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Hard Numbers: SpaceX has a rocky reentry, Norway to hit NATO target early, British MPs are OOO, Somalia debt is canceled, Berlin techno is protected
2: Norway announced that the country intends to meet its NATO defense spending target of 2% this year — two years ahead of schedule — citing a “serious” security situation. Sweden, the alliance’s newest member, says it will do the same. The two Nordic states can now rest assured that at least Donald Trump would protect them from a Russian invasion.
49: A new analysis found the workday for members of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s parliament is 49 minutes shorter than the 1997-2023 average, clocking in at only seven hours and nine minutes long. With all that extra time on their hands, Kate Middleton should be found in no time.
99: This week, 99% of Somalia’s debt was canceled by the Paris Club — a group of officials from major creditor countries including the United States, Japan, and Russia. Somalia’s information minister, Daud Aweis, called the move a “big milestone in the country’s journey to financial recovery.”
150: The number of UNESCO heritage sites in Germany rose to 150, with six entities being added this week. Notably, an Intangible Cultural Heritage designation was given to Berlin’s techno scene for its contribution to German culture. Oonts Oonts.Why Trump is now the favorite to win the US election
Last time I wrote about the 2024 US election back in November, I rated the outcome of the rematch between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump a coin flip.
Today, with eight months left until the votes are counted and as the most unwanted sequel since “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie's Island Adventure” kicks into high gear, Trump is looking like the slight favorite to return to the White House in 2025.
There are several reasons why.
Biden is unambiguously behind in the polls
If you ask me, Biden is doing a reasonable-to-good job on policy. The post-pandemic inflation has been all but conquered. Unemployment has stayed under 4% throughout. Real wages are up, gas prices are down, and the stock market keeps hitting record highs. Violent crime is near 50-year lows. Oil and gas production is at all-time highs.
But most Americans disagree. Biden’s average job approval ratings have been hovering around 38-39% since October last year, reflecting a drop in support among young progressives who disapprove of his support for Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attacks. Biden’s approval is lower than any modern president’s at this juncture in a reelection campaign except for Jimmy Carter’s … and we know how that one turned out.
While head-to-head polling is less predictive than an incumbent’s job approval this far out, all recent national and swing state polls show Biden trailing Trump. Trump’s advantage is also clear when looking at top-issue polling. A Bloomberg/Morning Consult swing state poll (covering Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia – the closest states in 2020) last week asked voters which issues are “very important” to their vote in November. The top five issues were the economy, democracy, crime, immigration, and health care. Trump has sizable leads on who voters trust to handle three of five of these top issues, and he leads on secondary issues such as infrastructure, US-China relations, housing, and guns. He also leads on nearly every economic subcategory in the poll, including all cost-of-living issues, which are a major vulnerability for Biden.
Yes, polls can be and have been wrong before, and polling averages are still reasonably close. And fewer people are responding to polls than they used to — so we really should be careful with these numbers. Plus, Super Tuesday was only just yesterday, so until very recently many voters didn’t believe it’d really come down to Biden vs. Trump, meaning there is still a lot of room for polls to move as the campaign begins in earnest. A lot could and will change in the next eight months in an extremely volatile domestic and global environment. And of course, anything could happen on the health front for either of the two candidates.
But Trump’s clear lead in head-to-head matchups and Biden’s persistently low approval rating suggest Trump is currently the modest favorite in a close race.
SCOTUS helps Trump keep the focus on Biden
As I wrote in November, Biden and Trump are both historically unpopular candidates, meaning that whoever is the main character of the election is likely to lose. That’s why they’re each trying to frame the election as a referendum on the other.
Biden’s most obvious liability is his age (also a liability for Trump, to be sure), something he can do nothing to overcome. Moreover, as the incumbent president, he’s the go-to lightning rod for the national mood. All the things people believe are going wrong in this country (especially illegal immigration) – and even things that are going wrong abroad, such as the humanitarian crisis in Gaza – are his fault by default. The buck, after all, stops at the Oval Office. These weaknesses are not going away between now and November – if anything, they’re getting worse.
Trump’s biggest liability, meanwhile, is his unfitness for office. This is best captured by the 91 felony counts he faces in four separate cases – the first criminal charges ever faced by a US president … all of which now look unlikely to have any impact on the election. The one wildcard issue that could have seriously dented the Trump campaign, a federal criminal conviction before the election, became dead in the water last week when the Supreme Court agreed to hear Trump’s case for presidential immunity in his DC election interference trial. The court set oral arguments for the week of April 22 and issued a stay on proceedings in the trial until the court rules, effectively pushing the trial’s timeline – which was expected to start in the spring and run throughout the summer campaign – significantly back.
