Several recent national polls have shown Joe Biden having a problem attracting the young voters that are a key part of the Democratic coalition.
A new poll suggests one reason: Many younger voters are simply unaware of some of Donald Trump’s most offensive comments.
For instance, just 42% of 18 to 30 year old voters remember Trump’s demand for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims” entering the U.S.
Only 35% know Trump did not want to visit a cemetery of Americans who died fighting in World War I because he said they were “losers” and “suckers.”
And just 37% know Trump said that Haitian immigrants “all have AIDS” and that Nigerian tourists would never “go back to their huts” after seeing America.
It’s not surprising since today’s college students were no more than 12 or 13 years old when he said these things. But that’s only part of the explanation since Trump continues to say hateful things on a daily basis. Many young voters simply grew up with the understanding that this kind of talk is just normal politics.
CALIFORNIA 41ST DISTRICT. Democrat Will Rollins has publicized an early May internal poll from David Binder Research that gives him a narrow 45-44 edge in his rematch against GOP Rep. Ken Calvert, who defeated him 52-48 last cycle.
The memo for this survey, which is the first we’ve seen of this contest, did not include data on respondents’ preferences in the presidential election. Donald Trump carried California’s 41st District, which stretches from the southern Riverside suburbs east to Palm Springs, 50-49 in 2020.
NEW YORK 16TH DISTRICT. AIPAC’s investment in next month’s Democratic primary for New York’s 16th Congressional District has skyrocketed, reports Business Insider’s Bryan Metzger, and now stands at just shy of $6 million. When the group’s affiliated United Democracy Project began its ad blitz late last week attacking Rep. Jamaal Bowman and supporting his challenger, Westchester County Executive George Latimer, Jewish Insider reported it would spend $2 million for a week-long run.
SOUTH CAROLINA REDISTRICTING. The Supreme Court’s right-wing majority upheld South Carolina’s congressional map in a 6-3 decision along ideological lines issued Thursday, reversing a lower court ruling that found Republicans had violated the Constitution by racially gerrymandering the 1st District to protect Rep. Nancy Mace, a white Republican.
The majority ruled that politics—not race—was the predominant factor in the GOP’s gerrymander, which shifted Black voters from the 1st District to the neighboring 6th to ensure conservative white voters would still dominate in the 1st.
This latest decision all but eliminates one of the few remaining tools that voters of color had left to challenge racism in redistricting. Because the court’s Republican-appointed majority ruled in 2019 that federal courts cannot adjudicate partisan gerrymandering challenges, allowing Republican mapmakers to claim partisan motives as a defense against racial gerrymandering only entrenches both kinds of gerrymanders.
Last year, a federal district court struck down the 1st District, ruling that Republicans had intentionally discriminated against Black voters. The three-judge panel concluded that legislators had violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause by packing too many Black voters into the 6th District, illegally letting race predominate in the mapmaking process in the absence of any compelling government interest to do so.
As shown on this map, the 1st District includes parts of the Charleston area and coastal South Carolina (click here for an interactive version). It saw multiple competitive elections under the previous decade’s map: Democrat Joe Cunningham won a 51-49 upset in 2018 before losing by that same margin to Mace in 2020.
However, the GOP’s new gerrymander, passed after the most recent census in 2020, insulated Mace from future challenges by extending Donald Trump’s margin of victory from 52-46 to 53-45. Mace, in part thanks to this new map, comfortably won reelection 56-42 last year.
Republicans took advantage of the fact that voting patterns in much of the South are heavily polarized along racial lines: Black voters overwhelmingly prefer Democrats and white voters heavily favor Republicans. Mapmakers looking to protect Mace therefore moved Black voters from her district into the 6th, a dark blue seat that already had a Black majority and has long elected Rep. Jim Clyburn, a Black Democrat.
But the Supreme Court, in an opinion authored by far-right Justice Samuel Alito, rejected as “clearly erroneous” the district court’s determination that race had illegally predominated, departing from a longstanding norm of deference towards findings of fact by trial courts. In doing so, Alito significantly increased the burden on plaintiffs to prove claims of illegal racial gerrymandering by holding that legislators draw maps with a “presumption” of “good faith.”
Absent “smoking gun” evidence of intentional discrimination, as election law expert Rick Hasen put it, Alito’s decision will require plaintiffs to produce an alternative map to show how mapmakers could achieve their partisan ends without illegally relying on race. This new requirement, found nowhere in legal precedent, consequently puts the burden on plaintiffs to help draw a new gerrymander for state officials, all but negating the purpose of filing a lawsuit in the first place. Not only will this ruling undermine the cause of Black representation in South Carolina, it will likely reverberate far beyond the state. Alito’s decision will blunt the ability of racial gerrymandering lawsuits to have a significant partisan impact, and because race and party are so heavily intertwined in the South, it diminishes the likelihood of increased representation for voters of color throughout the region.
