6 States
Your vote probably doesn’t matter: “The titanic Biden-Trump election likely will be decided by roughly 6% of voters in just six states,” reports Axios. The truly contested states in 2024 will probably be Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—same as the 2020 battlegrounds—with a possibly contested seventh state, North Carolina. And, within those six states, both campaigns are calculating that it’s really only about 6 percent of voters who are truly fence-sitters.
New April polling “found [President Joe] Biden is ahead in just one of the seven states most likely to determine the outcome of his matchup with [former President] Donald Trump, leading Michigan by 2 percentage points,” reports Bloomberg. “Biden trails the presumptive GOP nominee slightly in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and his deficit in Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina is larger.” Political analysts believe that some of this is due to dismal views of the economy, which voters are more likely to pin on Biden. (For better or worse, people frequently blame economic woes on the sitting president. In Biden’s case, given the massive COVID-era spending—which Trump also had a hand in—which massively spiked inflation, it arguably makes a bit more sense.)
“Education now transcends race as the best predictor of voting,” Doug Sosnik, a senior adviser to former President Bill Clinton, told Axios. “People are increasingly choosing to live around others who share their values and beliefs, which has led to a homogenization of how communities vote.”
It’s going to be a very tight race, decided by a very small handful of voters.
Stormy takes the stand: This week, porn star Stormy Daniels, whose tryst with Trump (and pocketing of hush money payments) is central to the criminal trial against Trump, took the stand.
“The charges against Mr. Trump stem from her story of sex with him during that 2006 celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, a story she was shopping a decade later, in the closing days of the presidential campaign,” reports The New York Times. “Mr. Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 in hush money before Election Day, and the former president is accused of falsifying business records to cover up reimbursements for Mr. Cohen.”
As for the sex itself, Daniels’ testimony seemed to be tinged with trauma rhetoric, claiming that even though she never said no outright, there was a “power imbalance” and implied that it was something less than consensual. “I was staring up at the ceiling, wondering how I got there,” she said on the stand.
As for the hush money, Daniels claimed that “my motivation wasn’t money,” which is…a little confusing, given that she accepted a large sum in 2016. (The judge, o
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