By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, September 19, 2024
From the write-up in the Washington Post, the Teamsters’
decision not to endorse a presidential candidate sounds like a defeat for the
Kamala Harris campaign:
For the first time in nearly three
decades, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters won’t endorse a candidate
in the presidential race — a blow to the Democratic Party, which has reliably
received the union’s approval for years.
The Teamsters confirmed the
decision not to endorse Wednesday, as the union’s executive board met in
Washington and voted on the endorsement.
The non-endorsement comes two days
after union leaders and members met privately with Vice President Kamala Harris
and she laid out her case for an endorsement, underscoring the current
administration’s many achievements for unions.
“Unfortunately, neither major
candidate was able to make serious commitments to our union to ensure the
interests of working people are always put before Big Business,” said Teamsters
president Sean O’Brien in a statement. The union had “sought commitments from
both Trump and Harris” specifically about their union campaigns, core
industries and right to strike, but “were unable to secure those pledges,” he
added.
And hey, if you’re Trump, a non-endorsement is better
than a Harris endorsement. But judging from the polling of its members that the Teamster Union
released Wednesday, Trump was indisputably the preferred choice of the
Teamsters rank-and-file. Members surveyed electronically preferred Trump to
Harris, 59.6 percent to 34 percent, and members surveyed by phone preferred
Trump, 58 percent to 31 percent.
Seriously, the Teamsters must rank among the most
pro-Trump demographics in America.
Keep in mind, the Trump campaign already gave the union
an unprecedented gift: Teamsters president Sean O’Brien gave the closing
address on the first night of the Republican National Convention, serving up a
17-minute speech that spent a lot of time bragging about how effective the
Teamsters are, denounced corporations for “economic terrorism,” and praised
Missouri senator Josh Hawley for changing his position to oppose national
“right to work” legislation. (Dominic Pino reminds us what the Teamsters Union actually is.)
My Three Martini Lunch podcast co-host Greg
Corombos and I spent the first segment on Tuesday discussing the rumors that the
Teamsters were going to betray Trump and endorse Harris. Trump dodged the
worst-case scenario, but . . . based on that poll, he earned the Teamsters
endorsement, and the leadership of the union wouldn’t give it to him. A non-endorsement
is a tie that really should have been a Trump win.
Donald Trump’s New York State of Mind
Yesterday was 47 days to Election Day, and Donald Trump
held a rally at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y., on
Long Island.
Now, there are three competitive House races on Long Island. If you’re GOP
representative Anthony
D’Esposito of the fourth congressional district, GOP representative Nick LaLota of the first
congressional district, or GOP congressional challenger Mike LiPetri of
the third congressional district, Trump did you one of the biggest favors a
presidential campaign can do.
But that’s about all that’s competitive in that neck of
the woods. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is cruising to reelection; despite the
occasional contention that she’s “vulnerable,” an August poll showed her at 63 percent. The governor’s race isn’t until
2026, and Democrats have a roughly two-to-one advantage in the New York state senate and state assembly, which are also on the ballot this year.
Trump is repeating a familiar — some would say tired —
refrain that despite history, polling numbers, and the latest registration
numbers that show 6.4 million registered Democrats and 2.9 million Republicans
in New York, he’s about to pull a rabbit out of a hat:
“When I told some people in
Washington, ‘I’m going up to New York, we’re doing a campaign speech,’ they
said, ‘What do you mean, New York? You can’t ever — nobody can win. Republicans
can’t win,’” Trump recounted to the cheering fans nearly filling a 16,000-seat
arena. “I said, ‘I can win New York, and we can win New York.’ We’re going to
win!”
Every four years, we go through this. It’s not just that
Trump loses New York, it’s that he doesn’t even come close to keeping it close.
In September 2016, speaking at the New York Conservative Party’s convention,
Trump insisted he could win New York. That year, he won 36.5
percent of the vote to Hillary Clinton’s 59 percent. It was his sixth-worst
performance in all the states, seventh if you count his 4.09 percent of the
vote in the District of Columbia.
Then, in August 2020, in an interview with the New York Post, Trump
insisted, “New York is in play”:
Trump brandished a map of New
York’s 2016 presidential election results.
The map showed most counties in
red, meaning he won them, despite losing the state by 22 points to Democrat
Hillary Clinton.
Trump tossed the paper across the
Resolute Desk toward reporters from The Post. Aides also had copies of the map
and handed them out too.
The problem for Trump is that while he indeed wins most
of the counties in the state, he wins the rural counties that have a lot fewer
voters, while his Democratic opponents run up huge margins in the cities. In
both 2016 and 2020, in Kings County, which includes Brooklyn, the Democratic
nominee won with a margin of around a half-million votes.
In 2020, Trump won 37.7 percent of the vote to Joe
Biden’s 60.8 percent. It was again his sixth-worst performance in all the
states, eighth worst if you count D.C. and Maine’s first congressional district
as separate from Maine statewide.
