Shocker Poll: Swing-State Voters Trust Trump More on Democracy

Good news for Joe Biden and the Democratic Party: The swing-state voters most likely to decide the election believe that democracy is on the ballot in November. The problem: They trust Donald Trump to protect it more than Biden.

A new poll from The Washington Post and George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government shows that the Biden campaign’s effort to frame the 2024 election as a battle between democracy and the rising tide of authoritarianism—the “most important election of our lifetime”—has been successful; 61 percent of surveyed swing-state voters described “threats to democracy” as “extremely important” to them.

But the campaign’s messaging does not seem to have translated to support for Biden. Remarkably, 44 percent of swing-state voters trust Trump to best handle those threats over Biden’s 33 percent. Among undecided voters, the numbers are just as bleak: 38 percent trust Trump and 29 percent trust Biden.

The troubling numbers come as Trump faces an election interference trial in Georgia and an investigation by special counsel Jack Smith over his involvement in the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Amid his legal woes, the former president has continued to peddle lies about the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Biden’s messaging problem is surprising. Voters appear to agree that democracy is in danger, a central theme of Biden’s stump-speech pitches and campaign ads, many of which contain footage of the mob outside the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They just don’t trust that he’s best suited to guard it. Claims made by Trump of the threat to democracy in the wake of his felony conviction in his hush-money trial may partially explain the poll’s results, as may frustration with Biden’s insistence on continuing to fund Israel’s unpopular assault on Gaza, even as he violates international and domestic weapons transfer laws to do so.

But whatever voters think threats to democracy entail—like a president sowing doubt in elections and refusing to submit to the peaceful transfer of power—Biden, who has prioritized comparatively abstract messaging on democracy at times during his reelection campaign, will need to figure out how to fully get through to voters on the issue, or change course soon.

Representative Lauren Boebert celebrated winning her new Colorado district’s Republican primary wearing a MAGA hat and an admittedly counterfeit pair of Donald Trump’s golden sneakers.

The tacky, reflective gold “Never Surrender” high-tops were first launched in February as a moneymaking scheme for the embattled former president, who’s been hit with mounting legal fines in addition to his costly campaign. It appears that Boebert, who claims to be one of Trump’s favorites, couldn’t secure an actual pair of the sneakers, so she had to go with knock-offs, according to Westword.

“These are very China, but I’m OK with that,” Boebert said at Tuesday night’s victory party, laughing. “If I could’ve bought the OGs, I would have.”

Trump has begun promising the limited-edition sneakers as a gift to donors who gave in excess of $2.5 million, but originally they sold for $399, a steep sum for a pair of plastic kicks. If Boebert had shelled out, the money would’ve gone to Trump’s Save America PAC, which will pay the bills across his many legal battles.

During her victory party, Boebert took a phone call, which she told Westword was from Trump himself. “I said a lot of great things,” she said. “I told him I’m looking forward to helping him in this fight, and that I’m going to be there, and I told him he needs to win his third election.”

Maybe next time she gets Trump on the phone, she should ask him for merch. The sneakers are sold out online, but Trump clearly has some extras knocking around.

“He congratulated me, he loves me and thanks me for a good win,” she said.

In December, Boebert announced that she would be switching districts, to run in a Republican stronghold after only narrowly securing her seat in 2022 from a Democratic challenger. With Tuesday’s win, the far-right Christian nationalist showed she will have far better luck staying in Congress in November.

Fox News and Jesse Watters are pushing a bizarre conspiracy theory ahead of Thursday’s presidential debate: that Joe Biden is part of a plot to install Kamala Harris in a “DEI presidency.”

On The Five Tuesday evening, Watters claimed that the debate was part of progressives’ plan to “drag [Biden] across the finish line and install” the vice president to the top job.

“There is a lot at stake, plus the progressive movement—they are this close to locking this thing in,” Watters lamented. “They have opened the borders. They have changed the entire culture of this country. If you look at the cities, it’s almost over.”

“If they can drag him across the finish line and install Kamala, we have a DEI presidency that they can celebrate for the rest of the administration,” he added. “That’s all they need to get to. It’s just 90 minutes. That’s all it takes.”

Diversity, equity, and inclusion principles have been a buzzword on the right in recent years, often standing in for racism and bigotry. Two weeks ago, Republicans in Congress introduced a bill to ban DEI from all government offices and contracting, and DEI was among the slurs used to allege another conspiracy involving the Baltimore bridge collapse in March. Conservatives have blamed DEI for the Hawaii wildfires last year and the rise in train derailments. And of course, there’s also Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s statewide crusade against DEI.

Alas, it’s no surprise that DEI would join right-wing media’s conspiracy mongering regarding the upcoming debate. So far, conservative pundits and politicians, including Trump himself, have been pushing the idea that Biden will need to be drugged up to speak coherently during the debate, despite Trump’s own cognitive issues. Right-wingers have also alleged that CNN is rigging the debate against Trump, crying about a “hostile environment.”

