Welcome to Trail Mix, your 2024 election sanity guide. See something interesting on the trail? Email me at jake.lahut@thedailybeast.com. To get Trail Mix in your inbox, subscribe here for free.
This week, we check in on Nikki Haley voters after her big announcement. Plus a look at what’s going on with President Biden’s Latino polling woes, and some new Kennedy-Shanahan J6 shenanigans.
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After Nikki Haley came out on Wednesday and said she’d vote for Trump in November, one thing was settled: The former governor fully capitulated.
Haley was the last GOP primary candidate standing against Trump and was seen as a reluctant Never Trump figure. Despite her endorsement, however, the former governor said the Trump campaign still needs to try and court her voters.
That’s where the work begins for Robert Schwartz, who leads the Haley Voters For Biden PAC.
“I had always said it makes a big difference whether she comes out and makes an enthusiastic endorsement like Tim Scott did, or a more tepid one like Ron DeSantis did,” Schwartz told The Daily Beast. “And this was an extremely tepid endorsement if you wanna call it that. It still makes it harder to win over Haley voters who deeply respect her.”
The Biden campaign was ready to spring into action, too.
The president’s re-election team made sure to keep a meeting on the books with a group of top Haley supporters—coordinated by Schwartz—the very same night the former United Nations ambassador said she’s throwing her support behind Trump. The Zoom meeting was first reported by The Daily Beast.
Schwartz said he’s impressed by the Biden campaign’s continued outreach, adding how he feels Haley voters’ concerns over Biden’s age have quelled ever since his fiery State of the Union address.
“What I think is more important in the run-up to the debate is one of the biggest reasons why Haley voters are struggling to see themselves voting for Joe Biden,” Schwartz said, citing a perception that the president is “working harder to win over voters on the left.”
Schwartz said he’s seen no major indications so far that Haley’s decision would influence her hodgepodge coalition of supporters in any cohesive way. The ideological makeup of her voters, he underscored, is too wide for a Trump endorsement to move the needle in a truly monumental way.
When it comes to convincing Haley voters to vote for the president, Schwartz said there’s no need to reinvent the wheel: There are some clear ways in which Haley’s supporters are closer to Biden than Trump, he claimed.
“An objective analysis would be that Biden is closer to Nikki Haley on a lot of foreign policy issues than Trump is,” Schwartz explained, offering as an example the war in Ukraine, where both Biden and Haley want to support the Ukrainians and avoid giving Russia any larger foothold in Eastern Europe.
Schwartz offered some unsolicited advice for the Biden campaign: Focus on foreign policy and lowering prices—or anything that could “give some policy victories to the center.” That would be the quickest way to lock in a solid chunk of the Haley voter bloc, he emphasized.
“She has a very wide coalition of voters,” Schwartz said of the former governor, “including some from the center-left, the center, and conservatives. And I think among strong conservatives, there are a lot of disagreements about Biden’s policy.”
Still, with Haley racking up more than 4.4 million votes—between her active campaign and then her zombie one in the weeks and months after dropping out—she has demonstrated something powerful: There exists an animated constituency within the GOP that is willing to explicitly vote against Trump.
“While I respectfully disagree with her decision to support Trump,” Schwartz said, “I would also respectfully disagree with her characterization of Biden being catastrophic.”
A BIDEN LATINO VOTER PROBLEM?
The Biden campaign has seen a precipitous drop-off in support among Latino voters in 2024 polling compared to 2020.
The president’s lead over Trump among Latinos has gone from a 29-point spread during his first year in office to just nine points as of April, and other more recent polls have shown continuing signs of trouble despite the Biden campaign spending early on Spanish-language ads, such as on ESPN Deportes during its coverage of La Liga soccer games from Spain.
Cathy Cohen, a University of Chicago professor and director of the GenForward survey, has been trying to figure out what’s really going on with Biden’s lagging support among the ever-growing and, on average, younger electorate—almost exclusively referred to by pollsters as Hispanic voters, but also used interchangeably with the terms Latino and Latinx.
