Crooked Media - What A Day: Primary concerns

With only two nominating contests behind us, this primary season is feeling pretty anticlimactic; but a potentially-cataclysmic Trump-Biden rematch in November looms large. 
 

• Disgraced former president Donald Trump scored a decisive win in New Hampshire on Tuesday over his last remaining challenger, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, all but zipping up the nomination after just two states. Before polls closed in the Granite State, Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel told NBC News: “If President Trump comes out strong tonight, that’s a clear message being sent by our primary voters,” and pointed to Trump’s former rivals like Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) endorsing him as proof of a need to coalesce around Trump in the likely event that he becomes the nominee. Nevertheless, Haley is hoping for a reversal of fortune in her home state of South Carolina, where Trump is still projected to beat her. 
   

• Yet there are a few cracks in Trump’s otherwise-impenetrable MAGA armor. NBC News exit polls found that while Trump (naturally) won handily among self-identified Republicans in New Hampshire, he lost Independents by a staggering 24 points. Fifty-one percent of self-identified “moderates” voted for Nikki Haley. Just 13 percent of Haley voters said they would be “satisfied” with Trump winning the nomination. This should all be taken with a grain of salt, as New Hampshire is perhaps uncharacteristically chock-a-block with Independents and moderates who hate Trump (and even so, he still won the day!). There’s also the fact that many Republican voters do end up coming home to the GOP nominee on election day, despite whatever misgivings they may vocalize.  
   

• For his part, Trump isn’t too worried. “They’re going to all vote for me again,” he said on Tuesday. He may be right! Tuesday saw record voter turnout for a GOP primary in New Hampshire. But what the numbers show is that Democrats have an opportunity to make gains with Independents and college-educated voters. Standing in the Biden campaign’s way seems to be, well, President Biden, as all polls show that the majority of Americans are unhappy with the prospect of a Biden-Trump rematch.

If the poll numbers and associated implications for November seem like they’re vacillating and giving us an opaque, at times conflicting narrative, well, that’s because they are. 
 

• President Biden’s age remains one of his central obstacles as a candidate, as many voters—even Biden’s supporters—are unenthused about voting for someone who will be 86 at the end of a prospective second term. His administration’s steadfast support of Israel in the war in Gaza has also peeled off many young voters, Black and Latino voters, and Arab-Americans, all of whom were crucial demographics of the coalition that delivered the White House to him in 2020. 
   

• President Biden has the unenviable task before him of cutting through the noise and trying to hammer his administration’s accomplishments into voters’ brains. This wouldn’t have been as challenging, say, forty years ago, when there was no 24-hour conservative media machine pumping out deranged narratives based on a fictitious reality, but that’s exactly what the Biden camp has to contend with. In the face of that nonsense, Biden HQ is adopting a more confident and aggressive messaging strategy about its economic record heading into 2024. Inflation? Down. Jobs? Up. The U.S. economy? Growing. You get the idea. There’s also Biden’s support of organized labor, unprecedented for an American President. The United Auto Workers endorsed Biden on Wednesday, which many Democrats hope will shore up votes for Biden in crucial swing states come November. 

White House Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will deliver what her staff described as a “major speech” on Thursday in Chicago to emphasize achievements the economic advances the Biden administration has made, particularly for the middle class.

What happens when one of China’s most prominent human rights activists escapes house arrest in China, lands in America as a hero of freedom and democracy, then somehow re-emerges a few years later as an avid Trump supporter? 


This is the story of Chen Guangcheng. In Crooked’s newest podcast Dissident At The Doorstep, hosts Alison Klayman, Colin Jones and Yangyang Cheng, tell the story of how a person can become a symbol for American values, and what happens to them next. Listen to the first three episodes now and new episodes of Dissident At The Doorstep every Saturday, in the Pod Save The World feed. Available on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts!

The Supreme Court cleared the way for Alabama to use a novel and untested execution method on a death row inmate on Thursday, after denying his petition for the Justices to intervene. Human rights exports have warned that nitrogen hypoxia—the slow deprivation of oxygen from the bloodstream that results from the administration of nitrogen gas through a mask and breathing tube—could be “painful and humiliating.” Attorneys for Kenneth Eugene Smith, whose execution is scheduled for Thursday, argued in his petition that this method would amount to cruel and unusual punishment, violating the Eighth and Fourteenth amendments of the Constitution. The Supreme Court Justices did not provide an explanation for their decision, and there were no noted dissents.

The state already tried to execute Smith in November 2022 via lethal injection, but failed, “jabb[ing] Mr. Smith repeatedly in his arms and hands” in an attempt to access his veins, causing him “severe physical pain and psychological torment, including post-traumatic stress disorder,” according to his lawyers. Smith is on death row for his role in murder of Elizabeth Sennett in 1988, after her husband, a minister, took out a life insurance policy on his wife and hired Smith to kill her. If Smith’s execution is completed, it would mark only the second time in American history that a state attempted to execute an imprisoned person again after a first attempt failed.

Global groundwater levels have shown a “widespread and accelerated” decline over the past 40 years according to a new study published on Wednesday in the Nature scientific journal. New climate change nightmare just dropped!!!

Iran-backed Houthi militants have ordered U.S. and British staff of humanitarian aid organizations to leave Yemen within the month following retaliatory strikes from both countries and escalating violence in the Red Sea. 

The Federal Aviation Administration launched an investigation on Tuesday after a Boeing 757 aircraft operated by Delta Air Lines lost the tire on the nose of the plane while taxiing for takeoff in Atlanta. 

Families of hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 are growing increasingly desperate and intensifying their calls for the right-wing Israeli government to make a deal to bring their loved ones home. 

A large Russian military plane crashed in the Belgorod region near the border of Ukraine on Wednesday, killing everyone on board. The Russian Defense Ministry said the plane was carrying 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war, and accused Ukraine of shooting down the plane with missiles. 

Since the 1970’s the number of Americans with no religious affiliation has gone from 5 percent to 30 percent. A new Pew Research report shows that most of these people are a surprisingly-diverse group made up of mostly Americans under 50. 

Alcohol has been banned in Saudi Arabia, a strict conservative theocracy, since 1952. The kingdom is now opening its first-ever liquor store—accessible only to non-Muslim diplomats.

Staff at the Texas Tribune are unionizing following major layoffs in the award-winning newsroom. 

Conservative lawmakers in Ohio overrode Gov. Mike DeWine’s (R-OH) veto of a bill on Wednesday that would bar transgender minors from receiving puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, or gender transition surgery. Gender confirmation surgery is almost never performed on minors to begin with. Learn how you can fight back at votesaveamerica.com/fuckbans

The United Nations reported on Wednesday that Israeli tanks struck a major U.N. compound in Gaza sheltering 30,000 displaced Palestinians in the city of Khan Younis. Israel denied its forces were responsible and suggested Hamas was potentially behind the shelling. The attack conjured a rare outright rebuke from the White House. State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said: “We deplore today’s attack on the U.N.’s Khan Younis training center…Civilians must be protected, and the protected nature of U.N. facilities must be respected, and humanitarian workers must be protected so that they can continue providing civilians with the life-saving humanitarian assistance that they need.” Israeli forces have launched their largest ground offensive in over a month, encircling the city in Southern Gaza where hundreds of thousands of people are sheltering, having fled fighting in other areas of the enclave.

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Turns out, return-to-office mandates don’t actually make companies more profitable or productive. Who could have guessed except everyone who has ever worked from home!

The Biden Administration is hitting pause on deciding whether to approve what would be the largest natural gas export terminal in the United States, and ordering the Department of Energy to expand its evaluation of the project and consider its potential impact on climate change.