Joe Doesn’t Intend to Go & The Presidential Reset & Bibi’s A Badass – Top 3 Takeaways – July 25th, 2024
- Joe doesn’t intend to go. Many had called for President Biden’s cabinet to use the 25th Amendment to remove Joe Biden as president of the United States prior to his exit from the presidential race. Many more have joined the chorus since (Senator Rick Scott is drafting a resolution this week pleading with his cabinet to do this). But in Joe’s prime time address last night he made it clear that he doesn’t intend to go home for good until January 20th of next year. As I mentioned in my top 3 takeaways yesterday previewing what we might expect from his speech I said... Some have wondered why he wouldn’t just now bow out and pass to the torch on to Harris – allowing her to run with the additional authority of being the president of the United States. There are a lot of potential reasons for that. Personal pride might be at the top of the list but there’s also a strategic reason for this. There’s nothing about being president that’s easy. Learning the ropes of the job when you're about 100 days away from Election Day would no doubt often take her away from the campaign. Also, it’s already hard for her to distance herself from Biden’s policies and lack of popularity – but it’s that much harder when they become your policies, and you have your first 100 days in office as the last 100 days before the presidential election. Only 22% of Americans currently approve of the direction of the country. It’s likely best to not be the president of that country if your goal is to win an election in it in three months. And based on what Joe laid out last night that line of thinking seems to be on point here. There are only five elected presidents who didn’t finish their first term. Two of them were assassinated (John F. Kennedy and James A. Garfield) and the other three died in office (William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor and Warren G. Harding). Never before has an elected president resigned during a first term. The odds are Joe Biden isn’t looking to become the first. But also, if it’s his goal to help Kamala Harris become the next President of the United States – it's likely that it’s in their interest that he remains in place at least through the election. There’s a good chance it’ll be a while before we have an address from ‘Ole Joe again (if ever) ...but for now it’s clear Joe doesn’t intend to go. And I suspect that his wishes will be fulfilled by those on the left by not pushing to remove him from office for now. That was a likely tradeoff in the pressure campaign by Democrats to push Biden out of the race.
- Two (percentage) points of separation. How big of swing do you think there was in this election cycle from the moment before the presidential debate on June 27th and Sunday when Joe Biden exited the presidential race? It’s often the case that what feels like may be reality and what the actual political reality are may be are two different things. First and foremost, there just aren’t that many persuadable people politically these days. There were after all people who publicly said they’d vote for Joe Biden for president even if he was dead in a competition with Donald Trump. The answer to my question, as my second takeaway suggests, is about two percentage points. About 2% more voters moved in Trump’s direction following the presidential debate than had been with him previously. And now that we’re a few days into the new presidential election matchup featuring Kamala Harris as the Democrat’s presumptive nominee where are we? Back to where we were before the presidential debate. On June 26th before the debate Joe Biden was priced with a 36% chance of winning the election in the betting markets – Kamala Harris is at 36% today. On June 26th Trump’s lead in head-to-head polling nationally was 1.5% over Joe Biden, it’s 1.7% over Harris today. So, in short what we’ve seen over the last week following the assignation attempt of Donald Trump, his selection of JD Vance as his running mate, the Republican National Convention, Joe Biden’s exit from the presidential race and Kamala Harris’ assent to become the Democrat’s presumptive presidential nominee is a reset in the race to where we were before the debate. There’s something for both sides to potentially feel good about here. First, for Trump, the speculation is over, and he knows who he’s really running against, he’s leading and he’s running considerably better today than he was four or eight years ago. For Harris, her candidacy seems to not only have stopped the bleeding of support from the Democrat Party but to have recovered what had been lost over the past month. Additionally, that was accomplished despite a potential tailwind for Trump from those who might have sympathy for his candidacy following the assassination attempt, any potential benefit from adding JD Vance as a running mate, and a potential bump from the RNC. Meanwhile, Harris still has the potential positive catalysts of naming a running mate and the DNC ahead of her. And one of the biggest questions left for her to address in the final 100 days is if she can convince more people to like her. And that takes me to...4 (percentage) points of separation. By and large the determining factor in Trump’s win in the 2016 election appears to have been that Hillary Clinton was more dislikeable than him. Fast forward eight years later and what do we have but yet another situation in which most Americans hold an unfavorable opinion of Donald Trump (his favorability rating currently averages 43.5%) while the woman running against him is even more disliked by most. Kamala Harris’ favorability rating currently averages 39.4% leaving Donald Trump a little over 4% more likeable. If people are most inclined to vote for politicians they like, Democrats could find themselves on the losing end of a Trump election again for similar reasons to what we saw in 2016.
- Bibi’s a badass. Benjamin Netanyahu stepped into a joint session of Congress vacated by the Democrat’s presidential nominee who went to a sorority event instead. Boycotted by nearly half of the Democrat delegation in total, Bibi rhetorically laid waste to antisemitic protestors the way he’s physically laid waste to Islamic terrorists when he’s given a chance. In the words of Netanyahu... I have a message for these protesters. When the tyrants of Tehran who hang gays from cranes and murder women for not covering their hair are praising, promoting and funding you, you have officially become Iran's useful idiots. Some of these protesters hold up signs proclaiming gays for Gaza. They might as well hold up signs saying ‘Chickens for KFC.’ These protesters chant ‘From the river to the sea.’ But many don't have a clue what river and what sea they're talking about. Truer words have never been spoken and the stakes as Israel remains not only at war with Hamas but under constant attack from Iranian-sponsored terrorists from across the middle east couldn’t be higher. The Biden administration's weakness brought about this war. There’s no doubt that a second Trump administration would allow Bibi to end it. If the sorority girl were in charge however...