All of these excuses add up to some kind of justification for Trump in the event that Biden outperforms him in the debate, which anyone who saw Biden out-debate the convicted felon in 2020 can understand.

The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to temporarily protect the right to abortions in medical emergencies in Idaho, according to an opinion that was briefly posted to the court’s website Wednesday morning, before promptly being taken down, according to Bloomberg.

The opinion indicated that the majority ruled 6-3 to dismiss the case as “improvidently granted,” which will send it back to a lower court to be retried. The lower court had previously reinstated emergency abortions for the health of patients, after Idaho enacted a near-total abortion ban following the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

The decision “will prevent Idaho from enforcing its abortion ban when the termination of a pregnancy is needed to prevent serious harms to a woman’s health,” wrote Justice Elena Kagan in a concurring opinion.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

The court was asked to decide whether Idaho’s uber-restrictive ban violated the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which requires hospitals receiving funds from Medicare to provide stabilizing treatment to any patient experiencing a medical emergency. In some cases, that could mean the patient requires an emergency abortion.

After President Joe Biden issued a memorandum explicitly stating that EMTALA preempted Idaho’s abortion ban, a lower court halted the law from going into effect. The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group behind challenges regarding Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the abortion pill mifepristone, filed for emergency relief with the Supreme Court—which the court granted, allowing the Idaho law to go into effect, while agreeing to hear the case in Idaho v. United States.

While this is not necessarily the final copy of the opinion, if the court does follow through with its ruling, emergency abortions may continue in Idaho while the issue is duked out in a lower court.

Patricia McCabe, the court’s public information officer, addressed the accidental posting, and said that the court has yet to release its final ruling. “The Court’s Publications Unit inadvertently and briefly uploaded a document to the Court’s website,” she said. “The Court’s opinion in Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States will be issued in due course.”

If final, the decision will provide essential relief for pregnant people who may seek emergency care in Idaho— but it will also let the court get away with putting off making actual decisions to protect abortion access, similar to its decision on mifepristone.

In her opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that doing away with the case “is not a victory for pregnant patients in Idaho.”

“While this court dawdles and the country waits, pregnant people experiencing emergency medical conditions remain in a precarious position, as their doctors are kept in the dark about what the law requires,” she wrote.

This story has been updated.

The Supreme Court issued a surprising decision on Wednesday, finding that complaints that the Biden administration had forced censorship on conservative social media users were unfounded. In its 6–3 decision, the Supreme Court laid a death blow in particular to the conspiracy theory that the FBI forced social media companies to suppress stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

One of the main conspiracy theories that has kept conservatives in a chokehold for the past three years is that the FBI forced social media companies to remove content discussing Hunter Biden’s laptop to protect the Bidens. In reality, social media companies cracked down on the dissemination of photos purporting to have come from Biden’s laptop in accordance with their boilerplate hacked-materials policies, which enforce against the dissemination of content obtained through illegal means, such as revenge porn. That enforcement resulted in a removal of posts discussing Biden’s laptop that included those photos, but discussions of the laptop on their own weren’t restricted.

One plaintiff in the Supreme Court case was Jim Hoft, founder of the failing far-right conspiracy website Gateway Pundit. Hoft elevated the FBI interference conspiracy and claimed moderation efforts taken by Twitter caused him harm. Hoft embedded Twitter posts made by his brother, Joe Hoft, sharing photos claiming to be from Biden’s laptop. Twitter suspended Joe Hoft’s account, which resulted in the posts embedded on Gateway Pundit turning up as dead links. Hoft was likely trying to pull a sneaky workaround to avoid licensing and verifying the images himself, instead sourcing to content published on Twitter, and the effort failed. Hoft claimed the FBI interfered to remove the photos and that doing so caused him harm.

The Supreme Court meticulously ripped these claims to shreds, hilariously sourcing Hoft’s own claims that the crackdown came from Twitter’s existing hacked materials policy.

“Hoft points to the FBI’s role in the platforms’ adoption of hacked-material policies. And he claims that Twitter, in December 2020, censored content about the Hunter Biden laptop story under such a policy,” the Supreme Court opinion reads. “Hoft’s own declaration reveals that Twitter acted according to its ‘rules against posting or sharing privately produced/distributed intimate media of someone without their express consent.’”

Further twisting the knife in the FBI conspiracy, the decision notes, “Hoft provides no evidence that Twitter adopted a policy against posting private, intimate content in response to the FBI’s warnings about hack-and-leak operations.”

Twitter nuked posts from The New York Post and other conservative accounts that circulated Hunter Biden’s hacked photos. The conservative blowback was intense, yet the Federal Election Commission ruled that Twitter acted lawfully in restricting the circulation of Hunter Biden’s hacked photos. Soon after, Twitter decided to change its policy to allow for the circulation of hacked materials, so long as the poster isn’t the hacker or someone working “in concert” with the hacker.