Coupled with the court’s unanimous ruling on Monday keeping the former president on the ballot nationwide (overturning a Colorado state court ruling that held he was disqualified based on Section Three of the 14th Amendment), this decision was a gift to Trump. The election interference case was the greatest political risk to the former president, reminding independent voters and moderate Republicans of Trump’s actions on Jan. 6. But even on the court’s expedited timeline, it now looks unlikely that the DC trial – the one case most likely to have brought a felony conviction against Trump – will begin before August (presuming the court denies the former president immunity, as most legal analysts think it will). With the trial expected to last 8-12 weeks, the odds of a conviction before November are now exceedingly low.
Polling shows that a guilty verdict in the Jan. 6 case would cost Trump significant support from independents and moderate Republicans. Taking that risk off the table neutralizes one of his campaign’s biggest vulnerabilities and helps Trump keep the focus on Biden. The remaining cases against Trump have limited electoral importance. The Florida classified documents trial is almost certain to be delayed, too. The Manhattan cases are widely seen by Republicans as nakedly political and therefore meaningless. While the Georgia case on election racketeering, in many ways the most serious of them all, has become politically fraught because of allegations of misconduct against the lead prosecutor.
Trump’s other major weakness in the past has been his inability to keep the campaign’s focus off himself. But so far, he looks to be running a remarkably disciplined campaign, staffed by veteran professionals who are keeping him on message and deploying him strategically throughout the primaries. Sure enough, his all-caps rants on Truth Social are still unhinged, and the signs of age-related mental decline are becoming more pronounced with each rally, but by and large, the craziness is either not breaking through into the mainstream media anymore or it’s already baked into voters’ assessments of him. To the extent that Republicans only need to run a good-enough candidate to beat an unpopular incumbent, Trump may be turning into that – with a generous assist from the Supreme Court.
Party unity, third parties also likely to benefit Trump
Trump and Biden’s ability to consolidate and mobilize their bases will be a major factor in November, and according to a New York Times/Siena poll released over the weekend, Trump is miles ahead of Biden on this front: 48% of Republican primary voters say they are “enthusiastic” about Trump, while only 23% of Democratic primary voters are “enthusiastic’ about Biden and 26% are “dissatisfied” with the president.
This split in the Democratic Party, fueled by concerns about Biden’s age and his response to the Israel-Hamas war, is evident in the president’s depressed approval ratings and eroding support with minority voters. Most critically, the NYT/Siena poll shows Trump is winning 97% of those who say they voted for him in 2020, while Biden is winning only 83% of his 2020 voters, 10% of whom say they will back Trump in November.
Third-party and independent candidates are also likely to play the biggest role in an election since 1992 amid high dissatisfaction with both Biden and Trump. While these candidates face an uphill battle to get on the ballot in the first place and have no chance of winning any states in November if they do, they can still play a spoiler in the handful of swing states that will decide the election.
Polling suggests that independent Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose campaign recently announced it had gathered enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in Arizona and Georgia, would take roughly the same number of votes from Trump as he would from Biden. By contrast, the far-left campaigns of Jill Stein and Cornel West are nearly guaranteed to reduce Biden’s vote share, drawing almost exclusively from dissatisfied progressives and minorities who would otherwise vote for the president or stay home. Recent national and swing state polls show Trump’s lead over Biden widening when third partiers are included, posing yet another headwind to Biden’s campaign.
Fake clouds, seeding doubt
“Those clouds are not real,” the woman standing next me at the car pickup spot said, pointing to the overcast skies above San Diego.
I had just arrived here to speak to a group of business leaders about Eurasia Group’s Top Risk report and the political landscape ahead in a year of polarizing elections.
“Sorry?”
“It’s usually beautiful and sunny here, but now with the cloud seeding, all we get is this,” she explained, adopting that apologetic tone proud locals use when their home isn’t exhibiting its best for a visitor. She interrupted her weather flow to give me some other tips about local restaurants — “check out Roberto’s taco stand” — and hiking in the area, before returning to the weather.
“Yeah, you know all those floods we had this past month?” she asked rhetorically. “They’re from these clouds the climate folks created with their cloud seeding because they want to block out the sun to cool the Earth down.”
And then she added the kicker: “And it’s poison, you know.”
Of all the risks I had come here to talk about, the poison-fake-clouds-causing-floods risk did not make the agenda. But the theory is so pervasive in California that the LA Times just wrote a long story in order to, well, rain on the conspiracy parade.
A quick background might be in order.
