The Outsider Perspective Issue 392 | The Beltway Outsiders

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Good Friday Morning! Especially to those of you who like hopping around and searching Zillow, like me. This week, a gem popped up: the childhood home of William F. Buckley Jr. is on the market for $5.5 million. It has eight bedrooms, nine bathrooms, an atrium, and some of the best woodwork in a home made in 1812. Buckley is considered one of the fathers of modern conservatives, founded National Review, and much more. It’s a very cool piece of American history, which Buckley writes about in some of his memoirs.

I hope you could all see the aurora borealis this past week. It was an astonishing event I never thought I’d see in Tennessee. But it wasn’t just in America. We have verified pictures of people viewing the lights on every continent on Earth, including both hemispheres. It’s likely the largest geomagnetic storm since the Carrington Event from September 1-2, 1859. The sunspots that caused that have rotated to the backside of the sun. If they return and face us again, we could get another show in two weeks.

Quick Hits:

The White House is claiming executive privilege over the audio recordings of Robert Hur’s interview with Biden regarding the classified documents the President kept in his private possession. If you recall, we have the transcript of these interviews. Claiming executive privilege over the audio recordings and not the transcripts is about the most enormous red flag imaginable. Politico is delicate with the White House in its wording, “While the transcripts of the interviews have already been released, Biden’s effort to block the recordings puts him in a politically awkward position: He has insisted that Hur has mischaracterized the interviews but is nonetheless trying to maintain secrecy over the raw audio.” There’s no grand executive privilege claim, either. White House counsel Ed Siskel said he’s not turning over the audio because “The absence of a legitimate need for the audio recordings lays bare your likely goal — to chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes.“ My friends, there are many reasons a President can assert executive privilege. Asserting it because “this is politically bad” ain’t an accepted argument in any court. If that argument works, Richard Milhous Nixon will rise from the dead, leading a nationwide zombie rampage.
Speaking of undead political careers, Kamala Harris is letting it be known that if Biden loses this race, she’d like to run for California Governor. Politico reports, “Vice President Kamala Harris has joked to friends that she may return to California to run for governor if Democrats lose the White House this fall, taking a page from Richard Nixon, two people familiar with her remarks said. “That did not happen,“ Harris spokesperson Kirsten Allen told POLITICO in response. “This November, the vice president will be preparing to be inaugurated for the second term of the Biden-Harris administration.“ Kamala Harris may not be the best politician in the world, but she’s not stupid. She can read the polls. And that has her thinking about backup plans.

Where you can find me this week

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Hamas Gets Caught Lying About Palestinian Death Numbers – Conservative Institute

Biden’s Polling Comeback Is Dead… Trump Is Winning – Conservative Institute

How Close Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. To Getting On Debate Stage? Closer Than You Think – Conservative Institute

Biden Cracks Open The Pandora’s Box Of Presidential Debates

We have debates! Or at least dates with debates scheduled. The whole deal went down very quickly, was clearly planned between Biden and the networks, and Trump agreed just as quickly. Politico offers the usual smarmy DC take on how the White House thinks about it. I found it all unconvincing.

My immediate first take was, “I can’t believe the White House is retreating from debates.” The traditional debate format involves three presidential debates and one vice presidential debate. Biden and the White House only want and have accepted two debates: the first in June and the second on September 10.

Now, the really funny thing is that Democrats everywhere are pretending Biden stuck it to Trump by forcing his hands on debates. But let’s be clear: Biden backed out of the Presidential Commission, reduced the number of debates, and moved them as far away from the November election as possible.

Trump claimed on Truth Social that he’d accepted a third debate on Fox News. Biden’s camp put out a bizarre answer:

“President Biden made his terms clear for two one-on-one debates, and Donald Trump accepted those terms,” Mr. Biden’s campaign chair, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, said. “No more games. No more chaos. No more debate about debates.”

Do more debates mean more chaos? That’s a bizarre framing from the candidate losing. The White House also wants you to believe that Biden doesn’t want more chances to put Trump in the limelight. That makes no sense. The other thing about the first debate is that Biden wanted it set up on CNN. That was set up first, and CNN has said, “the debate will only air on its own platforms.”

That means the viewership for that first debate will be only those who either have CNN on cable or actively seek it out by going to CNN’s website. ABC plans on sharing its feed, which means the second debate will be seen. CNN’s debate will have the lower viewership.

So, the White House wants fewer debates and the first debate to be on the smallest platform possible. This is not the move you make if you’re confident and believe the debates will help you.

It’s truly bizarre. Biden is clearly behind in the polls. His debate strategy is to minimize the impact as much as possible and get them away from the elections.

As I was thinking all these things, Nate Silver had similar thoughts:

So, the White House unambiguously wants fewer debates rather than more. And that’s a bad sign for Biden — part of a pattern where the White House has continually tried to minimize his exposure to unscripted moments. I wouldn’t quite say they’ve done the bare minimum when it comes to media appearances. But they’ve done the bare minimum more than the bare minimum, trying to optimize some function of minimizing both their 81-year-old candidate’s exposure and media criticism about the lack of said exposure. And when they have done media appearances, it’s mostly been with friendly sources like Howard Stern and pointedly not with more adversarial ones like the New York Times or Washington Post.

Preferring fewer debates is particularly bad sign given that 1) Biden is trailing in the race and therefore should want more chaos and variance and 2) that the debates went well enough for him last time.

I agree with Nate. The White House is terrified of these debates and wants them over with – the refusal to agree to any other debates is also telling. There is currently no VP debate, though Kamala Harris claims she’s accepted an invite from CBS News. Trump’s lack of a VP nominee makes this more complicated to navigate. The VP debate is also scheduled before the Democratic Convention (July 23/August 13 are the tentative dates).

