United States elections 2024

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https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/19/trump-campaign-election-monitoring-00153217

Trump campaign says it will deploy thousands of election workers to monitor poll sites​

The program underscores Trump’s fixation with election security, which he deployed in an effort to undermine results of the 2020 election.

Donald Trump has privately complained that his political apparatus was not adequately prepared for the legal battles in the 2020 election. | Jamie Kelter Davis for POLITICO
By ALEX ISENSTADT
04/19/2024 05:00 AM EDT

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Former President Donald Trump’s political operation said Thursday that it plans to deploy more than 100,000 attorneys and volunteers across battleground states to monitor — and potentially challenge — vote counting in November.
The initiative — which the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee described as “the most extensive and monumental election integrity program in the nation’s history” — will include training poll watchers and workers as well as lawyers.



The program underscores Trump’s ongoing fixation with election security, which he deployed in an attempt to undermine the results of the 2020 election despite the widespread conclusion, even among Republican officials, that there was no widespread fraud.




Trump has warned supporters, without evidence, that Democrats could try to rig the 2024 election. Trump made the same false claims about the 2020 election, which he unsuccessfully tried to overturn.


Trump predicts a ‘bloodbath’ if he loses 2024 election

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Trump has privately complained that his political apparatus was not adequately prepared for the legal battles in the 2020 election. He has made clear to advisers that he would like a more robust effort to be able to challenge election results as needed.
It’s also a sign that, should Trump once again attempt to overturn the election, he will already have in place tens of thousands of workers who could help with that effort.







In a statement, Trump said, “Having the right people to count the ballots is just as important as turning out voters on Election Day.”
According to the announcement, the Trump operation plans to deploy lawyers to monitor voter machine testing, early voting, election day voting, mail ballot processing and post-election canvassing, auditing and recounts. The campaign also plans to station lawyers at mail-in voting processing centers and set up a hotline that poll watchers and voters can use to report problems.
The RNC also stated that attorneys will be stationed at “every single target processing center where mail ballots are tabulated.”
Most states have rules regulating activities at polling sites. That includes laws prohibiting voter intimidation, obstructing voters from casting their ballots, loitering and advertising. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, partisan poll workers are allowed to monitor elections but can’t interfere in the electoral process except to report issues.
Those involved in the drafting of the program included RNC Chair Michael Whatley, RNC co-chair Lara Trump, who is Trump’s daughter-in-law, and the RNC’s general counsel, Charlie Spies.
In a statement, Spies said, “In 2024 we’re going to beat the Democrats at their own game and the RNC legal team will be working tirelessly to ensure that elections officials follow the rules in administering elections. We will aggressively take them to court if they don’t follow rules or try to change them at the last minute.”

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After the November 2020 election, Trump pressured government workers to overturn the election results and regularly spread false claims about voter fraud. On Jan. 6, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of the election. Trump is now facing federal and state charges centered on his attempt to hold onto power.
A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll released in January showed that one-third of Americans don’t accept that Biden legitimately won the 2020 election.
Trump has continued to stoke that false belief that the election was unfair, including installing Whatley, who echoed his false claims about the 2020 election, as RNC chair.
“We want a landslide that is too big to rig,” Trump said at a rally last month in Virginia.“That’s what we need because they’re going to be cheating, and they’re cheaters, and we’re going to be watching them, and we’re going to prosecute.”

 

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Trump vs. Biden Polls: How Will the Hush-Money Trial Play?

Polling shows voters consider these charges the least serious made against Trump, and reactions to a possible conviction match party affiliation.

nymag.com

POLL POSITION 11:43 A.M.

Trump vs. Biden Polls: How Will the Hush-Money Trial Play?​

By Ed Kilgore, political columnist for Intelligencer since 2015

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: MEGA/Getty Images
After months of speculation on whether Donald Trump would actually go to court on felony criminal charges before facing voters in November, his Manhattan trial over hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels is fully underway. Possible outcomes include felony convictions, misdemeanor convictions, acquittal, or a hung jury or mistrial, with all four seeming plausible.
Since we don’t know if any of Trump’s other felony criminal indictments will come to trial before November, this could be the key test of whether the 45th president’s legal troubles will affect his prospects for victory over Joe Biden.

While polling on this issue has been sporadic and questionably framed, it is reasonably clear that this particular case has been considered the least important, and thus least potentially damaging, to Trump. FiveThirtyEight explains:

According to an Ipsos/Reuters poll released Wednesday, 65 percent of registered voters found the hush-money-related charges “very” or “somewhat” serious, trailing the other three cases by 5 to 10 points. And in a YouGov poll from January, 56 percent of respondents ranked the hush money case as the least important of the four indictments. That majority held across nearly all demographic groups surveyed, including party identification.