LOUISIANA 5TH and 6TH DISTRICTS. The Louisiana Republican Party followed Speaker Mike Johnson’s lead this week by endorsing Reps. Julie Letlow and Garret Graves for separate districts even though Graves hasn’t ruled out a challenge to his colleague in the revamped 5th District.
NOLA.com’s Tyler Bridges says that Letlow’s team successfully urged party leaders to take this step as part of her effort to deter Graves from taking her on in the November all-party primary.
Other Pelican State Republicans are being even more overt as they try to convince Graves to defend the 6th District even though it’s now become blue turf. “[I]f he runs in that district—in his own district—he’ll find a tremendous amount of help from me and from other Republicans in the state,” Rep. Clay Higgins, who holds the 3rd District, told Politico.
The new version of the 6th favored Joe Biden 59-39, but Higgins argued it would be “very intellectually unsound to just presume that Garret Graves as the incumbent would not win in his own district just because it’s been technically drawn to be a Black-majority district.” (There’s nothing technical about it: The new district has a 54% Black majority among its voting-age population.)
Higgins also insisted that Democratic state Sen. Cleo Fields, who served in Congress from 1993 to 1997, could lose in the 6th because of the long gap since he last ran for federal office.
So far, however, even other Democrats who covet a spot in Congress aren’t acting like Fields is beatable: The state senator hasn’t attracted any serious intra-party opposition in the four months since he launched his comeback campaign. There is, however, still time for that to change before the July 19 filing deadline.
Higgins also issued a warning to Graves if he doesn’t take one for the team. “Whereas if he determines to run against a colleague, and I could be one of those,” he told Politico, “he’ll find that to be a very rocky path.”
There’s little reason to think that Graves, who said last week he’d run for “a district anchored in the Capital Region,” would take on Higgins, whose constituency is based to the south in Acadiana, though any other option would also set him up for a “very rocky path.” When Politico asked Graves Tuesday when he’d decide where to run, the congressman offered up only a “soon.”
Gov. Jeff Landry endorsed Rep. Julia Letlow on Monday in a tweet that did not mention her colleague and potential opponent, fellow GOP Rep. Garret Graves. Landry’s move is anything but a surprise, though, as he reportedly pushed for the congressional map that turned Graves’ 6th District solidly blue.
Graves, who spent about a year considering whether to take on Landry in the 2023 race for governor, further alienated the eventual winner by recruiting a rival candidate. Democratic state Rep. Mandie Landry, who is not related to Jeff Landry, said last month in her testimony over the new boundaries, “The governor wanted Congressman Graves out … It was the one [map] we all understood would go through.”
Jeff Landry also used his tweet to note that Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who represents Louisiana’s 1st District, is likewise supporting Letlow in the 5th. Scalise, like Landry, did not say anything about Graves in his own message praising Letlow, but he has his own reasons to want him out of Congress.
Scalise told Politico last year that Graves sabotaged his bid for speaker by spreading false rumors about his health. Scalise said that, while his physicians had told him his battle with cancer was progressing well, an “unnamed member of Congress” had claimed Scalise was “going to die in six months.” This “unnamed member,” according to Politico, was Graves.
NEW JERSEY 10TH DISTRICT. New Jersey Secretary of State Tahesha Way has allowed two candidates whose nominating petitions were challenged to run in the upcoming special election for New Jersey’s vacant 10th Congressional District. Her decision brings to a conclusion what the New Jersey Globe’s Joey Fox called a “lengthy and convoluted ballot access saga”—at least for now.
Two different Democrats, Newark City Council President LaMonica McIver and former East Orange City Councilwoman Brittany Claybrooks, had their eligibility for the July 16 primary called into question, leading to repeated back-and-forths between Way and the administrative law judges who were each adjudicating those challenges. Ultimately, Way accepted the judges’ ruling that both Claybrooks and McIver should appear on the ballot.
As Fox notes, though, Way’s conclusions could be challenged in a lawsuit, though there’s no word yet as to whether one might be forthcoming. If her decision stands, McIver and Claybrooks would participate in a primary that also includes New Jersey Redevelopment Authority COO Darryl Godfrey; Linden Mayor Derek Armstead; Hudson County Commissioner Jerry Walker; and Shana Melius, a former staffer to Rep. Donald Payne, whose death last month triggered the special election for the safely blue 10th District.
