Nothing deep here. I didn't pay that much attention once it became obvious the cast of characters was a gaggle of political Lilliputians. And one outsized monster. By the time DeSantis blew up his own campaign by trying to announce on Xitter, it was hard to take it seriously.
There is a congealed conventional wisdom that indictments of Trump only contributed to his popularity among Republicans. But might it not be equally likely that what we were seeing is correlation, not causality? In the same stretch of time during which Trump's legal hurdles multiplied, his putative opponents repeatedly revealed their emptiness. Trump remained the big dog.
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| New York Post |
While just over half (53%) of primary voters would be satisfied with Trump as the GOP nominee, one-third (35%) would be dissatisfied enough that they would not vote for him in November.
It looks to me as if Trump does not have the juice he had in 2016 or 2020. What he's got is some dangerous fanatical cult members (less than half the Party?) and lots of Republican inertia. Joe Perticone of the Bulwark wanders around among these folks and he has noticed dwindling enthusiasm.
If you recall [my] Press Pass dispatch from the Iowa State Fair last summer, I observed what I believe was a massive drop in campaign merchandise being worn or advertised by attendees compared to past open primaries like 2016. ... The situation in New Hampshire looks similar. Campaign signs are few and far between. I’ve seen the occasional TRUMP placard nailed to a tree along the highway and a few “NH <3 NH” (that is, New Hampshire loves Nikki Haley) yard signs in front of homes, but these represent a fraction of the signage I saw around here in 2016. Eight years ago in downtown Manchester, there was a forest of Bernie Sanders signs, Hillary’s arrow-H pointing across every street corner, Trump flags flapping at various angles, and still other advertisements for Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, and John Kasich.
... Real or not, this time around, the lack of signs is jarring. Could absence of signage be signage of an absence? ... It could simply be that Republican voters don’t want to add more junk to New Hampshire’s landfills after the primary is done.
This doesn't say that Joe Biden's re-election will be easy. He didn't run in the New Hampshire vote because the Democratic Party is trying to wrench its primary process away this all-white state. But he seems on track to get over 60 percent of the NH Dem voters by write-in! (Write-ins take time to count so they are not done as of this post.) He's what we've got. For many of us, he wasn't what we wanted in 2020. But he has shown he can rise to the awful occasion. Democrats also have anti-Trump inertia.
Let's remember with attorney Jay Kuo:
[The Trump] base wasn’t enough to win the election in 2020, and all he has done since is alienate more voters, even as millions of his staunchest supporters age out or die, while millions of younger, far more Democratic-leaning and progressive voters age into the voting pool.
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Joshua Marshall called the New Hampshire vote "tepid." But he also highlighted a creative initiative asking voters to write in "cease-fire" on their ballots.
The remaining question is how the campaign to write-in “cease-fire” managed. I haven’t seen any news site so far that has this number. However, the Times currently says that 6.4% of the write-in ballots which have been read are for others besides Joe Biden. Since “cease-fire,” so far as I know, was the only other organized write-in campaign, it stands to reason that a substantial percentage of that 6.4% is “cease-fire.” But there’s no real way to know based on the currently released data.
However, yesterday, Daniel Marans of HuffPost said that the New Hampshire Secretary of State’s office told him they would publish the results for “cease-fire.”...
Nice work, New Hampshire!
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