The thinking seems to be that despite the lurid nature of the narrative surrounding the payments to Stormy Daniels, the case involves understandable private conduct (at least for a very rich man running for president) that occurred before Trump was president. And as former prosecutor Elie Honig explained at New York, there’s a counternarrative for the case that makes Trump look more like a victim of overzealous prosecutors than a felon:

The crime is a paperwork offense relating to how Trump and his businesses logged a series of perfectly legal (if unseemly) hush-money payments in their own internal records. The prosecution’s star witness is a convicted perjurer and fraudster who openly spews vitriol at the defendant, often in grotesque terms, essentially for a living. The famously aggressive feds at the Southern District of New York passed on the case years ago, and current Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s predecessor could have indicted before he left office but did not. The charges are either misdemeanors or the lowest-level felonies (depending on how the jury decides the case), and the vast majority of defendants convicted of similar offenses are sentenced to probation and fines, not prison.

Public reaction will depend on the optics of the trial and the exact outcome. An acquittal, of course, would be treated by his campaign and his supporters as a plenary exoneration of Trump that could actually boost his general-election standing but probably won’t move mountains for him insofar as he faces three other felony criminal trials that voters do take very seriously. The biggest short-range question is whether a conviction — particularly of a felony — would significantly damage him. And there is some evidence that it would, as in a new AP-NORC poll released this week: “Half of Americans would consider Trump unfit to serve as president if he is convicted of falsifying business documents to cover up hush-money payments to a woman who said he had a sexual encounter with her.” Most crucially, 47 percent of self-identified independents, and even 15 percent of Republicans, share that sentiment. But anything else than a decisive felony conviction might play into public doubts that prosecutors in this and the other Trump cases are motivated by justice concerns rather than politics, the same polls suggests:

[A] cloud of doubt hangs over all the proceedings. Only about 3 in 10 Americans feel that any of the prosecutors who have brought charges against Trump are treating the former president fairly. And only about 2 in 10 Americans are extremely or very confident that the judges and jurors in the cases against him can be fair and impartial.

It’s also worth noting that the “half of Americans” that would deem Trump “unfit to serve as president” if he’s convicted in Manhattan isn’t much higher than the percentage of voters who have consistently said they would not vote for the former president in any circumstance. As FiveThirtyEight’s Geoffrey Skelley observes, attitudes about Trump’s culpability in the various trials may simply represent inflexible partisanship:

[A March] Ipsos/Politico poll found that a near-identical proportion of Americans (around half) believe Trump is guilty in all four cases. And with beliefs in Trump’s guilt largely falling in line with partisanship, opinions on the indictments appear to be little more than a reflection of how voters feel about Trump at large …

Polling on the New York trial — and the other three indictments — reflects a clean split between the political parties and not much else. A guilty verdict might hurt Trump’s performance among independents, but severe political polarization for and against the former president means that a seismic shift in voting patterns is unlikely.

On the other hand, it may not take a “seismic shift in voting patterns” to lift Joe Biden to victory if this and/or other trials cast a dark light on Trump’s conduct and character. If, as appears increasingly likely, the Biden-Trump contest winds up extremely close, what he did in 2016 to very narrowly get over the finish line could cost him just enough votes in 2024 to keep him from a return to the White House. Biden would almost certainly have to fight another Trump effort to challenge or overturn the results, but that’s a problem for another day’s consideration.

 

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Was Trump Benefiting From Being Out of the News?

His liabilities weren’t dominating the conversation the way they once did, perhaps helping his polling, but the trial could change things.

www.nytimes.com

 

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Marquette Law Poll: Trump leads Biden, latest results show | FOX6 News Milwaukee​

 

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Why US elections only give you two choices​

 

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/18/biden-younger-voters-polling/

The politics of younger voters are less exceptional than they used to be​

Polls continue to show that President Biden retains an advantage with voters under 30, but it’s not clear where he can gain more ground​

Analysis by Philip Bump
National columnist
April 18, 2024 at 1:19 p.m. EDT
President Biden faces different challenges in the electorate than he did in 2020, according to new polling. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

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Earlier this week, I was asked a question for which I didn’t know the answer: What could President Biden do to firm up his support among younger voters?
Recent polling has shown that Biden is performing more poorly than expected with Americans under 30, though, as I’ve written, that varies depending on the poll and whether it screens for the likelihood that the respondents will vote.


