Where Things Stand

My take on the current state of the 2024 presidential race; why Republicans keep endorsing Donald Trump and the former president has a new theory about presidential power

I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to become a paid subscriber, you can sign up here.

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Besides being a long-time friend of the newsletter, I think Elliot Morris is one of the smartest, most grounded election analysts out there — and it’s why I’m quoting him for the second straight post.

This is basically where I am right now in my assessment of the 2024 election. I wrote a few months ago that my feeling about this election is that it will likely be a near repeat of 2020, with Biden winning by around 4-5 points with approximately 300 electoral votes. I wouldn’t be surprised if Biden and Trump win the same states they won 4 years ago. The states most likely to flip are probably North Carolina and Georgia.

To be sure, this is NOT a prediction. I could imagine a scenario in which Trump is convicted, the bottom falls out, and he loses by an even larger margin. I can also imagine a scenario in which Biden never recovers his support from within the Democratic Party, and Trump ekes out a narrow win. These outcomes are unlikely, but I’m not ruling them out.

I feel more confident about the second part of Elliott’s tweet — that pretty much everything that’s happened in the past six months, from the situation in Gaza to the GOP nomination fight, will not influence the outcome at all. Indeed, the most important thing that happened in 2023 was Trump’s multiple indictments — mainly because of how they will play out in 2024. I’m also very confident that none of the current public opinion polling tells us much about what will happen in 2024. We’re 9 1/2 months away from Election Day. Both candidates will run campaigns that will seek to mobilize their supporters. How successful they are at doing that will determine who wins … not gaffes or campaign events uttered months before the election.

To the latter point, I don’t want to dismiss the role of persuasion completely, but ultimately, this election will be about mobilization. As we speak, around 90 percent of Americans already know who they will vote for in 2024. That number might have been around 70-80 percent three decades ago. Voters usually vote the way they have in the past, and with increased partisan polarization, the number of voters set in their voting preference has only increased.

Of the 10 percent who are undecided, they are, by and large, the most uninformed members of the electorate and don’t closely follow political news. So that’s where we are at the beginning of 2024. It’s the same place we were in the fall of 2023 and likely the same place we’ll be in for the rest of the year.

Why Do Republicans Keep Endorsing Donald Trump?

Sam Puskar/AP

Earlier this week, I received two emails from the Trump campaign alerting me to campaign events in New Hampshire with Ohio Senator JD Vance and Rep. Elise Stefanik. Both have previously endorsed Trump, and this week, they were joined by Utah Senator Mike Lee and Texas Senator Ted Cruz. This follows a regular pattern that we’ve seen this cycle. Neither Nikki Haley nor Ron DeSantis have been endorsed by a single Senate Republican. Twenty-five of them have publicly thrown their support behing Trump.