Iowa Another GOP Underperformance, Biden's Strong Presidency Causing GOP Attacks To Evaporate and Disappear

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Happy Tuesday folks. I am writing today from DC’s first snow day in many years. We got more snow than expected last night, and the federal government and schools are shuttered, kids are sledding and the great dig out has begun. If you are in for the day try to catch my discussion about polling and the 2024 elections with Molly Jong-Fast for her podcast, Fast Politics. It was a terrific conversation, and very relevant to our current moment.

And if you have time please make some GOTV calls for Tom Keen today. It’s election day, and while the early vote has been promising we need to close strong on a day with lots of happy news for Florida Republicans. He needs our help - can you grab a shift of calls today?

While we got more snow than expected, last night Republicans saw a lot less voters show up than expected. Turnout in the Iowa Caucuses last night was 115,000, down from 186,000 in 2016. Another election, another GOP struggle, another GOP underperformance - what we’ve been seeing again and again post Dobbs in election after election, in all parts of the country, for more than 18 months now.

I think the GOP has been struggling since Dobbs because this MAGA, Trumpy party is deeply unattractive even to many Republican voters. Trumpy candidates in the 2022 battlegrounds saw their party splinter, Republicans vote for Democrats and they lost, some times by enormous margins. Democrats then took away important things from Republicans in 2023 due to this ongoing GOP electoral struggle - a SCOTUS seat and outrageous gerrymandering in WI; Colorado Springs and Jacksonville - two of the largest GOP held cities in the country; the six-week abortion ban in Ohio; the state House and the hope of the 15 week abortion ban as a safe heaven in VA; and cities, city councils, state legislative seats and school board races across the US.

The fundamental problem Republicans face in 2024 is that their Presidential candidate and party are more unattractive than they’ve ever been. They’ve brought unprecedented chaos and extremism to Congress, and a historic appeasement of genocidal Putin; dozens of their leaders across the US have been indicted for supporting a party wide effort to overturn an election and end American democracy; they are content to leave pregnant women to die on a hospital table, denying them the life saving care they need; they are refusing to pass common sense reforms to make it easier for the US government to manage our border and rising immigrant flows. They want more dead kids in schools, the planet to warm faster, to strip health insurance from tens of millions, establish mass deportation camps, and to keep taking away freedoms and rights common throughout the modern world……

And then there’s Trump. More degraded, extreme, dangerous than 2016 and 2020. His performance on the stump is far more erratic and wild. He keeps making big, consequential unforced errors due to his mental decline and mania. And there are the things he’s done that voters did not know about last time - his rape of a woman in a department store dressing room; his decades-long financial fraud; his leading of a party-wide effort to overturn an election and end American democracy for all time; his being more responsible for ending Roe and stripping American women of rights and freedoms than any other single person; his rancid stealing of America’s secrets and sharing them with others; his taking of more money from foreign governments than any politician and political family in history. None of these things were known in 2020. Any one of them could disqualify him with voters. Taken together it’s an unprecedented basket of awfulness, and it’s just hard to imagine how he survives it all.

In the NBC News/Des Moines Register poll released this past weekend more Haley voters - 20% of Iowa’s GOP vote - said they would support Biden in the general election than Trump. Listen to CNN’s Katie Hunt discussing their entrance poll finding that over 30% of very conservative Iowa voters would view crimes Trump has committed as disqualifying.

Like the low turnout in the Caucuses, this data are clear warning signs that Trump could easily bleed Republicans this November, fail to bring his party together and lose the election. For in this video Kasie Hunt is talking about 30% of Republicans viewing things he HAS ALREADY DONE as disqualifiers - courts have already found that he has raped E. Jean Carroll; committed financial fraud; and lead an insurrection against the United States.

Just as we never should have waited for Mueller, we should not now wait for Jack Smith or other pending cases, and need to begin talking forcefully on TV and elsewhere about the many crimes we already know Trump has committed. We need to move this conversation from the courts to politics, and disqualify this historically awful man in the eyes of voters who have already voted against him and MAGA repeatedly. I did this last week on MSNBC (and below) and we need to keep doing it again and again as this information is new and many voters may are unaware of it.

Let’s review the math here. If 43% of Haley voters said they would vote for Biden over Trump, that’s about 8% of the GOP electorate, or 3-4% of the national vote. We won the last election by 4.5% points. If we can pick up another 3-4% due to Republicans fleeing Trump we can get to 55 and make this election an historic repudiation of MAGA, something our democracy desperately needs.

The other ominous development for Republicans in these past few weeks is that almost all of their talking points and attacks on Biden have evaporated:

• the economy is terrible - the economy is booming actually, job market best since the 1960s, best recovery in G7, deficit is trillions less and by many measures Americans are more content today than they’ve been in years

• inflation is ruining us - prices are falling, real wage growth right now way above historic norms

• Biden’s war on energy fueled inflation - both renewable and domestic oil production set records in 2023, high gas prices were fueled by Putin and OPEC not Biden

• Crime is rising everywhere - crime and murder rate saw dramatic drops in 2023, and are a fraction of what they were 30 years ago

• Biden is old - yes, but your guy is a criminal, a rapist, a madman and a wanna be dictator

My point here is just think about the arguments the two parties are going to make in the coming months. What’s the case for Trump? That he was a good President? Wants good things for our country? Is a good man, capable leader? Go ahead, game it out. What’s his argument, and consider that almost all of their attacks on Biden are losing their power and potency. Watch this clip of Trump from the other night, and consider how completely ridiculous and unsustainable this argument is - that the economy and stock market are strong right now because of him? WTF? When Trump left office the country was in one of the deepest recessions in our history, and as I wrote yesterday, it is now a lie to say he is beating Biden in public polling:

Trump is weak, not strong. His politics lost in 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2023. 35-40% of Republicans are still not supporting him. The really low turnout in Iowa last night was another example of Republicans underperforming in a post-Dobbs election. There is a very large cohort of Republicans who are not on board with MAGA and Trump’s historic awfulness, and even if a small fraction of them bolt and endorse Biden - as many did in 2022 - his coalition will splinter, and he will lose the election, again. Joe Biden’s increasingly successful Presidency is causing the 2023 Republican attacks to evaporate and disappear, giving Republicans even less to run on this year, pushing them deeper into ridiculous places and arguments and further and further away from the electorate.

We’ve got a long way to go in this election, but as I’ve been saying for some time, our current understanding of the 2024 election is wildly over discounting how deeply unattractive and awful the Republican Party has become. We will be reminded of this today when rather than heading to New Hampshire Trump returns to a New York court which has already determined he raped E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room.

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