Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.
We begin today with Cameron Joseph of Columbia Journalism Review and the problem with what the New York Times called “collective amnesia” about the shoe salesman’s time in executive office.
Part of the problem is that many voters, especially the crucial bloc of younger ones, simply don’t remember Trump that well. Those turning eighteen and eligible to vote for the first time this fall were just ten years old and in grade school when Trump won the presidency, in 2016; the January 6 Capitol riots happened back when most of them were just starting high school. The rest of us don’t have memories that are as sharp and reliable as we’d like to think—it’s not just Joe Biden and Donald Trump who regularly get names wrong or forget in what year things occurred.
And the past eight years have been particularly intense. I barely remembered a few of Trump’s quotes tested in the Garin poll, and I cover this for a living. We’ve all just grown numb, overwhelmed by the chaos—something that’s often reflected in our coverage and in how voters respond. The first time Trump ventures into new rhetorical territory, it’s still news. The second or third time he says something that once would have been far outside the pale of political rhetoric, it doesn’t even rate a mention.
Case in point: When Trump launched his 2016 campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and “murderers,” it dominated the news and became one of the most-remembered lines of the campaign. His recent claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” generated headlines but didn’t dominate coverage. On Thursday, he declared in his State of the Union “prebuttal” that Biden is “keeping the hordes of illegal migrants and illegal aliens pouring into the country,” and claimed that “many come from mental institutions, many come from prisons, they’re terrorists.” Few major news organizations wrote stories focusing on the comments.
Philip Bump of The Washington Post reports that 538 has now removed Rasmussen Reports polling from its list of polling averages and forecasts.
The decision comes after months of consideration that broke into public view in June. At that point, G. Elliott Morris, ABC News’s editorial director of data analytics and 538 lead, presented Rasmussen with questions meant to evaluate its objectivity and methodology. Rasmussen published the letter on its website, triggering backlash against 538 in right-wing media — and by Nate Silver, the founder of what was then called FiveThirtyEight. No change was implemented.
[…]
Last March, for example, Rasmussen released data purporting to show that Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake (R) had won her gubernatorial election in November 2022. The route it took to get to that determination was circuitous and, to put it mildly, atypical. On behalf of the group College Republicans United, Rasmussen asked Arizona voters who they voted for in Lake’s race and, after weighting the results to exit polls — which is unusual — declared that, contrary to the certified tally, Kari Lake had won her race by eight points.
An election of 2.5 million voters is a better indicator of an election outcome than a retrospective question offered to 1,000 Arizonans four months later from a Republican-leaning pollster that is adjusting its results to a metric, exit polls, that is itself weighted to the election results. But Rasmussen trumpeted this revisionist look at the race loudly — including on Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast — as did Trump allies.
This was one trigger for the questions Morris sent to Rasmussen in June.
Kaleigh Rogers of 538 shares polling showing that the LGBTQ+ community supports Democrats because of the anti-LGBTQ+ policies of the Republicans.
New polling shared first with 538 gives us a rare look at a demographic that is often underpolled heading into the 2024 election. When considered alongside just-released survey data from GLAAD, an LGBTQ+ media organization, it paints a picture of a segment of the electorate that is likely to continue supporting the Democratic Party not because it leans particularly left, but because the Republican Party has taken such an aggressively anti-LGBTQ+ tack and made these voters’ rights a partisan issue.
LGBTQ+ voters appear considerably more likely to vote for President Joe Biden than the general population, according to new polling of 600 Americans who identify as LGBTQ+ from The Independent Center, a centrist think tank, and the Bullfinch Group. When asked who they would vote for in a head-to-head between Biden and former President Donald Trump, 43 percent said “definitely Biden,” with another 13 percent saying they leaned toward Biden. Just 28 percent said they would definitely support or leaned toward supporting Trump. Another 16 percent were undecided. When given the option to vote for Biden, Trump or a hypothetical independent third candidate, 21 percent said they’d prefer the independent, but 44 percent still backed Biden.
[…]
Historically, LGBTQ+ voters have largely voted Democratic. But this isn’t necessarily because they lean left ideologically. In the Independent Center survey, a plurality (30 percent) of LGBTQ+ Americans identified their political leanings as “moderate centrist/independent.” When asked to place themselves on a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 being the most liberal and 10 being the most conservative, the average response was 3.9. Similarly, a plurality said that they’d like politicians to be a 5 on that scale. And when asked what they thought was the most pressing issue in America today, the top response, with 24 percent, was “jobs and the economy.”
This checks…and there are a lot of Black people (particularly of the churchified variety) that would vote GOP if the Republican Party wasn’t so racist. The Republicans wouldn’t get the majority of the vote under that scenario but I could see the Black vote reverting to the level of support of the Eisenhower years.
Lori Rozsa of The Washington Post reports that the backlash in Florida against the culture wars is becoming more intense.