Cloud seeding is not new. It’s been around since the late 1940s, when a meteorologist named Vincent Schaefer first tried to stop ice from forming on airplane wings by firing chemicals like silver iodide into the air to stimulate condensation. Since then it’s been happening all over the world to induce rain or reduce hail storms — but it’s not a Harry Potter magic trick that can cause mass flooding. Cloud seeding, at best, can increase precipitation by about 5%-10%, which won’t get Noah rushing to build an ark.
Silver iodide is the chemical most often used and there are legitimate health and environmental questions about the levels. The EPA and state governments regulate all cloud seeding programs. And there are multiple studies that show the levels of silver collected from cloud seeding are more than a 1000 times lower than EPA standards for drinking water and therefore have very minor environmental, toxicological or health impacts.
So, did cloud seeding cause the two flooding events that took place between Feb. 3-8 and 18-19? Nope. As the Times reported, the body in charge of the project, the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority (SAWPA), hadn’t even conducted any cloud seeding operations since Feb. 1, and even then, they didn’t do it in the San Diego area.
I didn’t intend to go up the whole cloud seeding hole, but the short encounter prompted me to think about the polarization in both the US and Canada, where people no longer debate different ideas based on a shared set of facts, but believe in different realities. Genuine, substantial conversations between people who disagree on key events, like say, the war in Gaza, are just not happening in places like college campuses — where they should — because each side sees the other as illegitimate, as if one is looking at fake clouds and the other at the real thing.
University administrators are now so fearful of getting involved in any way other than making anodyne statements — they don’t want to be “Harvarded” and alienate students, donors, and politicians or all three — that campuses have become bunkers of protest, not bastions of political debate.
It's also playing out politically in the US election cycle, where perception is driving reality. Look at the strong economic news. Last quarter, US GDP increased at a 3.2% annualized rate, business investment is up, consumer spending is up, the market is up and wages are up — but Biden’s poll numbers are down.
Biden is getting no credit for strong economic news and Donald Trump is sustaining no damage from bad legal news because partisan voters simply see what they want to see. Biden’s problem is no longer inflation itself — it has come down dramatically — it’s vibe-flation. Biden simply doesn’t look like the good news he’s delivering. He looks weak while his facts are strong. Trump looks strong while his facts are weak. And it’s working for Trump.
The self-reinforcing reality bubbles of partisan politics make it next to impossible to break out of these myopic views because there are no institutions with enough trust to set a benchmark of consensus and corrective facts.
As Gallup polling on trust consistently shows, confidence in US institutions is at all-time lows and going down: “The five worst-rated institutions — newspapers, the criminal justice system, television news, big business and Congress — stir confidence in less than 20% of Americans, with Congress, at 8%, the only one in single digits,” wrote Gallup’s Lydia Saad.
If someone doesn’t believe the clouds are real, why would they believe the facts about the economy are real?
Everything is political. That’s our mandate here at GZERO, but it doesn’t mean everything is up for grabs. Seeding clouds of doubt with conspiracy theories everywhere erodes the foundational gift of our democracy, which is to have passionate disagreements respectfully with our neighbors and still manage to get big things done together. To do that, facts matter.
That’s why, with crises growing all around the world and the election cycle whirling ever faster, we at GZERO are committed to having humane, non-partisan, robust coverage about different, conflicting points of view — but at least with an agreed upon set of basic facts. To alter an old saying, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own clouds.
Biden’s $130 million momentum
Were President Joe Biden to win reelection this November, he’d be 86 years old when finishing his second term. That’s part of why a startling 86% of Americans tell pollsters he’s too old to serve again.
But 86 is only one Biden number of note. Another is 130 million. That’s the total number of dollars his campaign has raised to date after raking in $42 million in the month of January alone. In fact, Biden’s $130 million haul is the most any Democrat has ever raised to this point in a campaign. (Donald Trump ended 2023 with $66 million and hasn’t yet reported January totals. He also has a few legal bills to pay.)
That’s why, whatever his popularity numbers, despite the flood of recent stories about possible Democratic Party alternatives to Biden, and whatever embarrassments next week’s Michigan primary may hold in store for a president whose firm support for Israel has angered much of that state’s sizeable Arab-American population, Biden won’t be easy to beat.
It’s also another reason we hold to our view that the only presidential polling questions that really matter are: Will you vote? Who will you vote for?
We’re Sora-ing, flying
OpenAI, the buzzy startup behind the ChatGPT chatbot, has begun previewing its next tool: Sora. Just like OpenAI’s DALL-E allows users to type out a text prompt and generate an image, Sora will give customers the same ability with video.