Nate Silver nukes the other claims Biden makes in his official letter (read Nate’s entire take; it’s excellent). But he makes one other point that surprised me, given who it is. He raises the possibility of Biden getting tossed from the ticket:

So basically, Biden traded three debates after Labor Day for one debate after Labor Day. If the White House thinks the debates are a liability for Biden, this is a brilliant tactical move — and I mean that sincerely. By throwing this curveball, Biden made it appear as though he proactively wanted more debates when he actually wanted fewer. And he doesn’t seem to be paying too much of a PR price for it. The media has mostly gone along with the White House narrative — not to mention Democratic partisans yelling at me on Twitter — fooled by his sleight-of-hand into not recognizing that 2 < 3.

There’s one other tactical wrinkle — I suppose I’m skeptical that the White House was thinking about it, but if so, I’ll up their grade from A+ to A+++. By moving the first debate to before the Democratic convention in August, Democrats increase their option value. Here’s what I mean by that. If Biden totally and irrecoverably screws up in the June debate — he’s just obviously no longer ready for prime time — then he can step down and Democrats can pull the Ezra Klein break-glass-in-case-of-emergency plan and hold a contested convention. It’s not ideal — that’s an understatement — but it’s much less bad than going into the final months of the campaign certain to lose.

After all, if Democrats really think that Trump is an existential threat to democracy or whatever else, that means making the most of their position, however poor it might be. Biden is trailing in the swing states, faces a number of other headwinds, and otherwise holds a fairly bad hand. Today the White House pulled off a great bluff — but if that June debate goes really badly, the only remaining move will be to fold.

I thought this point of being able to replace Biden was interesting because I had the exact opposite reaction. Having general election debates before the conventions is unique. Neither man is technically on the ballot yet. I see Biden getting debates in early to establish “I’m the guy!” to head off any dissent from the Democratic Party.

If Biden and Harris have already done two debates by the time of the convention, it’d be harder to pull them off the ballot, in my view. But I found it interesting that Silver had the opposite view: if Biden bombs, Democrats panic and try to do the ole switch-a-roo.

If I knew nothing else about this race and only these debate details, I’d assume Biden had a strong lead and was trying to choke off Trump’s ability to make inroads. But that’s not the case: Biden is losing this race. This is the other part of this Presidential election where I feel like I’m taking crazy pills now.

Biden is running like he’s leading, and Trump is hammering away like the challenger. In the RealClearPolitics average, Trump leads by 1.1 points. That seems close until you realize that Biden was ahead by 4.7 points at this point in 2020, meaning that Biden is running nearly 6 points behind his 2020 margin.

I’ve already explained that I think Biden needs to win the popular vote by four points to win. And we’re in “Trump could win the popular vote” territory of polling. It is possible that Biden’s supporters are so deflated by him that they’re not responding in polls. Trump’s supporters tend to be more emphatic. However, Biden has not overperformed in the polls. Trump has.

This Biden strategy helps Trump because it keeps the race as is. If you’re a race car in the lead, you know what’s great? If everyone behind you just accepts that and cruises along. That’s the Biden campaign strategy. The White House wants a Trump wipeout. They do not believe they can catch up otherwise.

Last thoughts: What to watch for from here on out.

If either candidate wants to back out, what excuses do they use? Trump needs to make it loudly known that Biden is rejecting more debates and falling below the standards of every President before him on the debate front. If the White House doesn’t want these debates, it will look for an excuse to end them and blame Trump.
National Democrats have laid the groundwork for months that Biden shouldn’t debate Trump. The reasons vary. Watch for reasons to multiply if something goes sideways. Or if Biden ultimately pulls out.
The State of the Union is an important benchmark. It did not improve Biden’s polling. The recent “Biden bump” was more about Trump slumping in the polls. As Trump has bounced back to the mean, Biden has not returned with it. Biden could “win” the debate in the press and lose in the polls. The press will be quick to declare him a winner. But if he comes off as “old man yells at cloud,” the reverse could happen. Biden’s major public appearances are not polling well.
RFK Jr. – A major reason Biden pulled this stunt is because he does not want Kennedy on that stage. Trump doesn’t either, but Biden is pushing the cart on this point and has made RFK (“third parties”) a reason for leaving the traditional debate format. And he’s pushing it hard. CNN says RFK Jr. can still make the debate. When asked about that, a Biden advisor said, “Our criteria for a 1:1 debate was made clear publicly, it was made clear to CNN and they understood our position when we accepted their offer.” The Washington Post claims a Trump official told them “a CNN producer had promised in a call today that ‘RFK will not be on the stage.'” Getting RFK Jr. “qualified” would be a fascinating development. There’s an interesting risk on this for Biden: he claims to represent the “defending democracy” faction of politics, and he’s actively trying to prevent more democratic options on a debate stage. That is a hypocritical stance, to put it lightly. (For the record, I side with Sean Trende on third-party spoilers like Ross Perot. Conventional wisdom says they cost the leading candidate the election, but there’s little evidence to prove that. It presumes a Kennedy voter is a Biden or Trump voter if you remove Kennedy. It’s not that simple. They might not vote at all. It’s hard to tell). Last point: By my estimation, Kennedy only needs to get one more poll to hit CNN’s threshold to be on the debate stage.
The Press vs Trump. There’s going to be immense pressure on the moderators to ensure Trump “loses” these debates. A recent interview about the NYT in Semafor explored this issue. Ben Smith started that interview with a head NYT Editor this way, “Dan Pfeiffer, who used to work for Barack Obama, recently wrote of the Times: “They do not see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power.” Why don’t you see your job as: ‘We’ve got to stop Trump?’ What about your job doesn’t let you think that way?” How many of these moderators will believe it is their job to “Stop Trump?” It’s an open debate in journalistic circles… some might even say it’s the preferred mindset.