of itself as contrarian relative to the rest of society. So you could plausibly see some preference cascades. Maybe these elites are side-eying one another and saying: is this really what we wanted? And is Elon OK? But they’re reluctant to be the first ones to speak out. Once some do, however, others will follow. This would be sort of the reverse of the process that played out from 2021-2024, as Silicon Valley elites became increasingly vocal about their opposition to wokeness and other things they associate with progressives and Democrats.

But LIFO might not be right; sometimes the new converts are the most passionate ones, after all. The more radical possibility would be that Trump instead loses support among his base, the white working class.

Nate Silver wrote in his Silver Bulletin Substack that Trump’s 2nd term could have more polling downsides.

[bobcatmoran]

PSA that tonight is the first general election US Presidential Debate of the 2024 election, Biden v Trump, in a rematch of their 2020 debates, which included such highlights as "Proud Boys, stand back and stand by," Trump showing up to the first debate with Covid, and "Will you shut up, man? This is so unpresidential."

If you want to watch, it will be airing on CNN, who's sponsoring the debate, as well as streaming on Max and CNN.com (the latter available without a cable subscription just for the debate). Major TV networks (PBS, CBS, ABC, NBC, and local FOX broadcast affiliates) will also be showing it.

The debate will run 90 minutes, and will be moderated by Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, starting at 9 PM Eastern Time, 8 PM Central, 7 PM Mountain, and 6 PM Pacific.

I, however, will not be doing my usual debate liveblog. I've got theater tickets to see "Little Shop of Horrors," which will almost undoubtedly be more entertaining than watching two old men yell at each other.

Anyway. Other debates this cycle will include the VP debate between Kamela Harris and Mystery GOP VP candidate on either July 23 or August 13, and a second presidential debate on September 10.

[whencyclopedia]

US Presidential Election of 1796

The US presidential election of 1796 was the first contested presidential election in the history of the United States. John Adams, the candidate of the Federalist Party, won the presidency, defeating his rival, Thomas Jefferson, candidate of the Democratic-Republican Party. Since Jefferson won the second most votes, he became Vice President, as was the protocol at the time.

In the previous two national elections – the US presidential election of 1789 and 1792 – George Washington had been unanimously voted into office, and the presidency had never seriously been contested. Now, with Washington declining to serve a third term, each political party scrambled to secure support for its candidate. Adams, as the incumbent vice president, was widely viewed as Washington's natural successor, but his association with the haughty, nationalist Federalists led to accusations that he was a pro-British monarchist. Jefferson, likewise, was attacked for his party's support of the bloody French Revolution, and his hypocritical opinions on slavery were brought into question. The use of partisan newspapers to attack the candidates became prevalent in this election, reflecting the increase of factionalism in US politics.

At the time, presidential elections were conducted very differently than they are today. Candidates did not run on a shared ticket; instead, each member of the Electoral College cast two votes for whichever candidates they pleased. The candidate who got the most votes was elected president, while the candidate with the second most votes became vice president, regardless of political party. It was for this reason that Adams ended up winning the presidency with Jefferson as his vice president, even though they had been rivals in the election. The partisanship that fueled this election would only worsen four years later, when Adams and Jefferson rematched in the US presidential election of 1800.

Background: Washington's Farewell Address

It was less than two months before the election, on 19 September 1796, when President Washington's famous Farewell Address appeared in the Philadelphia newspaper American Daily Advisor, confirming that he would not seek a third term in office. In the address, Washington revealed that he had initially planned on retiring after his first four years in office but had decided to serve a second term because of heightening tensions with Great Britain. Now, with that crisis averted, Washington saw no reason to stick around and was happy to hand the torch off to a successor. He then went on to emphasize the importance of the Union, which bound all Americans together and protected their liberties, before warning against three existential dangers that threatened to destroy that Union: regionalism, partisanship, and foreign entanglements. On the issue of political partisanship – or 'factionalism' as it was then known – Washington warned that it would lead to a 'spirit of revenge' and would open the door to 'foreign influence and corruption'. He went on to say:

serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of the party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community…they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which the cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterward the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

(constitutioncenter.org)

George Washington

Gilbert Stuart (Public Domain)

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[simply-ivanka]

Former US president Donald Trump claimed on Monday that Hamas would not have attacked Israel on October 7 if he had still been president, vowing to solve the situation “very fast” if reelected as he took a major step toward a rematch for the White House in November.

Speaking in Iowa after winning the first contest of the Republican presidential primary on Monday, Trump said that “Russia would not have attacked, Israel would never have been attacked” if he had still been president.

“The Ukraine situation is so horrible, the Israeli situation is so horrible. We are going to get them solved very fast,” he said, without giving details on how he aimed to achieve this.