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How campus protests could influence the US presidential election
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC, shares his perspective on US politics.
This is what we are watching in US Politics this week: Campus protests.
They're happening everywhere. Elite schools, state schools, the Northeast, the Midwest, Southern California, campus protests are a major story this week over the Israeli operation in Gaza and the Biden administration's support for it. These are leading to accusations of anti-Semitism on college campuses, and things like canceling college graduation ceremonies at several schools.
Will this be an issue of the November elections?
Really difficult to say. Everyone remembers in 1968, massive protest at the Democratic National Convention, contributing to President Nixon's message that he was the “law and order” candidate, and the Democrats didn't have control. That could easily be repeated this year if the protests continue and are sustained into August at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, where it also was in 1968. And then, if the protests continue on campus once again, when schools come back in in the fall, right before the November elections.
One thing we're watching is how Donald Trump tries to spin these things. A key campaign message that he's been pushing so far, this cycle, is that everything they're saying about him are the things they're actually doing. They thought he would get the US into a war with Iran, and now President Biden came right up to the verge of that last week. They say, “He's the chaos candidate,” and now you've got wars all over the globe, you've got campus protests, you've got a spike in crime, and you've got a massive immigration problem under President Biden.
So, that message is going to be one that Donald Trump continues to push and will definitely resonate with Republican voters and could potentially resonate with independent voters if the large-scale protests and clashes with police continue into the fall.
An organizer carries a clipboard with petitions for a ballot initiative to enshrine abortion into the Arizona state constitution during a small rally led by Women's March Tucson after Arizona's Supreme Court revived a law dating to 1864 that bans abortion in virtually all instances, in Tucson, Arizona, U.S. April 9, 2024.
High stakes in Arizona abortion ban
On Wednesday, Arizona Republicans blocked attempts by Democrats to repeal an 1864 total abortion ban that the state’s supreme court reinstated on Tuesday. The court’s move means the state must revert to the 123-year-old law making abortions almost entirely illegal except when it is necessary to save a pregnant person’s life.
That ruling came a week after a pro-choice group obtained enough signatures to put an amendment to enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution on the ballot in November – all but ensuring that abortion, a major motivating issue for Democratic voters, will play a big role in how the swing state votes later this year.
It is also having political fallout beyond the Grand Canyon State with Democrats wasting no time rallying opposition to abortion restrictions. Polling shows it is an effective issue for Democrats, particularly among young voters, with whom Joe Biden has struggled to connect.
In the upcoming, razor-close election against Trump, the struggle for battleground states that will allow the winner to carry the electoral college is intense. Abortion ballot initiatives could give the Democrats a boost in the presidential election and down-ballot races, since it may drive turnout. The issue is largely credited for helping the Democrats outperform in the 2022 midterms.
Abortion will likely be on the ballot in the battleground states of Arizona and Florida. Voters in blue states New York and Maryland will also have the opportunity to vote on abortion initiatives, and Democrats are trying to get it on the ballot elsewhere, including Nevada, which is seen as a crucial swing state.
Like the dog that caught the car, Republicans now look to be in disarray on the issue, trapped between wanting to take credit for restricting abortion and fears of alienating moderates and not wanting to fuel Democratic momentum on the issue. Trump, who likes to take credit for the Supreme Court appointments that ended Roe v. Wade, now seems to sense his vulnerability on this issue. He said Wednesday he would not sign a national abortion ban, preferring to leave the matter to the states.
It’s an issue that may gain salience north of the border, where abortion rights advocates can be expected to warn against Conservative plans for Canada during the election to come.
What Florida's abortion rulings mean for the 2024 US election
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC, shares his perspective on US politics.
This is what we are watching in US Politics this week: Abortion.
Abortion is the big story in US politics this week with the Florida state Supreme Court ruling that a ballot initiative that would protect access to abortion up until fetal viability will be on the ballot in abortion in Florida this year. Democrats are excited about this ruling because it was starting to look like Florida was increasingly out of reach for them.
Republicans now out register Democratic voters in the state by over 800,000 registered voters, which is a flip from a decade ago when Democrats outnumbered Republicans by about 500,000 registered voters. Florida is looking like more and more of a red state with a massive 20 point victory for Republican Governor Ron DeSantis in the 2022 midterm elections. That's what was making Democrats feel like it wouldn't be a very competitive state in this presidential cycle.