PENNSYLVANIA 3RD DISTRICT. Democratic Rep. Dwight Evans said Thursday that he was “recovering from a minor stroke, and I want to emphasize the word minor.”
“It was minor enough that I didn’t even realize what had happened for a few days,” the congressman continued in a statement. “The main impact seems to be some difficulty with one leg, which will probably impact my walking for some time, but not my long-term ability to serve the people of Philadelphia.”
Evans says he anticipates staying in a rehabilitation facility for a week and “currently expect[s] to be back voting in Washington in about six weeks from now.”
SOUTH CAROLINA 1ST DISTRICT. A new Emerson College Polling/The Hill poll of the June Republican primary in South Carolina’s 1st congressional district finds Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) with 47% support, Catherine Templeton (R) at 22%, and Bill Young (R) at 7%.
Twenty-four percent are undecided ahead of the June primary.
TENNESSEE 5TH DISTRICT. Republican Rep. Andy Ogles has amended his campaign finance reports to say he loaned his campaign $20,000, rather than the $320,000 he’d previously claimed, reports NewsChannel 5’s Phil Williams.
During his first bid for the House in 2022, when he faced a competitive primary for Tennessee’s freshly gerrymandered 5th District, Ogles said he’d loaned himself that larger sum. Last year, however, Williams pointed out that the congressman’s personal financial disclosures showed he lacked the wealth to make a loan of that size. (On those forms, Ogles did not even list any bank accounts.)
Ogles never sought to explain himself until the day after Williams’ latest story, when he issued a statement saying that, at the start of his campaign in 2022, he had “pledged $320,000 to use toward my own campaign efforts if needed.” He went on, “While we only needed to transfer $20,000, unfortunately, the full amount of my pledge was mistakenly included on my campaign’s FEC reports.”
That explanation left Williams wanting. He pointed out in response that Ogles’ amended reports now show he had just $2,000 in cash three weeks before the GOP primary in 2022, while his original said he had more than $280,000 in the bank. “How do you look at your bank accounts and ‘mistakenly include’ cash you don’t have?” Williams asked rhetorically.
Thanks to these inflated figures, though, Ogles made it seem as though he was keeping pace with his top primary rivals. With help from groups like the far-right Club for Growth, Ogles went on to defeat his nearest opponent by a 35-25 margin and comfortably won the general election.
Williams has repeatedly exposed Ogles for a wide range of inconsistencies during his short tenure in Congress, including an apparently fabricated life story and an episode where Ogles raised close to $25,000 for a children’s burial garden that was never constructed.
Ogles faces a challenge in the Aug. 1 GOP primary from Davidson County Metro Councilmember Courtney Johnston. Ogles previously reported having $450,000 on hand for that race, but according to his latest amendments, he has less than $100,000 in his coffers.
NEW JERSEY 8TH DISTRICT. New Jersey Rep. Rob Menendez is pushing back on Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla’s attempts to link him to his scandal-ridden father, Sen. Bob Menendez, in a new commercial ahead of their June 4 Democratic primary for the dark blue 8th District.
“My opponent wants to run against my father because he’s scared to run against me,” the congressman tells the audience. “That’s on him.”
Menendez doesn’t say anything more about the senator, who is currently on trial for corruption, or Bhalla, whom he does not mention by name. The incumbent instead argues he’s an ardent liberal, declaring, “I’m protecting health care coverage for pre-existing conditions, and I’m defending abortion rights from the MAGA Republicans.”
The younger Menendez has not been implicated in any of his father’s alleged crimes, but that hasn’t deterred Bhalla from arguing that North Jersey voters should fire the “entitled son of corrupt Bob ‘Gold Bars’ Menendez.”
The mayor told the New Jersey Monitor earlier this month that his opponent is a “replication of the same apparatus” of donors and advisors who spent years aiding the senator. “We need to change, to get to a place with people who are not anointed by way of their connections with powerful people, but are elected with the qualifications.”
Bhalla’s allies at the super PAC America’s Promise have spent over $200,000 on digital ads making a similar argument. “Prosecutors say Sen. Menendez took gold bars, a Mercedes, and thousands in bribes in exchange for political favors,” declares the narrator, continuing, “But Rob says he strongly believes in his father’s integrity and values, and he’s refused to give his father’s dirty money back.”
Rob Menendez has pushed back by insisting that Bhalla was quite happy with his record in office before he decided he was vulnerable. “Ravi used to text me and thank me for what we were doing and what good advocates we were for Hoboken,” he told the Monitor. “So clearly, only one thing has changed, and that’s the one thing Ravi wants to talk about.”