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Consider, for example, new polling from the Harvard Institute of Politics that considers only the views of adults 18-29. Overall, Biden leads former president Donald Trump by eight points, 45 percent to 37 percent. Among registered voters, though, he’s up 13 points — 50 percent to 37 percent. And among those who say they’re most likely to vote, he’s up 19 points. Biden has 56 percent of support and Trump, again, 37 percent.
That Trump doesn’t gain ground as the pool of respondents is narrowed is important. It suggests that indifference to the candidates and voter apathy are linked — and that there’s potentially an opportunity for Biden if his campaign can compel more young Americans to vote.



This comes back to the initial question: What’s the pitch?
Recent YouGov polling conducted for the Economist included a battery of issues on which respondents were asked to offer their opinions. This allows us to see where Americans stand on the election and also how younger (those under 30) voters differ from older ones.
What we find is that there are only a handful of issues to which younger voters ascribe more importance than older ones, whether we're considering issues respondents identify as the most important (red, below), very important (purple) or at least somewhat important (orange). Younger Americans are more likely to point to jobs and abortion as the most important issue to them, but the gap between younger voters and voters overall is wider when describing climate change or civil rights as very important issues.
The issue that scored the highest in importance to younger Americans? Inflation, same as everyone else.
That holds in the Harvard Youth Poll as well. Its methodology was different, presenting respondents with two options from a lengthy list and asking them to identify which was more important. The issue that was most commonly selected as most important relative to alternatives was, once again, inflation.

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By virtue of focusing on younger respondents, the Harvard poll allows a breakdown by gender. You can see that, on several issues, there’s a substantial difference in the views of young men and women, like reproductive rights. The three issues on which there’s the widest difference by gender are three of the most commonly associated with liberal politics: reproductive rights, climate change and gun violence. Young women were at least 10 points more likely to identify those issues as important than were young men.
A key finding in the Harvard poll centers on the divide by gender. Support for Biden is higher among likely voters than among young people overall — but among young men who are likely to vote, his advantage is only six points compared with a 33-point advantage with young women who are likely to vote.
Since 2020, the Harvard Youth Poll has seen the partisan advantage for Democrats evaporate among young men. In 2020, men and women were about 20 points more likely to identify as Democrats than as Republicans. Now, women are 26 points more likely to, while among men, there’s virtually no difference.
(It’s worth noting that Gallup polling of partisan identity shows a rightward shift among young voters that comports with the data above.)



On the issue importance question, the views of young women correlate strongly to the views of young Democrats. The views of young men correlate slightly less strongly to the views of young Republicans.
The question of how Biden appeals to these voters, though, remains unanswered. He’s put a big focus on student loan relief, as you’re probably aware, and it’s the issue on which Harvard found the highest level of approval for Biden from younger Americans. It is also the issue that was least likely to be identified as important in Harvard’s battery. On inflation and gun violence, issues seen as more important, his approval rating was around 25 percent. On the issue of Israel — which was also surprisingly low on the importance list — his approval was under 20 percent.
YouGov found that younger Americans were more critical of Biden across the board than Americans overall, including on education and civil rights, issues that they were more likely to identify as important.
The situation, then, is that the issues important to young people and those important to Americans overall don’t differ that much as Biden’s party has lost ground with young men. (A plurality of young men in the poll identified as independent.) Analysis from Pew Research Center found that voters under 30 backed Biden by a 26-point margin in 2020, down from the 30-point margin Hillary Clinton enjoyed four years before. If the margin had instead matched that seen in this poll — 19 points — it would have meant a shift of more than 4 million votes from Biden to Trump.
Convincing younger voters to turn out to vote for him in November, in other words, is of significant importance to Biden’s campaign. It seems safe to say, at this point, that he’ll have better luck focusing on young women than young men.

 

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Will Trump’s trial lose him the election? | His colleagues reveal all​

 

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Kennedy family announces endorsement for President Joe Biden's run for re-election​

 

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President Biden visits Philly to campaign for 2024 presidential election​

 

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'Historic low': James Morrow details Joe Biden's 'trouble' ahead of US election​

 

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Is Trump the frontrunner in the general election? Not so fast​

 

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President Biden receives key endorsement for 2024 election​

 

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'Weak' Joe Biden has lost control​

 

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The 2024 Election Based on Political Betting Odds​

 

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15 Kennedy family members endorse Biden for president​