However, with abortion on the ballot, they now see an opportunity for outside groups to come in and spend a bunch of money who otherwise wouldn't have sent money there, forcing Republicans to respond by potentially wasting money there. The state is probably a little bit too red for it to truly be competitive for President Biden in this election cycle.
But this abortion referendum story is going to play out across the country. Democratic activists have the opportunity to get abortion on the ballot in two critical swing states of Nevada and Arizona. But it's unlikely they would show up in the other swing states of Wisconsin or Michigan, because Wisconsin had a recent state Supreme Court decision about it. And Michigan had an abortion referendum in 2022. That doesn't mean they can't find other ways to make this election about access to abortion, which has been a very positive issue for Democrats.
There have been seven state referendums since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. And in each of those, the electorate shifted significantly to the left from what they did in the 2020 results, even in deep red states like Kansas and Kentucky. So this is going to be an important issue to keep watching throughout the election. And could be one of the wild cards that helps Joe Biden overcome the bad polls that he's been experiencing in recent weeks.
Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump attends a campaign rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, U.S., April 2, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Trump and RNC fundraising haul, NATO’s long-term plan for Ukraine, Uganda’s anti-gay law upheld, Eurozone inflation cools
65.6 million: Former President Donald Trump and the RNC raised $65.6 million in March, ending the month with $93.1 million in cash on hand. This should be welcome news to Trump as he faces a slew of money problems. President Joe Biden has been outpacing Trump in terms of 2024 fundraising so far, but his campaign has yet to release numbers for last month.
107 billion: NATO is considering a plan for a $107 billion, five-year fund for Ukraine. The proposal, pushed by NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg, has been met with skepticism by some members of the alliance — particularly Hungary. Ukraine has relied heavily on foreign aid amid its war with Russia, but internal divisions in the West have seen assistance dry up in recent months. Stoltenberg says the alliance needs to ensure Ukraine is supported for the “long haul.”
14: Uganda’s constitutional court on Wednesday slapped down a petition to overturn the country’s controversial anti-gay law, which permits the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality,” among other harsh and discriminatory penalties. The petition was put forward by 14 people, including legislators, activists, and law professors. One of the petitioners pledged to appeal the decision.
2.4: Eurozone inflation surprisingly fell last month, raising expectations for a rate cut in June. Consumer prices were 2.4% higher in March compared to last year, down from 2.6% in February.2024 Third Party Candidates
Could third-party candidates upend the 2024 US election?
I’ll say it again and again: The 2024 presidential election will be a very close race.
Head-to-head national polling averages currently have President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump – the two major parties’ presumptive nominees – in a statistical dead heat. Some averages show Trump with a slight lead, but one that lies within most polls’ margins of error.
While the polls will no doubt seesaw back and forth over the next seven months, don’t get fooled by the noise. Because of the Electoral College and America’s growing political polarization, the outcome of US elections is determined not by the national popular vote but by the states – and, increasingly, by just tens of thousands of voters in a handful of swing states.
Trump carried most of these in 2016, and Biden flipped most in 2020. The former was decided by about 78,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The latter, by about 44,000 votes in Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia. Something similar will happen this upcoming November, with the winner virtually guaranteed to have a narrow path to the White House.
Polls consistently show that most Americans dislike both Biden and Trump and want neither to lead the nation again. The unprecedented unpopularity of both nominees makes 2024 the most favorable environment in a generation for third-party candidates, three of whom are currently in the running: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West, and Jill Stein.
But could they have an impact on the election’s outcome? And if so, to whose benefit?
Polls show third parties hurt Biden more on net
First, let’s dispense with the obvious. Third-party candidates have no chance of winning any states in 2024. Not even Ross Perot’s 19% of the nationwide popular vote in 1992 was enough to win him more than a few counties.
But third parties don’t need to win any states or even significant numbers of votes to influence the 2024 result. Even single-digit vote shares could be enough to shift margins in the closely contested swing states that will decide the election, as they have in several recent contests. Indeed, third-party candidates picked up more votes than the eventual winner’s margin of victory in 75% of swing states in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. Insofar as the 2024 race is close, it won’t take many third-party votes in the right places to spoil it.