Menendez has also declared that he shouldn’t be punished for his father’s alleged crimes, an argument that several prominent Democrats agree with. “People should be judged in terms of their own actions,” said Rep. Andy Kim, who announced a bid for Bob Menendez’s Senate seat just one day after he was indicted.
Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who has repeatedly called for expelling his indicted colleague, also told Politico last month that he doesn’t “have anything against” Rob Menendez. “I don’t believe that he was part of all of the depravity and all that kind of sleaze.”
Bob Menendez’s trial began May 13, and it’s generated plenty of headlines. “Defense Blames Senator Menendez’s Wife as Bribery Trial Starts,” the New York Times titled one of its articles. (The senator’s marriage to Rob Menendez’s mother, Jane Jacobsen, ended with a 2005 divorce; Bob Menendez later married Nadine Menendez, who was indicted with him last fall.)
However, there may not be a verdict before voters decide the congressman’s political fate on June 4. The trial was paused for a week on Tuesday after jurors were trapped in a courthouse elevator, something that happened one day after the jurors were forced out of their regular meeting room because someone left the sink faucets running for the weekend. “Don’t all get into one elevator,” the judge jokingly warned the jurors as they prepared to leave.
SOUTH CAROLINA 3RD and 4TH DISTRICTS. Republican Gov. Henry McMaster has endorsed Rep. William Timmons ahead of the June 11 primary for the Spartanbug-area 4th District, where far-right state Rep. Adam Morgan is challenging the incumbent. McMaster previously took sides last month in the crowded GOP primary for the neighboring 3rd District by backing Air National Guard Lt. Col. Sheri Biggs for a safely red open seat in the Greenville area.
SOUTH CAROLINA 4TH DISTRICT. South Carolina Rep. William Timmons’ newest ad accuses his primary opponent of being too hardline on abortion, a line of attack that GOP candidates almost never use against one another. Timmons, though, is betting that even Republican primary voters in the conservative Greenville area have limits on what they’re willing to tolerate.
The spot shows footage of state Rep. Adam Morgan, who is challenging Timmons for renomination on June 11, raising his hand in support of what a female narrator describes as “legislation that would send rape and incest victims to jail for up to two years who ended their pregnancy.”
“Adam,” she continues, “being pro-life doesn’t mean you hurt women by jailing the victims of rape and incest. Your vote was shameful.” Timmons himself closes out the commercial by saying he approves his message “because I am pro-life.”
The Greenville News’ Savannah Moss recently explained the context for the 2022 vote in question. At the time, the state House was debating a bill that would ban abortion unless the mother’s life was at risk or the pregnancy was the result of a sexual assault.
But Republican Rep. Josiah Magnuson thought these restrictions still did not go far enough, so he proposed an amendment that would punish a woman who “intentionally commits abortion” with a misdemeanor with a maximum prison sentence of two years.
Morgan, who chairs the far-right Freedom Caucus that Magnuson is also a member of, voted for his ally’s plan, but most lawmakers did not. The amendment failed 91 to 9, though the legislature went on to ban abortion in most cases after just six weeks.
Morgan defended himself at a candidate forum earlier this month by claiming that his vote was meant to close an alleged “loophole” by going after women “who performed abortions on themselves.” He also snarked that the three-term congressman didn’t understand the true purpose of the vote because he suffered from “reading comprehension issues.”
Timmons stood his ground both on the amendment and his reading abilities. The incumbent shared his new ad on social media Monday, writing that Morgan had backed a measure that “was widely rejected by the national and state pro-life movement as not only harmful to women, but to the noble effort to protect the unborn.”
Timmons, who has Donald Trump’s endorsement, is facing off against Morgan in an increasingly ugly battle. During a debate last week, the congressman brought up a website his campaign had created to attack Morgan for missing votes in the legislature, prompting Morgan to respond by drawing attention to rumors that Timmons used the powers of his office to conceal an extra-marital affair.
“The fact that we’re at a place in our politics where somebody has to go and create a website about attacking their opponent and attacking their integrity,” Morgan complained. “I have to say, you don’t want this election to be about integrity.”
When the rumors first surfaced two years ago, Timmons denied he’d done anything illegal. He did not, however, address whether he’d been unfaithful to his wife, who filed for divorce several months later, with the estranged wife of a developer named Ron Rallis.
