A strong showing by Biden, another underperformance by Trump.

February 28, 2024

President Biden met with congressional leaders on Tuesday in an effort to avoid a government shutdown and ensure funding for Ukraine. According to reports, everyone in the room—including Republican leaders—hammered Speaker Mike Johnson into acting in the interests of the American people. See The Hill, Leaders gang up on Speaker Johnson at ‘intense’ White House meeting. Senator Schumer said the Ukraine discussion was “one of the most intense I have ever encountered” at the White House.

After the group meeting, Mike Johnson stayed behind for an even more “intense one-on-one meeting” with President Biden. After the meeting with President Biden, Speaker Johnson said,

We will get the government funded. We have been working in good faith around the clock every single day, for months and weeks, and over the last several days, quite literally around the clock, to get that job done.

We're very optimistic.

Almost no one trusts what Mike Johnson says. First, his assurance of government funding contained an outright lie. House Republicans have not been “working around the clock . . . to get the job done.”  The House is returning on Wednesday from a ten-day recess, during which Republicans were not working on any bills.

Second, it is unclear whether Johnson speaks for any caucus member. Reactionary members of the House Republican caucus have said they will not vote to fund the government until Congress passes an immigration reform bill. You will, of course, recall that House Republicans killed a bipartisan immigration reform bill that was negotiated in the Senate because Trump told them to do so.

In other words, a substantial portion of the GOP House caucus won’t support an immigration bill but won’t fund the government until an immigration bill is passed. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the very definition of “gaslighting.”

The situation is a mess. But President Biden has intervened forcefully—with support from Democratic and Republican congressional leaders. Although the path forward is murky, it was also unclear before the last two budget extensions (in November and January). While short-term funding extensions are no way to run a government, it is better than the alternative—which is what the most reactionary members of the GOP caucus are hoping for.

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Comment on the Michigan primary results

As usual, the major media outlets cannot shake themselves of the horse-race model to look beyond the “who won vs. who lost” narrative. As I write (9:30 p.m. Central), President Biden has won 80% of the vote, with 15% uncommitted and 5% split between Marianne Williamson and Dean Phillips. The 15% appears to be a protest vote against President Biden’s policies regarding Israel’s war on Hamas, while only 5% of the vote was cast for candidates other than Biden. It was a strong showing by Biden, even accepting the protest vote on policy toward Israel.

In contrast, Trump won only 70% of the Republican primary vote, indicating that a sizable portion of the Republican electorate does not want Trump to be the GOP nominee.

But, alas! Major outlets are reporting that Biden faced “stiff opposition” while Trump delivered a “blow” to Nikki Haley. I won’t cite headlines because media outlets are changing them as I write, presumably because their subscribers are yelling at them about unbalanced coverage.

And although the results are not yet final, it appears that the polling averages overstated support for Donald Trump.

FiveThirtyEight.com’s final polling average showed Trump winning the Michigan primary by 57 percentage points. As of 10:30 p.m. on Tuesday evening, the NYTimes is predicting that Trump will win by 42 percentage points—a 15-point underperformance in the actual result vs. the polling average.

Hmm. . . let me take a guess what Nate Cohn will say about this “miss.” Here’s my prediction:

• It’s “only” a primary.

• The error isn’t “especially large” for a primary.

• The pollsters surveyed the wrong voters because they didn’t include “Democratic-leaning” Republicans and Independents.

At a certain point, those “explanations” aren’t explanations. They are efforts to cover up an embedded bias in polling for Trump. But let’s give Nate the benefit of the doubt to see what he has to say about this latest overestimate of support for Trump.

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President Biden goes on the offensive against Trump on the age issue

President Biden was interviewed on Late Night with Seth Meyers. (Video here.) Meyers asked Biden about voters’ concerns about his age. Biden said the following in response:

Well, a couple things. You got to take a look at the other guy. He is about as old as I am. But he can’t remember his wife’s name.

But it’s about how old your ideas are. Look, this is a guy who wants to take us back. He wants to take us back on Roe v. Wade, he wants to take us back on a whole range of isssues that are 50, 60 years . . . they’ve been solid American positions.

And I really mean this sincerely, I think it’s about the future . . . and everything we’ve done. I think we’ve gotten some good things done. And they told us we couldn’t get them done because things were so divided.

Biden’s reference to Trump being unable to remember his wife’s name refers to a speech over the weekend when Trump referred to his wife as “Mercedes,” rather than “Melania.” See The Independent, Donald Trump calls wife Melania ‘Mercedes’ during CPAC.

And for those of you who continue to worry about Biden’s age, the relative velocity of misstatements by Trump is increasing. On Tuesday, Trump told reporters,

In some states, the law allows a baby to be born from the mother’s womb in the ninth  month. This has to change.

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The bad-faith gambit by Alabama Republicans to dodge the implications of their anti-abortion legislation

Republicans in Alabama (and across the nation) are scrambling to pass legislation to “protect IVF” in the wake of the Alabama Supreme Court decision that the destruction of frozen embryos can give rise to a civil claim for wrongful death. One Alabama GOP legislator has introduced a bill that would “fix” the decision by the Alabama court.

