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Post by Webster on Jan 23, 2024 16:28:10 GMT -5
Previous 2024 Presidential Campaign Threads: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3(The Guardian) Biden still expected to win Democratic primary despite not being on ballotEven without a formal campaign presence in New Hampshire, and without Biden’s name on the ballot paper, the US president is still expected to receive the most votes in the Democratic primary by a wide margin. An Emerson College/WHDH poll conducted last week showed Biden winning the support of 61% of likely Democratic primary voters, compared to 16% for Phillips and 5% for Williamson. But a disappointing performance could point to decreased enthusiasm among the Democratic base, which would be a worrisome sign for Biden heading into the general election. Polls already show Biden running neck and neck with Donald Trump, who is widely expected to win the Republican presidential nomination. In an indication of Biden’s potential vulnerabilities, some of the president’s prominent allies, including congressman Ro Khanna of California, have spent time campaigning on his behalf in New Hampshire. Speaking at a house party in support of the write-in campaign on Saturday, Khanna predicted a “decisive win” for Biden in New Hampshire. “That’s going to propel him to have a big win in November,” Khanna said. “At the end of the day, I am a believer that Americans love this country and love our democracy.” Some voters, however, outraged over the war in Gaza, are expected to write in “ceasefire” to the ballot paper today to criticize US support for Israel’s military.
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Post by Webster on Jan 23, 2024 16:31:06 GMT -5
(The Guardian) One of the big questions today is if a big win for Donald Trump will effectively end the race to be the Republican nominee. Over at CNN Eric Bradner and Gregory Krieg write: If Trump wins, he would make history: In modern presidential campaign history – since the Iowa caucuses began serving as the official kickoff, followed by the New Hampshire primary — no non-incumbent Republican has won both states.
And in doing so, he would make it much tougher for Haley to convince donors to pour money into her campaign and voters to stick with her for the month until the South Carolina primary. She’ll miss her only shot at another win before then because Haley filed to run in Nevada’s state-run primary, instead of competing in the state GOP-run caucuses. Delegates are awarded through the Nevada caucuses.
Some in the party are already eager to see the nominating race reach its end eight days after it started.
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Post by Webster on Jan 23, 2024 17:06:33 GMT -5
(The Guardian) The New Hampshire attorney general’s office said on Monday that it was investigating reports of a robocall mimicking the voice of Joe Biden and encouraging Democrats not to vote in Tuesday’s primary election. New Hampshire attorney general, John Formella, said the recorded message, which was sent to multiple voters on Sunday, appeared to be an illegal attempt to disrupt and suppress voting. Voters should “disregard the contents of this message entirely”, he added. A recording of the call, released by NBC, begins with: “What a bunch of malarkey,”, using a term so characteristic of the 81-year-old president it has been widely used in merchandising and meme-making. “You know the value of voting Democratic,” the voice said. “Our votes count. It’s important that you save your vote for the November election. We’ll need your help in electing Democrats up and down the ticket. - Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again. Your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday. If you would like to be removed from future calls, please press two now.Biden’s name will not be on the Democratic ballot on Tuesday, because New Hampshire went against an official reorganisation of the primary calendar which placed South Carolina first.
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Post by Webster on Jan 23, 2024 17:14:16 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Biden and Harris to hold abortion rights rally in VirginiaJoe Biden and Kamala Harris will join forces at a rally in Virginia today as they campaign for abortion rights, a likely top issue for Democrats in this year’s election. Biden and Harris will be joined by their spouses, first lady Jill Biden and second gentleman Doug Emhoff, the first time the four of them have appeared together since the 2024 campaign began. At the rally, which comes a day after the 51st anniversary of the Roe v Wade ruling, Biden will address what he will describe as the “devastating” impacts of the supreme court’s overturning of the decision in June 2022. Afterward, Biden and Harris are expected to meet with healthcare providers and leaders of reproductive rights groups. On Monday, Harris kicked off her much-vaunted abortion rights nationwide tour in the battleground state of Wisconsin, which the president won in the 2020 presidential election by just over 20,000 votes. Wisconsin is a notable starting point for Harris’s reproductive freedoms tour. Last year, abortion rights propelled a Democratic victory in a critical election for the state supreme court. Roe v Wade, the supreme court decision that enshrined the federal right to abortion, was overturned in June 2022 after the then president Donald Trump nominated three conservative justices to the nation’s highest court. The decision was a major blow to supporters of reproductive rights, but since the ruling seven states – including the conservative strongholds of Kentucky, Kansas and Montana – have held ballot referendums where voters chose to protect abortion rights. The issue also appeared to hurt Republicans in the 2022 midterm elections.