The strongest third-party candidate in decades courtesy of his family’s name recognition, independent RFK Jr. is easily the best-performing of the three, currently registering 10.4% in the RealClearPolitics five-way national polling average. The far-left West and Stein are each polling at around 1.9% on average. In the six swing states that matter most (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), RFK Jr. is polling at 8.8% on average, while West is polling at 1.8% and Stein at 1.5%.
Whereas polls last year showed RFK Jr. siphoning more votes from Trump than Biden in a three-way race, more recent polling finds him drawing roughly equal support from both candidates, with some even showing him hurting Biden slightly more. But the margins are small, and the data is far from conclusive.
On the one hand, RFK Jr. bears the most famous name in Democratic politics and is the scion of legendary Democratic leaders such as former President John F. Kennedy and former Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy. An environmental lawyer and activist, Kennedy himself was a lifelong Democrat and competed in the Democratic primary until last October, so it’s not a stretch to assume that most voters who recognize and react favorably to him are likely to be … Democrats. Crucially, Democrats (especially young, progressive, and minority voters) report being less enthusiastic about Biden as their nominee than Republicans are about Trump, suggesting the former would be more open to voting for an alternative candidate such as RFK Jr.
On the other hand, the No. 1 reason to think RFK Jr. could hurt Trump more than Biden is that Republicans and Republican-leaning independents like him much more than Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents do. While the exact numbers vary from poll to poll, Kennedy’s average net favorability is positive among Republicans and negative among Democrats. This trend has grown over time as voters have gotten to know RFK Jr. better and realized his anti-establishment views put him closer to the Republican base than the Democratic one. To name just a few, he is a vocal anti-vaxxer, opposes gun control and Ukraine aid, and has a knack for conspiratorial thinking. All these positions are right-wing coded, appealing more to the reactionary populism of Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and Alex Jones than the suburban, college-educated liberals who make up the base of the Democratic Party.
Whether he hurts Biden or Trump more will remain an open question for months to come, but what is clear is that Kennedy appeals to disaffected voters on both sides of the aisle who are skeptical of elites and have little commitment to either major-party candidate. It’s also possible that he ends up taking about even support from both of them in the “tipping point” states, in which case he wouldn’t ultimately matter much at all.
By contrast, the far-left campaigns of West and Stein pose a problem for Biden, despite their much smaller vote shares. Biden’s margin against Trump in national and swing state polls is consistently worse with these candidates included than without. Neither West nor Stein will attract any voters who would otherwise support Trump; their appeal is limited almost exclusively to progressives (especially young and non-white Americans) who would either vote for the president or stay home if they weren’t on the ballot. While votes they gain from those who’d otherwise not vote won’t sway the election, siphoning votes from Biden in swing states while taking none from Trump certainly could.
On balance, then, third parties’ continued presence in the race is a bigger threat to Biden and one of the reasons why I believe Trump is slightly favored to win the race at the moment.
Ballot access remains the key obstacle
Polling aside, third-party candidates will have no impact in November if they can’t qualify for the presidential ballot in key swing states.
Gathering the hundreds of thousands of signatures necessary to appear on all 50 state ballots costs millions – possibly tens of millions – of dollars and is usually an impossibly tall order for independent candidates running ballot-qualification campaigns from scratch on shoestring budgets. That’s why the sole independent candidate in the 2020 election qualified for the ballot in only 13 states, none of them swing states. Third-party candidates running under an established minor-party label – such as the Green Party or Libertarian Party – have an easier time with ballot qualification, as most states have lower ballot qualification standards for established minor parties than for true independents.
RFK Jr. has made significant progress on this front in recent weeks, having reportedly amassed enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, and New Hampshire, as well as in several non-swing states. The financial backing of his newly picked running mate, wealthy Bay Area lawyer, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Nicole Shanahan, makes it all the more likely that he will qualify for more key state ballots. Should Kennedy manage to secure the nomination of the Libertarian Party at the party’s convention in May, which seems reasonably likely, he would have a straightforward path to appearing on nearly all of them.
The story for the far-left candidates is more mixed. Stein will appear on the ballot in most states by virtue of running under the Green Party label. West, on the other hand, has neither the organizational apparatus nor the funding to mount a nationwide qualification drive. He seems to have secured a place on the ballot only in Utah and South Carolina – two non-swing states – thus far; the considerable challenges he faces to qualify in swing states could render his campaign dead in the water by the end of the summer.
