What’s less clear is which independent or swing voters are actually moved by this message. The KFF tracking poll of registered voters in the spring found 1 in 8 voters say it’s the most important issue to their vote — but those voters are overwhelmingly Democratic, likely to be female, black, younger, and essentially amount to what you’d consider as the party’s most motivated base:
The issue resonates with certain key groups of women voters. More than 1 in 4 Black women voters (28%), and about a fifth of Democratic women (22%), women who live in states where abortion is banned (19%), women voters who plan to vote for President Biden (19%), and women of reproductive age (18-49) (17%) identify as abortion voters.
When you dig into it, one out of four of these “abortion voters” say they still plan to vote for Donald Trump:
About half (48%) of this election’s abortion voters say that they would vote for President Biden if the election were held today, nearly double the share (26%) who say that they would vote for former President Trump. This group says they voted for Biden over Trump by a similar margin in 2020, though about 1 in 5 say they did not vote in that election.
And the idea that contraception is under threat — a major Democratic talking point this cycle, especially in the context of the recent SCOTUS case, hasn’t had as much play as the party would like — just 1 in 5 voters view it as under threat:
On March 26, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that could affect access to mifepristone, a drug used for medication abortion that can currently be prescribed via telehealth and mailed to patients. About two thirds (64%) of the public has not heard anything about the case.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to end the constitutional right to abortion, just under half (45%) of adults say they consider the right to use contraception as “secure,” while one in five (21%) say it is “a threatened right likely to be overturned,” and a third (34%) say they are not sure whether the right is threatened or secure. Among partisans, Democrats are most likely to see the right to contraception as threatened (38%).
There’s no question abortion was central in the 2022 midterms: Gallup found it was the second most important issue for voters the week before the election, with many Republicans caught off guard and incapable of putting out good messaging on the subject.
But now, things have changed. In Gallup’s more recent polling, just 3 percent list it as a top issue. It may now have more be shifting to have an impact along the lines of gun politics — a motivator for the Democratic base, but with less appeal to independents and swing voters as a deciding factor. It’s hard to read the numbers above and see any significant portion of lost votes for Republicans at the moment.
Dobbs was announced in June of 2022, which was after the 2021 data collection but before the survey was fielded in the Fall of 2022. That’s noted by the vertical dashed line. [image below] For the Democrats, I don’t think we can come to any grand conclusion. Support for a ban was 12% before Dobbs, then dropped to 10% right after. But then it rose to 14% in 2023. Which just seems odd. I am going to just say I don’t see any discernible change here. Or at least not yet.
Now for Independents, there was a big drop right after Dobbs. Support for a total ban went from 20% to 16%. But then it shot back up to 19% in the 2023 data. That 19% statistic was pretty much the average over the years before Dobbs was decided. Maybe there was an initial drop in support among Independents but then it returned to equilibrium.
For Republicans, I think the result is pretty clear here. Support for a ban on abortion was increasing between 2017 and 2020. It was solidly at 30% before Dobbs. Then, it dropped by five points and stayed at 25% the last two years. I feel reasonably confident in saying that some Republicans responded to the SCOTUS decision by backing off from an abortion ban. Not a ton, but it’s way outside the margin of error, too. And it repeats in two surveys.
Of course, polls and surveys aren’t votes, and in an election this close with the electoral map as it stands, the Democrats’ massive big media + big dollar abortion push could prove more decisive than it currently appears. As it stands, the evidence we have suggests its salience as an issue motivating non-Democrats has measurably declined. That’s one reason why conservative Christians aren’t likely to see Trump change his tune in any significant way between now and the election. But it’s also a sign that Republican consultants and figures who are scrambling to water down a platform no one cares about or bend away from the issue are largely engaged in acts of desperation to win over voters who were never going to support them anyway.
Joe Biden’s lawyer is to impersonate Donald Trump and ‘insult’ the president in preparation for the set-piece debate on Thursday night.
The US president and a group of aides have relocated to Camp David, his secluded country residence in Maryland, for intensive practice sessions ahead of the first of two 2024 debates that could be pivotal to the election.
Bob Bauer, Mr Biden’s personal attorney, will reprise his role as the freewheeling Republican candidate in mock debates, according to reports.
Unlike previous stand-ins, the 72-year-old will not be donning a costume, telling Politico that “this is not a Saturday Night Live impression.”
But, while refusing to explicitly confirm his role, he said the person playing Trump ‘cannot be afraid of laying down on the table something that your candidate that you’re preparing this for won’t like.”
“That could be something personally insulting.”
Aides are keen to ensure Mr Biden, 81, spends plenty of down time ahead of the high-stakes event, in what has been described as a “prep-and-rest” routine.
In the coming weeks, there is a very real possibility that the federal district court in Florida will rule that Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of Jack Smith as a special counsel (SC) violated the Constitution’s appointments clause (art. II, §2, cl.2).
If Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump-appointee who is presiding over Smith’s illegal document-retention prosecution against former president Trump, were to make such a ruling, would the Biden Justice Department have to start the case over from scratch? Perhaps, but I think that’s unlikely.
More likely: AG Garland would have to reassign the case to a district U.S. attorney appointed by President Biden. That probably wouldn’t cause much delay. It would, however, force Garland to abandon his independent-prosecutor deception — i.e., the artifice by which he and Biden claim that they have no involvement in the government’s prosecution of Biden’s electoral opponent and that all decisions are being made by Smith, a supposedly independent actor. In truth, Biden and Garland are controlling the Trump prosecutions — as a matter of constitutional law, and as a matter of fact.
The deception is not hard to grasp. The attendant legal technicalities, however, are complex because of the Constitution’s appointments clause, which says that the president
. . . shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law. [Emphasis added]
There is a bit more to the clause, which we’ll come to. For starters, let’s stick with this first part.
Attorneys who authorize the investigation and prosecution of federal crimes must be officers of the United States because they wield significant government power. Under the clause, there are just two ways of qualifying as an officer of the United States: the appointee must either be (a) nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, or (b) appointed to a position that “shall be established by law” — which is to say, by a congressional statute.
Smith, who has run the Trump investigations since his SC appointment by Garland on November 18, 2022, was not appointed under either of those procedures. To the contrary, he was purportedly appointed under the Justice Department’s SC regulations. I say “purportedly” for two reasons.
First, Garland notoriously flouts the SC regulations. He picks and chooses which regs he is claiming to follow depending on the Biden administration’s political needs of the moment, and, when expedient, he pulls his ace in the hole: §600.10 (the last of the ten regs), which provides that no one can force the Justice Department to follow its regulations — so the AG can ignore them at will. As I’ve previously explained, Garland flouted the SC regulations in appointing Smith because he was trying to project the fiction that he and Biden were not behind the Trump prosecutions.
Second, a mere regulation cannot override statutory law, much less the Constitution. Ergo, if the Constitution mandates that officer positions (other than those the Constitution itself creates) must be established by law, then they must be established by statute, not by a DOJ regulation. To be sure, Garland has broad authority to assign any Justice Department lawyer to any matter he chooses, but as an executive officer, he has no power to create an officer-of-the-United States position. Only Congress can do that.
When Robert Winnett was named the new editor of the Washington Post, it made a lot of sense to me. He’s deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph, perhaps best known for being the driving force behind the Britain’s Members of Parliament expenses investigation. His judgment and energy have been pivotal to making the Telegraph such a strong commercial and editorial success in a world that seems full of newspapers in crisis. The Washington Post is fast turning into one of them which is why Jeff Bezos, its owner, turned to former Telegraph editor Will Lewis as CEO. And why Lewis, in turn, headhunted Winnett.
But one thing I couldn’t quite work out: why would Rob want to take the job? It’s far from clear that the WaPo’s crisis is recoverable. It has a reputation of being a bit of a viper’s nest. So why not stay and build on the profitable, growing model he has created with Chris Evans and Allister Heath at the Telegraph papers — with great potential in the US?
It emerged Friday that Winnett isn’t going after all. “It is with regret that I share with you that Robert Winnett has withdrawn from the position of editor at the Washington Post,” Lewis told staff in an email yesterday morning. The warmth of the reaction to this news in the Telegraph says much about how Winnett is recognized as a journalists’ editor, precisely the kind of guy you want battling at the front during a fight for the future of news.
The Telegraph — like The Spectator — is for sale right now and its financials came out a few days ago: $76 million profit for last year, on turnover of $340 million. When Lewis announced Winnett to WaPo staff, he had a very different story to tell: that the newspaper was losing more than $1 million a week and that its audience has halved since 2020. Such figures risk massive cuts in the not-too-distant future. My hunch is that the WaPo staff sensed that the ax was coming — and got it into their head that Winnett was the ax-man. If they could stop him coming, maybe they’d avoid the ax. So a massive campaign was launched to smear and stop him. It was astonishing to watch.
There are well-known culture differences in newsrooms in the US and UK. They regard journalism as a profession; we regard it as a trade. They covet awards; we regard gongs as a bit of harmless fun. In Britain, readers are the only judges that matter. Our journalism tends to be profitable; theirs not so much. TIME magazine is losing $20 million a year. The Los Angeles Timesis losing about $35 million a year; WaPo is losing twice that. All three titles were bought by billionaires who are struggling to work out how to reposition them.
We also see a kind of lawlessness in certain American newspapers with staff often in open revolt against the management — and each other — in a way that would strike British journalists as not just disloyalty but a collective act of self-harm.
“It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives. The permissibility of abortion, and the limitations, upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.”