“What you see is a drop,” Cohen told The Daily Beast, “and it’s not only among Latino voters, but also among African American voters, male voters, and working-class voters. So it suggests his programs are not resonating, people are still suffering from inflation… We should take seriously that there has been a decline in support for Biden.”
Cohen pointed to longer-standing problems with polling Latino voters, from a potential language barrier, with polls conducted only in English, to non-college-educated Hispanic men being among the most difficult voters to reach on a live call survey. Then there are online surveys, some of which pay users at different rates to respond to polls. Male Latino voters can carry the highest rate, and there’s often little to no way of confirming whether someone is being honest about their demographic information.
So is there a systemic polling error, or is Biden in actual trouble?
“It’s a hard question to answer because it really does vary by the poll and the quality of the poll,” Cohen said. “The thing I would say to people is yes, you’ve gotta pay attention to the numbers, but you really wanna pay attention to the trends.”
OFF THE BEATEN PATH
Another day, another RFK-Shanahan J6 mess-up.
Twice in just under 24 hours, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, quoted posts on X made by two highly vocal defenders of the Jan. 6 insurrection, both of whom were at the Capitol for the Stop the Steal rally.
On Tuesday, Shanahan quote tweeted Brandon Straka, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of disorderly conduct and was sentenced to 90 days of home detention and three years probation for his involvement in the insurrection. Shanahan praised him for standing up to Meta over his Facebook page being taken down, comparing it to Meta allegedly censoring the Who Is Bobby Kennedy? documentary.
She also dragged Hunter Biden’s laptop into the mix—because of course.
“A group who shared videos of liberals walking away from the Democrat Party had their entire page banned without any reason given,” Shanahan said in the post. “Meta censored the ‘Who is Bobby Kennedy’ video, and before that the Hunter Biden laptop story. Big Tech poses a serious threat to free speech in our country. I’m encouraged to see state leaders in Georgia taking this issue seriously.”
The next day, Shanahan quoted a post from Ian Smith, a New Jersey gym owner who was cleared of charges for violating COVID-19 shutdown measures. Smith was at the rally outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 and called on fellow Trump supporters to join the proceedings in the buildup to that fateful day.
“We’re Coming And There Is NOTHING. YOU. CAN. DO. TO. STOP. US,” Smith wrote in a tweet on January 3, 2021. “Our Republic is under attack from the inside. Many ‘public servants’ have sold their souls, and in doing so have sold our way of life. Communism WILL NEVER flourish here. On Jan 6th, we make that abundantly clear. We’re coming and there is NOTHING. YOU. CAN. DO. TO. STOP. US.”
Smith is also scheduled to be at the Libertarian National Convention on Friday, where Kennedy will speak that same day and Shanahan on Sunday.
Pennsylvania’s hot spots.
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee announced in a press call on Thursday their plans to shore up the party’s standing in key areas of Pennsylvania, one of the most competitive battleground states for 2024.
The group focusing on state legislature races is looking to help the Biden campaign by investing in more boots on the ground, particularly around Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and one of the swingiest precincts of them all, Bucks County.
The DLCC is also looking to help aspiring state representative Anna Thomas in her race, where the district includes Northampton County. That county has voted for the presidential winner all but three times over the past 100 years.
CAMPAIGN LIT
Hunter speaks with The Beast. Roger Sollenberger spoke with Hunter Biden about his decision to sue Fox News and where he draws the line on questions of decency.
Bada bing donations. A former NBA player-turned-far-right GOP candidate thought it was a good idea to spend donor funds on strip clubs and other misadventures, Roger and Mini Racker report.
Trump’s got bills. The former president’s legal expenses keep mounting, and he may be in debt up to $1 million with his attorneys, Reese Gorman and Mini report.
The Cuellar-Azerbaijan connection. William Bredderman and Riley Rogerson connect the dots behind the alleged corruption network surrounding embattled and indicted Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX).
The renters’ primary. Democratic N.H. congressional hopeful Maggie Goodlander says Congress needs more renters. Jake Lahut found a $1.2 million problem with that message, and how she’s already ruffling feathers in one of the GOP’s prized pickup seats.