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Post by Webster on Jan 23, 2024 17:28:49 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Two prominent No Labels donors have sued the centrist political group for pulling a “bait and switch” by preparing to back a third-party presidential candidacy after seeking donations to support “bipartisan activism”. Douglas and Jonathan Durst, cousins who are part of the powerful Durst real estate family in New York, allege that No Labels has “lost its way, abandoned its original mission, and fundamentally betrayed its donors’ trust in the process” in their lawsuit, filed in the New York state supreme court on Tuesday. The suit seeks damages and reimbursements for the $145,000 that the Dursts donated years ago, when No Labels was founded on the promise of finding governing solutions, the New York Times reported. The suit reads: This case seeks to hold No Labels accountable for the consequences of its misguided actions that have left its original benefactors like the Dursts feeling bewildered, betrayed and outraged.No Labels has “shifted seismically from its original mission” and its donors “should not have to stand idly by”, it continues. Founded in 2009, No Labels is now on the ballot in 14 states and say it will decide in March whether to offer its ballot line to a unity presidential ticket. Critics say if No Labels does mount a campaign, polling shows more voters likely to peel from Joe Biden than Trump, handing the latter the White House for a second term should he be the Republican nominee. The Dursts’ lawsuit continues: A third ticket option is a clear break from No Labels’ prior goal of uniting the two parties in Congress to pursue common sense solutions — instead, it incites division amongst Americans.
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Post by Webster on Jan 23, 2024 19:42:39 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Harris attacks Trump for involvement in overturning Roe v Wade during campaign's first joint rallyPresident Joe Biden and vice-president Kamala Harris kicked off their first joint campaign rally of 2024 in Manassas, Virginia today, with a plea for voters to send them back to the White House to protect abortion rights. Harris took the stage before Biden and spoke in front of a group of primarily women, many of whom were carrying red and blue signs that read “DEFEND CHOICE.” She framed the fight over abortion access as being about freedom. “Extremists have proposed and passed laws that criminalized doctors and punished women. Laws that make no exception even for rape or incest,” Harris said. “And let us all agree: one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government should not be telling her want to do with her body.” Virginia is a telling first stop for the 2024 campaign. In elections last year, Virginia Republicans failed to take control of the state legislature after campaigning on a 15-week abortion ban. Seven other states have also voted directly on abortion-related ballot referendums since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade; in each case, abortion rights supporters won. Now, Biden and Harris are betting that outrage over Roe will send them back to the White House. Although the Republican primaries are still unfolding in New Hampshire, Harris took aim squarely at former president Donald Trump, the Republican frontrunner. Trump appointed three of the US supreme court justices who overturned Roe. “He is the architect of this health care crisis, and he is not done, and the extremists are not done,” Harris said, warning of the possibility that a Republican administration may enact a national abortion ban.
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Post by Webster on Jan 24, 2024 14:08:29 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Dean Phillips, a Democratic congressman from Minnesota, and Marianne Williamson, an author and self-help guru who ran for president in 2020, were among the potential challengers to Joe Biden on the Democratic primary ticket in New Hampshire. Biden took the vote after a write-in campaign, and neither Phillips nor Williamson made significant in-roads. Jared Gans writes this for the Hill about Phillips: Phillips centered his long-shot attempt to oppose Biden’s renomination on New Hampshire, having filed there first when launching his candidacy. If there was anywhere for Phillips to see the most success, the Granite State was likely to be it.
Phillips had the opportunity to repeatedly criticize Biden for not campaigning for the support of New Hampshire voters and emphasize his electability argument.
But those arguments seemed to have fallen mostly flat. Phillips barely received more than 20% of the vote, while the other notable longshot, Williamson, received less than 5%.
Ahead of the primary, Phillips declared that reaching the 20s would be “quite extraordinary”. But he was only able to get a fraction of Biden’s percentage even with the incumbent not on the ballot – and he is about to experience a more contested primary starting in about 10 days.
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Post by Webster on Jan 24, 2024 14:13:44 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Nate Cohn’s analysis in the New York Times is that Nikki Haley has now missed her best shot to change the trajectory of the Republican contest. He writes: Trump’s 12-point margin of victory is not extraordinarily impressive in its own right. In fact, he won by a smaller margin than many pre-election polls suggested. What makes Trump’s victory so important – and what raises the question about whether the race is over – is that New Hampshire was Haley’s best opportunity to change the trajectory of the race. It was arguably her best opportunity to win a state, period. If she couldn’t win here, she might not be able to win anywhere.In the Washington Post, Maeve Reston and Ashley Parker write that Trump’s juggernaut has rolled on, despite Haley’s campaign insisting they live to fight another day. They write: The New Hampshire voters who could have lifted Haley to victory instead chose Trump and made her long-shot bid even longer. Haley had performed better than predicted by some pre-election polling, but it was a decisive loss nonetheless.