Rallis publicly accused Timmons of moral and legal wrongdoing at the time and has since kept up a public crusade against the incumbent. The developer sat in the audience at a late April candidate forum as another attendee asked Timmons about the scandal. The congressman, after what the Post & Courier described as “a moment that left the room in awkward silence and Timmons at a loss for words,” avoided giving a direct answer.
WASHINGTON 6TH DISTRICT. State Sen. Emily Randall has earned the backing of the Washington State Labor Council in the August top-two primary to replace retiring Rep. Derek Kilmer, a fellow Democrat. Randall’s main intra-party foe this summer is Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz, who has Kilmer’s support.
VIRGINIA 7TH DISTRICT. VoteVets has launched what it says is a $400,000 TV ad buy to support former National Security Council adviser Eugene Vindman in the crowded Democratic primary on June 18. The spot notes that Vindman was fired for standing up to Donald Trump in the scandal that led to Trump’s first impeachment, and it also touts the Washington Post’s recent endorsement along with Vindman’s support for abortion rights.
WASHINGTON 5TH DISTRICT. The Washington State Labor Council over the weekend issued a dual endorsement to Republican state Rep. Jacquelin Maycumber and former Spokane County Democratic Party chair Carmela Conroy in the Aug. 6 top-two primary for the conservative 5th District.
Maycumber is the lone Republican congressional candidate to receive an endorsement, albeit a shared one, from the WSLC, an AFL-CIO affiliate that calls itself the state’s “largest labor organization.” WSLC’s support, though, could help Maycumber appeal to Democratic voters if she winds up facing Spokane County Treasurer Michael Baumgartner in an all-Republican general election to succeed retiring GOP Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers.
NORTH CAROLINA 3RD DISTRICT. Republican Rep. Greg Murphy announced Tuesday that he has been diagnosed with a tumor at the base of his skull called a pituitary macroadenoma and will undergo surgery soon to have it removed. Murphy said his doctors thought the tumor was benign and that his prognosis “is excellent,” though he didn’t specify a timeline for his absence beyond saying he hoped to return to work “soon.”
MICHIGAN 13TH DISTRICT. Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett has determined that former state Sen. Adam Hollier failed to file the 1,000 voter signatures required to qualify for the August Democratic primary in his rematch against freshman Rep. Shri Thanedar. Garrett’s office concluded that only 863 signatures were valid while 690 were not, including some due to apparent fraud.
The Detroit Free Press’ Clara Hendrickson writes that state law allows Hollier or someone else “aggrieved” by his disqualification to appeal to the secretary of state or a state court. Hollier responded to the decision stating that he would “continue to talk to my family, friends, supporters, and Pastor about the way forward” over “the coming days.”
If Hollier’s disqualification stands, Thanedar would lose his best-funded primary challenger. A few underfunded Democrats are also challenging the incumbent, including Detroit City Councilmember Mary Waters, though Waters had just $5,000 in cash on hand at the end of March.
COLORADO 4TH DISTRICT. Democrat Trisha Calvarese has released an internal poll from Keating Research that finds her trailing 3rd District GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert by a 46-36 margin in a hypothetical November general election for the 4th District. However, the survey is a month old, and the release did not include results for this year’s presidential contest. Donald Trump carried the 4th 58-39 in 2020.
Calvarese is running against Republican Greg Lopez in the June 25 special election to fill the remainder of former Republican Ken Buck’s term, but Lopez isn’t running in the GOP primary for the full term that is happening that same day. Boebert, who currently represents a district based in western Colorado, is running in a crowded primary that features several candidates with stronger ties to this eastern Colorado district.
OKLAHOMA 4TH DISTRICT. Defending Main Street has launched what Punchbowl News reports is a $500,000 ad buy to help Rep. Tom Cole fend off self-funder Paul Bondar in an unexpectedly expensive June 18 Republican primary. The super PAC, which supports candidates like Cole who are close to the House GOP leadership, attacks Bondar as a wealthy outsider from Texas who wants to buy a House seat in Oklahoma.
The ad features a clip where KFOR reporter Spencer Humphrey asks Bondar if he was doing their video interview from Texas, to which the challenger responds, “I’m in an office right now.” Humphrey doesn’t accept that answer and inquires, “Is that office in Texas?” After first deflecting, Bondar acknowledges, “No, I’m not in Oklahoma right now.”
What the commercial does not include, likely owing to time limitations, is the 10 seconds of silence that followed when Humphrey first asked if the candidate was in Texas. “You’re … you’re … you’re cutting out for me,” Bondar finally said before eventually acknowledging he wasn’t in Oklahoma.
0 comments on “The Political Report – May 26, 2024”