In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I've remarked here on how early in this campaign cycle we've seen Democrat insiders sounding alarms about Joe's campaign , especially in comparison to earlier epic defeats for McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis. and Kerry. In 1972, especially after the Eagleton fiasco, there was never any serious expectation that McGovern could beat Nixon, so that election is an outlier -- but even then, the real pessimism didn't even take hold until McGovern was nominated. In the 2024 cycle, we're seeing gnashing of teeth and rending of garments a full year before the election. There was a brief surge of optimism in the middle of last month, when prognosticators like Sean Trende and Nate Silver thought they saw Joe closing the gap on Trump, but oddly, a single poll from CNN over the past weekend seems to have ended those fantasies. But something seems to be replacing the previous pattern of unattrributed insider discomfort we used to see during the summers before the election: now ...

More than a week ago, I pointed out Sean Trende's blunder when he hopped on the bandwagon that "President Biden’s standing in the polls has improved". Another arbiter of the conventional wisdom, Byron York of the Washington Examiner, pointed out late yesterday , Biden did rise a bit in the polls. According to the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, Trump has led Biden in head-to-head matchups since September 2023. (They were tied for one brief moment in October.) During his March-April “bump,” Biden’s deficit shrank, coming within two-tenths of a point of catching Trump. Democratic hopes rose. “Biden’s position in the polls is improving against Trump,” declared the polling analyst Nate Silver on April 18. “It looks to me like Biden’s numbers against Trump have improved by a hair, probably to a degree that isn’t just statistical noise.” Even a slight improvement was like manna from heaven for Democrats and their allies in the media. Alas, it didn’t last...

US District Court Judge Aileen Cannon of the District of Southern Florida is overseeing the United States v Trump case regarding the mishandling of classified documents at Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence. Beginning Monday, April 22, she has been releasing versions of documents in the case that had previously been heavily redacted. The unredacted court filings published on April 22 revealed, among other things, the code name Plasmic Echo for the FBI investigation into those documents, and I covered this development here last Friday . In that post, I linked to a Washington Examiner story that described the release as covering "hundreds of pages of exhibits, motions, and other filings, underscored the close communication the Biden White House and the National Archives and Records Administration had in the year before Trump was indicted". Alt journalists have since been combining through those files. One result has been a not-fully-explicated theory that many of the docum...

News about two sets of polls over the weekend brings me back to the question I raised a week ago , in which I cited Rush Limbaugh's often-expressed view that the polls aren't meant to report the news, they're meant to shape it. So in that context, what are we to make of the weekend's new polls showing Trump trending ahead of Joe once again? For CNN : Former President Donald Trump has opened his biggest lead ever captured in the CNN poll of the American electorate, enjoying a six-point advantage over incumbent Democrat President Joe Biden. Trump, at 49 percent, is six percent ahead of Biden’s 43 percent when the two are polled head-to-head. For Gallup , President Joe Biden averaged 38.7% job approval during his recently completed 13th quarter in office, which began on Jan. 20 and ended April 19. None of the other nine presidents elected to their first term since Dwight Eisenhower had a lower 13th-quarter average than Biden. . . . Jimmy Carter is the only ...

Let's recall that a week ago, Judge Merchan wasn't going to let Trump take any days off from his New York trial : The New York judge overseeing former President Trump’s hush money trial said Monday that Trump cannot attend arguments on presidential immunity at the Supreme Court next week. It came after the judge earlier delayed a decision on allowing Trump to attend his son Barron’s high school graduation in May. The attempts by Trump to take off certain days of his hush money trial that is expected to last weeks, if not months, came as the first day of trial was officially underway in Manhattan. . . . “Arguing before the Supreme Court is a big deal, and I can certainly appreciate why your client would want to be there, but a trial in New York Supreme Court . . . is also a big deal,” Judge Juan Merchan said to Trump lawyer Todd Blanche, rejecting his request to let the former president play hooky. “I will see him here next week,” the judge added. While the judge cle...

Remarks from Joe Biden in his recent interview with Howard Stern drew some attention this week . Following the death of his first wife in an auto accident, "I got put in that 10 Most Eligible Bachelors list," he told Stern. "And a lot of lovely women ... would send very salacious pictures and I just give them to the Secret Service. And I thought somebody would think I was ... " The president then seems to trail off. U.S. senators and House representatives are not provided Secret Service detail, though many do travel with some security. He then discussed how he met his current wife, first lady Jill Biden. He went on about meeting Jill: "I just gave up," Biden continued. "I got a call from my brother. So, I have a girl here at Delaware; Jill is nine years younger than I am. He said you'll love her. She doesn't like politics." What I haven't seen anyone mention so far is that the Stern interview appears to have been ta...

Via the Washington Examiner : A judge in Florida went on an unsealing spree this week, making public a trove of documents that had previously been filed under seal or in heavily redacted form in former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case. The documents, which included hundreds of pages of exhibits, motions, and other filings, underscored the close communication the Biden White House and the National Archives and Records Administration had in the year before Trump was indicted. . . . Trump has consistently maintained that NARA was out to get him and that the agency had been maliciously coordinating with President Joe Biden’s White House from the outset of its pursuit. Newly unredacted court papers showing Trump and Smith battling over access to discovery in February reveal examples of the communication Trump has criticized. In fact, the records confirm a lengthy history of collaboration among the White House, the National Archives, and the Justice Department ...