Haley’s campaign insists that as many as a dozen remaining states – including Michigan and many of those that cast ballots in the Super Tuesday contests 5 March – offer “fertile ground” for Haley, because they are open or semi-open primaries where independents are allowed to vote.
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Post by Webster on Jan 24, 2024 14:15:17 GMT -5
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Post by Webster on Jan 24, 2024 14:16:25 GMT -5
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Post by Webster on Jan 24, 2024 14:17:06 GMT -5
(The Guardian) With Donald Trump’s primary victory on Tuesday night in New Hampshire, Joe Biden is setting his sights on the ex-president as his likely 2024 opponent. The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports: Joe Biden appears to have set his sights on an almost inevitable rematch with Donald Trump for the White House in November’s election, after the former president’s decisive win in the New Hampshire primary, on his sprint to the Republican nomination.
Biden’s campaign believes the presidential election has officially begun, Politico reported, with Trump’s victory over Nikki Haley in New Hampshire on Tuesday officially kicking off what the outlet described as “the longest and most grueling general election campaign in modern American political history”. It’s a dynamic that underscores the unusual nature of the 2024 campaign. Usually, the results from the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary have marked just the beginning of the nominating contest, with a long slog of an intra-party fight into the spring.
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Post by Webster on Jan 24, 2024 14:17:55 GMT -5
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Post by Webster on Jan 24, 2024 14:18:44 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Joe Biden’s campaign is moving full steam ahead into the general election, effectively declaring the Republican primary over as it focuses its attention on Donald Trump. Speaking to reporters this morning, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, Biden’s campaign manager, said the results of the New Hampshire Republican primary “confirm that Donald Trump has all but locked up the GOP nomination.” “With that simple fact established, the choice that American voters will face next November is coming into increasingly sharp focus. It’ll be a choice between two visions for this country that couldn’t be more different,” Rodríguez said. “Donald Trump is running a campaign of revenge and retribution that threatens American democracy and our fundamental freedoms, while Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are running to move the country forward and make life better for working people.” Asked how Biden’s team determined that Nikki Haley has no path to winning the Republican nomination, communications director Michael Tyler said the campaign is “just looking at the reality of the data in front of us.” “Coming off of Iowa and New Hampshire, you have Donald Trump, who’s fully consolidated the extreme MAGA [‘Make America Great Again’] base of the party and is marching towards the nomination,” Tyler said. “So this campaign is now laser focused on presenting that direct choice to the American people because it’s real at this point in time.”
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Post by Webster on Jan 24, 2024 14:20:18 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Biden camp confident president will win against Trump in NovemberJoe Biden’s campaign expressed confidence in the president’s ability to again defeat Donald Trump in November, even as polls show the two men running neck and neck. Quentin Fulks, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, noted that Trump’s 11-point margin of victory in New Hampshire last night was actually narrower than his 20-point win in 2016, when he was running against more opponents. “To put simply, Trump’s party is divided, and now he’s about to face the only politician who has ever beaten him and who did so with more votes than any presidential candidate in history: President Joe Biden,” Fulks said. But reporters pressed campaign officials about Biden’s performance in polls, some of which show Trump pulling ahead in key battleground states. “We don’t govern based on polls, and polls are just a snapshot in time,” said Cedric Richmond, the Biden campaign co-chair. “If I had a dollar for every time somebody counted Joe Biden out based on polls or something else, then I’d be independently wealthy.” He added: “Do we think we’re going to win? Absolutely. Because there’s too much on the line not to for the American people.” Trump reportedly spent New Hampshire victory night privately seethingDonald Trump spent his victory night in New Hampshire privately seething to his aides, according to reports. CNN reports that after the polls for the state’s primary closed, Trump “continued to rail against Nikki Haley privately and publicly after she declined to drop out of the race”. The ex-president also reportedly told his aides that he was baffled that Haley remains adamant about staying in the race, and urged his political aides to ramp up their attacks on his former UN ambassador. During his speech last night, Trump issued a warning to Haley, saying: “Just a little note to Nikki. She’s not going to win. But if she did, she would be under investigation by those people in 15 minutes, and I could tell you five reasons why already.” He added: “Not big reasons, little stuff that she doesn’t want to talk about, that she will be under investigation within minutes, and so would Ron [DeSantis] have been, but he decided to get out.
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Post by Webster on Jan 24, 2024 14:21:01 GMT -5
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