The deadlines for ballot access run from June to August. This means that we are still months away from knowing which states third-party candidates will qualify in – and how exactly they might shake up the 2024 race.
What we do know is that they could.
FILE PHOTO: Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump arrives at his rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, U.S., March 2, 2024.
What happens if Trump can’t find $454 million?
Donald Trump’s half-billion dollar bond in his New York fraud case is due Monday and his lawyers say he doesn’t have it.
New York Attorney General Letitia James has already positioned herself to seize Trump’s properties in Westchester County and could potentially target his bank accounts. She’s likely to wait a few days, however, pending the ruling of Trump’s appeal.
The former president’s legal team is arguing that he should be allowed to post a smaller bond because raising such a large sum is impossible. However, Trump on Friday undercut their messaging on social media by claiming he does have $500 million in cash on hand, which may make it seem to the court that he’s simply trying to get out of paying. His net looks like it could get a nice boost now that the social network Trump owns, Truth Social, has approval to go public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, but it might be six months before he can cash out.
So will there be a fire sale? It may be easier for James to go after bank accounts first, because seizing and auctioning off real estate is irreversible should the appeals court offer Trump some relief. Should the courts stick with the status quo, however, James could start auctioning off Trump’s buildings about two months after she seizes them.FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump greets Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, U.S., May 13, 2019.
Pressure builds on Ukraine
The most hotly debated question about a possible second Donald Trump foreign policy: Would he simply abandon Ukraine and its fight to repel Russian invaders? We might now have an answer.
Hungary’s PM Viktor Orbán, a political ally of both Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, announced after meeting with Trump in Florida yesterday that the former president “will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war.” He told Hungary’s M1 TV channel that “if the Americans don’t give money, the Europeans alone are unable to finance this war. And then the war is over.”
Trump himself has yet to comment on this claim that he would end the conflict by forcing a Ukrainian surrender.
Putin has also added more pressure on Ukraine. On Monday, he called it “quite understandable” that Pope Francis has reportedly urged Ukraine’s leaders to find “the courage of the white flag” to negotiate with the Kremlin.
Does Ukraine have any cause for near-term optimism? Despite delays, a few trained Ukrainian pilots will likely have six US-made F16 aircraft ready to go by this summer. Their successful use against Russian forces could accelerate the pace of training and delivery. (A total of 45 F16s have been promised.)
These aircraft won’t win the war for Ukraine, but significant numbers of them will boost Ukraine’s offensive and defensive capabilities. The timing of their delivery is critical. You can read details on their possible battlefield importance here.
A voter takes a sticker after casting their ballot during early voting, a day ahead of the Super Tuesday primary election, at the San Francisco City Hall voting center in San Francisco, California, U.S. March 4, 2024.
Why Super Tuesday still matters
Biden and Trump have swept the primaries so far, with Biden running unopposed by any major candidate and Trump beating his sole rival – Nikki Haley – in eight of the nine GOP primaries so far. Trump leads Haley by 201 delegates.
Wait, what’s a delegate? Americans don’t actually vote for presidents. Delegates do.
A ticked box for a candidate on a primary ballot is a vote for a delegate who supports that candidate and will vote for them at the party convention. In the primaries, candidates aim to gain enough delegates to clinch the nomination – 1,215 for the GOP and 1,986 for the Democrats this year.
Why does Super Tuesday matter? This year’s is worth tracking to see what is motivating voters. We’ll be watching to see if the trends in the early primaries continue like Democrats voting against Biden over US policy in Gaza, or if he continues to lose support among young Black and Hispanic voters.
SCOTUS gives Trump the green light. Trump’s legal woes were the greatest threat to his nomination until the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the 14th Amendment does not give states the ability to bar Trump from the ballot and decided to hear his appeal on presidential immunity – delaying the DC Federal indictment until at least June.
With Trump free of any immediate threat of criminal indictment, he has the potential to be an even bigger threat to Biden, especially among moderates in swing states. Trump is currently seen as more trustworthy than Biden on economy, immigration, and crime, the biggest issues for moderate voters in swing states.
According to Eurasia Group’s US director Jon Lieber, Trump is looking like the new favorite to win the general election.
“It is hard not to look at the public opinion data, Biden‘s low approval ratings, and the fact that his biggest liability – his age – is only going to become more of an issue through the eight months of a difficult campaign, and not see that Trump is the favorite right now.”