Florida has firmly cemented itself in recent years as ground zero for the nation’s culture wars. The Sunshine State is the birthplace of conservative parental rights group Moms for Liberty, the original law restricting LGBTQ+ discussion in classrooms, one of the strictest abortion laws in the country and legislation that has led to the banning of more books than in any other state in America.
But the pushback is growing.
Judges are also canceling some of DeSantis’s marquee laws, including the “Stop Woke Act.” A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled Monday that the law “exceeds the bounds” of the Constitution’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression.
I wouldn’t say that Florida is returning to “battleground status” based on this report. But I wouldn’t be opposed to tossing a little money in Florida just to see if that dog might hunt.
Jason Dick of Roll Call found a workable metaphor to describe the situation Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) finds himself in nowadays.
And yet there it was, in the midnight hour, a Senate subway car on the Dirksen-Hart office buildings line, stalled in the tracks between the Capitol and Dirksen, after President Joe Biden had finished his State of the Union address Thursday night and as the post-SOTU rituals of backslapping and Statuary Hall hot takes were petering out.
The fact that among the handful of folks trapped in the subway was Sen. James Lankford also felt clumsily on point, the sort of conceit that a fiction workshop would advise the writer to throw out, so as to not be so overt.
The Oklahoma Republican spent months negotiating in good faith with a bipartisan group of his colleagues to craft legislation to overhaul the immigration system, the issue his GOP contemporaries proclaim metronomically is a crisis that needs to be addressed — and now.
Lankford delivered, then got shivved by his party’s presumptive nominee, former President Donald Trump, and all the other party leaders who quickly fell in line on both sides of the Capitol and killed it before it had a chance to move.
Nadeem Badshah of the Guardian captures some exclusive reporting by The Sunday Times that Bojo the Clown secretly met with Venezuela’s president Nicholás Maduro in order to dissuade Venezuela from providing military support to Russia.
The former prime minister spoke to the Venezuelan president about the war in Ukraine, amid concerns that the socialist republic could supply weapons or military support to Russia, according to the Sunday Times.
He also discussed the conditions for normalising relations with the UK, which does not accept the legitimacy of Maduro’s administration. Maduro has been in power for 11 years.
Johnson’s office told the Sunday Times that the foreign secretary, David Cameron, was aware of the visit and that Johnson also spoke to Colin Dick, the most senior British diplomat in the country. […]
The talks are unorthodox given the state of bilateral relations and wider uncertainty about western relations with Venezuela, which will hold presidential elections on 28 July.
The South American country has the world’s largest oil reserves. It has been a supporter of President Putin and blamed the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Nato.
Anna Grzymala-Busse of the Brookings Institution reports that on Tuesday, the odd couple of Poland’s president Andrzej Duda and Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk will visit the White House about the only thing that the two of them have in common.
Two political rivals are coming to the White House. The prime minister of Poland, Donald Tusk, and the president of Poland, Andrzej Duda, will visit the White House on March 12 to “reaffirm their unwavering support for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s brutal war of conquest” and celebrate the 25th anniversary of Poland joining NATO.
Yet support for Ukraine and NATO—and increasing Polish military expenditure to 4 percent of GDP, double the rate the alliance asks of its members—are perhaps the only issues that unite Polish politicians. When it comes to domestic politics, Duda and Tusk are poles apart.
Duda is loyal to the Law and Justice Party (PiS), which governed Poland from 2015 until its electoral defeat in September 2023. He is in office until 2025 and wields the presidential veto. Meanwhile, Tusk has consistently opposed PiS and chairs the Civic Coalition (KO), one of the three anti-PiS parties that was swept back into power in the September elections and formed the new government.
Finally today, John McWorther writes for The New York Times about the “silliness” of the rule that no sentence should end with a preposition.
The first person on record to declare opposition to ending sentences with a preposition was the poet John Dryden in the 17th century. But what really set the idea in stone was Bishop Robert Lowth’s highly influential “A Short Introduction to English Grammar” in 1762 and its direct descendant, Lindley Murray’s “English Grammar” in 1795. The two manuscripts had the same sort of influence in the 18th and 19th centuries as Strunk & White would have later.
But whence the notion that “the person I arrived with” is somehow inept compared with “the person with whom I arrived”? Anyone who never ended sentences with prepositions in casual speech would risk a certain sparseness of social life. Indeed, even grammarians like Lowth stipulated that keeping prepositions away from the end of sentences was most important in formal rather than casual language. But the question is why it is necessary there, since it usually sounds stuffy even in formal contexts.
The answer is: Latin. Scholars of Lowth’s period were in thrall to the idea that Latin and Ancient Greek were the quintessence of language. England was taking its place as a world power starting in the 17th century, and English was being spoken by ever more people and used in a widening range of literary genres. This spawned a crop of grammarians dedicated to sprucing the language up for its new prominence, and the assumption was that a real and important language should be as much like Latin as possible. And in Latin, as it happens, one did not end sentences with a preposition. “To whom are you speaking?” was how one put it in Latin; to phrase it as “Who are you speaking to?” would have sounded like Martian.
Try to have the best possible day everyone!