Believe it or not, the 2024 presidential election has
begun. Arkansas, Delaware, Kentucky, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania,
South Dakota, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Wisconsin have already begun mailing out absentee ballots. In Virginia and Minnesota, in-person absentee balloting, a.k.a. early
voting, begins Friday.
If the Republicans keep the House by a narrow margin with
the help of some wins on Long Island, perhaps Wednesday’s rally will be
remembered as worthwhile. But if that doesn’t come to pass, and Trump loses the
presidential election, many will fairly ask why he was spending a weekday in
the middle of September holding a rally in a state he was just about guaranteed
to lose in a landslide.
Trump also announced at yesterday’s rally that he would
go to Springfield, Ohio and Aurora, Co. in the coming weeks.
There may be some messaging value to holding events in
those cities, but polls indicate Trump is currently winning Ohio by about nine percentage points. There’s only been one poll of Colorado since Harris became the
Democratic nominee; it showed Harris ahead, 55 percent to 40 percent.
The Trump Campaign Is Worried about Omaha, and I Don’t
Mean Steaks
Tuesday’s newsletter looked at the reasons Trump has the advantage as we get closer to November;
Wednesday did the same for Kamala Harris. You didn’t have to look far
to find commenters complaining that Tuesday’s edition was unfair or ignoring
Harris’s advantages, and that Wednesday’s was one-sided and ignoring Trump’s
advantages. Yes, that’s the point. Would it help if I typed slower?
For everyone who grumbled about yesterday’s edition and
insisted Trump will win in a landslide, I will point out that the Trump
campaign is not acting like it expects to win in a landslide. From KOLN in Lincoln, Neb.:
Sen. Lindsey Graham met with more
than a dozen Republican members of Nebraska’s Unicameral at the governor’s
mansion Wednesday morning, multiple state senators confirmed. Graham visited
with lawmakers about the topic of winner-take-all in Nebraska.
“He wanted us to kind of understand
the national picture,” State Sen. Tom Brewer, the head of the Legislature’s
Government, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee. That’s the committee that
would likely take up a winner-take-all bill if a special session gets called.
On Friday, Gov. Jim Pillen said
that a special session to make Nebraska a winner-take-all state in the
Electoral College has been in the works. But Pillen will not call a special
session until he has 33 votes to ensure a bill is passed.
Most of the state senators who
gathered at the governor’s mansion are ready to pass a winner-take-all bill,
but a few holdouts remain, according to lawmakers. Senators estimate that 30 to
31 votes have been confirmed.
Sen. Graham spoke to the senators
with the hopes of encouraging the final holdouts to change their minds.
“Depending on how the count comes
up, it may very well decide who the next president United States is going be,”
Brewer said. “And [Graham] just wanted us to understand the big picture, that
this is a national issue, not just in Nebraska.”
If you think you’re on your way to winning in a
landslide, you don’t spend time and effort trying to pass a last-minute change
to ensure you win five electoral votes instead of four in Nebraska.
ADDENDUM: Over in my column in the Washington Post, a deeper dive
into why the FBI crime statistics in recent years aren’t a particularly
reliable measuring stick of whether violent crime is up or down:
As the Marshall Project explains, in 2021, “in an effort to
fully modernize the system, the FBI stopped taking data from the old summary
system and only accepted data through the new system. Thousands of police
agencies fell through the cracks because they didn’t catch up with the changes
on time.” That year, Miami-Dade, New York City and Los Angeles did not submit
their data. Philadelphia reported nine months’ worth of data; Chicago reported
seven months, and Phoenix reported only one month. For 2021, the FBI noted, “crime estimates will fill in the gaps where
data is not available.”
In 2022, Miami-Dade, Philadelphia
and Chicago got the data in, but Phoenix didn’t, and neither did New York or
Los Angeles. Crime statistics that don’t include information from the two
largest U.S. cities would seem to guarantee an incomplete understanding about
the state of crime in America.
The stumbling transition to the new
FBI reporting system meant big variations in the number of law enforcement
agencies that participate year by year. In 2020, 16,572 of 18,641 participated
(88 percent). The following year, when the new system was introduced, saw a big
drop in participation: just 13,344 of 18,939 (70 percent). The next year, 2022,
brought a rebound, with 16,100 of 18,930 participating (85 percent).
But even for 2020, the FBI was missing crime reports from
about 2,000 jurisdictions. The most recent complete year in the FBI Crime Data Explorer is 2022, but the numbers in the
quarter that Garland cited included data from 13,719 of 19,268 law enforcement
agencies in the country — 71 percent.
It is increasingly clear that many people participating
in our public debates don’t care about whether what they’re saying is true;
they just want to assert that their guy is doing a terrific job.
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