Want a cinematic clip of dinosaurs walking through Central Park? Sure. How about kangaroos hopping around Mars? Why not? These are the kinds of imaginative things that Sora can theoretically generate with just a short prompt. The software has only been tested by a select group of people, and the reviews so far are mixed. It’s groundbreaking but often struggles with things like scale and glitchiness.
AI-generated images have already posed serious problems, including the spread of photorealistic deep fake pornography and convincing-but-fake political images. (For example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign used AI-generated images of former President Donald Trump hugging Anthony Fauci in a video, and the Republican National Committee did something similar with fake images of Joe Biden.)
While users may not yet have access to movie-quality video generators, they soon might — something that’ll almost certainly supercharge the issues presented by AI-generated images. The World Economic Forum recently named disinformation, especially that caused by artificial intelligence, as the biggest global short-term risk. “Misinformation and disinformation may radically disrupt electoral processes in several economies over the next two years,” according to the WEF. “A growing distrust of information, as well as media and governments as sources, will deepen polarized views – a vicious cycle that could trigger civil unrest and possibly confrontation.”
Eurasia Group, GZERO’s parent company, also named “Ungoverned AI” as one of its Top Risks for 2024. “In a year when four billion people head to the polls, generative AI will be used by domestic and foreign actors — notably Russia — to influence electoral campaigns, stoke division, undermine trust in democracy, and sow political chaos on an unprecedented scale,” according to the report. “A crisis in global democracy is today more likely to be precipitated by AI-created and algorithm-driven disinformation than any other factor.”Foreign aid bill passed by Senate faces uphill battle in House
A $95 billion bill including aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan passed with bipartisan support in the Senate on Tuesday in a 70-29 vote.
This occurred despite strong objections from former President Donald Trump – the likely 2024 GOP presidential nominee and de facto head of the Republican Party.
Trump builds a wall against foreign aid. Trump argues that the US should only offer foreign aid in the form of a loan, and his stance on the legislation could help tank it in the GOP-controlled House.
Schumer the optimist. House Speaker Mike Johnson on Monday pooh-poohed the foreign aid bill because it doesn’t include provisions to boost border security – an issue that’s created a logjam in Congress for months.
But just last week, Republicans killed bipartisan legislation that lumped the issues together after Trump urged them to do so, warning it could help Democrats in the 2024 election.
Despite these obstacles, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Tuesday said he’s confident that if Johnson does “the right thing” and brings the bill to the floor, it would pass with bipartisan support. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also said he hopes Johnson doesn’t block the bill from consideration.
Up to this point, every Ukraine aid vote has received support from at least 73% of the lower chamber.
Trump: I would encourage Russia to attack 'delinquent' NATO allies
Speaking at a South Carolina rally on Saturday, Donald Trumpsaid he would "encourage" Russia to attack NATO members that don’t meet their financial obligations. “No I would not protect you, in fact I would encourage them to do whatever they want,” the former president and likely GOP 2024 nominee thundered. “You gotta pay."
Reaction was swift. “Any suggestion that allies will not defend each other undermines all of our security, including that of the US, and puts American and European soldiers at increased risk,” said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in a statement. EU Council President Charles Michel and the German foreign ministry echoed this sentiment, while White House spokesperson Andrew Bates branded Trump's comments as "appalling and unhinged.”
Who would make Trump’s list? According to data released in July 2023, only 11 of 30 NATO countries spent at least 2% of their GDP on defense, including the US, the UK, Poland, Greece, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Hungary and new member Finland. The “delinquents” list is considerably longer and includes Croatia, France, Bulgaria, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Norway, and Canada – the country with the longest land border with the United States.
Border bill fails in Senate: the jockeying intensifies
President Joe Biden is blaming Donald Trump for killing a Senate bill on Ukraine support and border security on Wednesday.
The bill would have delivered billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine and Israel along with stricter border security – including asylum restrictions, a major stated goal for the GOP.
The bill looked like it might have enough bipartisan support to pass until Trump weighed in to trash it. In the end, only four Republicans voted “yes”.
The bill would have been a win for Biden at a time when the Trump-led GOP are keen to amplify their message that President Biden is neglecting the border to a “constitutionally violating” degree.
Biden is trying to flip the script by blaming Trump for the demise of the border deal, aid to Ukraine, support for Israel, and relief for Gaza – all at once.
Four Democrats also voted against the bill, including majority leader Chuck Schumer, who, after seeing GOP support evaporate, cast a “no” vote as a tactical move allowing him to quickly call for a vote on the foreign aid portion alone. Doing so forces the GOP to decide whether to block Ukraine and Israel's aid twice in one day.