But, as Judd Legum notes, the proposed bill is a bad faith gambit to avoid the electoral consequences of a draconian policy that exposes couples trying to conceive to civil and (possible) criminal liability. As explained by Legum, the proposed bill would

• Expire in a year—five months after the 2024 election cycle

• Allow for lawsuits against IVF clinics for intentional acts “not arising from or related to IVF services.” Notably, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that destroying frozen embryos is not an intrinsic part of the IVF process.

• Does not provide that frozen embryos are not “children” or “unborn life”, which is at the core of the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision.

I would add to Legum’s list the following point:

• The Alabama Supreme Court based its decision on a newly enacted state constitutional amendment that was “aimed at stopping courts from excluding unborn life from legal protection.” Thus, the Alabama legislature cannot override the provisions of the state constitutional amendment by granting immunity merely by enacting legislation.

The problem with Republican efforts to undo the damage to IVF caused by the Alabama decision is that “protecting IVF” is meaningless unless state and federal legislatures protect patients, doctors, and service providers against liability for destroying frozen embryos.

Republicans simply aren’t going to grant that protection—because state constitutions forbid it and because doing so would contravene the religious principles of the white evangelicals that form the bedrock of Trump's support.

The illusory protection granted by the proposed legislation in Alabama illustrates the bind that Republicans have created for themselves—and for couples trying to conceive.

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A quick comment on Republican plans to interfere in the 2024 electoral ballot count

Over the last several days, I have received a handful of worried emails about a supposed plan by Republicans to interfere with the count of electoral ballots in the 2024 election. The theory asserts that Speaker Mike Johnson will refuse to swear in newly elected Democrats, thereby maintaining control of the House through January 6, 2025, when Congress will count the electoral ballots.

While I do not mean to minimize or dismiss the efforts Republicans will undertake to prevent a Biden victory, the plan outlined above can’t happen. Why? Under the 20th Amendment to the Constitution and the rules of the House, Mike Johnson’s term as Speaker ends on January 3, 2025, at 11:59 a.m.—three days before the electoral ballots are counted.

On January 3, 2025, at 12:00 p.m., a new Congress begins (the 119th). Every member elected to the 119th Congress is a “representative-elect,” and no one—including Mike Johnson—has yet to be sworn in when the new Congress begins. All the unsworn “representative-elects” of the 119th Congress vote for a new Speaker. (See the rules linked above.)

The newly elected Speaker then swears in every representative-elect—because each begins a new term of service on January 3, 2025. Mike Johnson doesn’t “carry over” as Speaker from the 118th to the 119th Congress.

If Democrats “flip” the House in the 2024 elections, they will be a majority of Democratic representatives-elect, and they will elect Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker of the 119th Congress. Mike Johnson is irrelevant.

If I haven’t explained the above clearly, the most important point is that Democrats must flip the House to prevent the radical “Freedom Caucus” from interfering in the count of electoral ballots.

And remember this: No matter who wins the 2024 election, the President Pro Tem of the Senate on January 6, 2025, will be Kamala Harris. Her first term does not expire until January 20, 2025.

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Concluding Thoughts.

Ugh. I tried my best to watch the coverage of the Michigan primaries, but the editorializing against Biden was simply too much. I won’t detail how major media print and broadcast outlets placed their thumbs on the scale against Joe Biden, but it was painfully obvious. As Josh Marshall observed about the Times, its analysis bordered on “innumeracy.”  

Here’s the takeaway: Joe Biden turned in another strong showing with about 81% of the vote. The percentage of the vote garnered by the candidate (Dean Phillips) running on the platform that “Biden is too old” came in fourth place in a three-person race—at 2.8% of the vote. If you are looking for a signal in the noise, that is a strong one.

 In addition, about 13% of voters in Michigan voted for “uncommitted”—some of whom used that vote to express their policy disagreement with Biden over his support for Israel in its war against Hamas. I urge caution when reading analyses of the uncommitted votes. Finding a fair comparison for understanding the strength of the signal is difficult—and many commentators are playing fast and loose with the numbers.

The number of uncommitted votes on Tuesday is far higher than the number of uncommitted voters when Barack Obama ran as an incumbent in 2012. But the total votes cast on Tuesday in the Democratic primary (about 875,000) is far higher than the total votes cast in the 2012 Democratic primary (194,887). In 2012, approximately 11% voted uncommitted, while in 2024, approximately 13% voted uncommitted (as of 11:15 p.m. Central).

In offering the above numbers, I don’t mean to diminish anyone’s vote for, against, or uncommitted. But having the correct (and complete) data is the right place to start a conversation. Media outlets looking to spin a negative outcome for Biden will likely focus only on the absolute numbers of the uncommitted vote without providing the natural comparator—the last time an incumbent Democratic president participated in a Michigan primary.

But, no matter how you look at the data, it is fair to say that tens of thousands of Michigan voters expressed their dissatisfaction with Biden’s support for Israel.

The media is taking that policy disagreement and casting it as a “loss,” “defeat,” or “stiff opposition,” while Trump's fifth straight underperformance against Nikki Haley is described as a “blow” against Haley or a victory for Trump. That should have been the lead story of the night.

Once again, the media is doing its best to misrepresent the presidential primary to maximize clicks. Don’t fall for it! Biden had a good night!

Talk to you tomorrow!