Post State of the Union time has positively Good news coming after some dark days….
March was the month Biden found some mojo.
After his March 7 State of the Union address, which energized Democrats and comforted voters worried about Biden’s age and stamina, the money started pouring in. Within 48 hours, the campaign raised $10 million, and then the three-president fundraiser featuring Barack Obama and Bill Clinton joining Biden in New York raised another $25 million.
Then those universally bad polls began to budge. Biden is now moving ahead of Trump in numerous general election polls and some swing state polling as well.
And both Nates have confirmed this is officially real: Silver here and Cohn here.
An actual trend line. It is finally happening—just like Dark Brandon kept telling us it would. It may not last, but breathe it in!
At long last the Human Crime Spree was given a court date.
For all the 88 criminal charges Trump is facing, he will likely only face one trial, in the New York State case involving his hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. Sure, this is a lame case and could boomerang and help him politically. So what—it’s overdue. Trump was named an unindicted co-conspirator in this case six years ago. He has to be a defendant sometime. Maybe there will be some surprises. Maybe he will become a convicted felon. The trial is set to start next Monday.
Republicans can practically taste the Senate majority, but they are polling behind Democrats.
Yes, all it will take is a Trump victory, because West Virginia will elect a Republican senator after Joe Manchin retires, for the GOP to control the Senate next year. At this point in the cycle, there aren’t many state surveys, so many of the polls are about a month old, but it’s remarkable that all Republican candidates are currently trailing Democrats in the most competitive contests. Even Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester are hanging tough in their dark red states. This is great news.
Democrats swing an Alabama GOP state legislature seat by 25 points.
In a special election for the Alabama House of Representatives, the Democrat focused heavily on the IVF issue, abortion, and reproductive freedoms and beat the GOP candidate badly. Alabama is ground zero for this debate right now, as the state supreme court ruled frozen embryos are children and then the legislature attempted to remedy the decision with a new law trying to carve out protections for the practice. But the huge margin in this contest makes clear that these issues taken together—from the availability of mifepristone to fertility treatments to abortion—can turbocharge Democratic turnout.
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Kari Lake got busted for her lies.
After upending Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer’s life—and his family’s—with her false election claims, and being sued for defamation over it, Lake chose not to defend her statements. Because she can’t. Lake now faces the hearing and potential damages, and she continues to lie about the case.
This will hurt her campaign for the U.S. Senate—she lost her other statewide race only sixteen months ago; the voters know her, and they will learn that she had no evidence for her allegations. Rep. Ruben Gallego, her Democratic opponent, will see to that. And the race isn’t going well either. In the first week of March, Kyrsten Sinema’s retirement announcement scrambled the dynamics of a three-way contest Lake could have won.
Shiree Verdone, a longtime GOP fundraiser in Arizona, put it this way to NBC: “What I hear is, everybody has just resigned themselves that we’re going to be stuck with a Ruben Gallego—that’s what I hear from all the major players, the big-money people. . . . I haven’t heard anyone say, ‘Kari Lake is going to win.’”…