Politics

By Jason Lange and James Oliphant

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The steady U.S. economy and voter anger over threats to abortion rights are buoying Democratic President Joe Biden, but voters are receptive to a host of culture-war issues his Republican rivals are campaigning on, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows.

The Republicans fighting for their party’s nomination to take on Biden in 2024, led by former President Donald Trump and also including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, have emphasized issues such as immigration, public school teaching on gender and sexuality and transgender athletes in youth sports.

Voters appear to be persuadable on some of those issues, the poll showed, while they are finding fault with Republicans for their efforts to restrict abortion.

Biden, 80, is seeking a second term in office, and he has signaled that he plans to run largely on his economic record – particularly low unemployment and public investment in job creation, which he terms “Bidenomics.”

A significant share of voters, 36%, said they expect their personal economic situation to improve next year when asked: “Looking ahead a year from now, do you expect your personal financial situation to be much stronger, somewhat stronger, about the same, somewhat weaker, or much weaker than it is now?” That compared with a total of 20% who expect it to be weaker. Another 38% said they expected it to be about the same and the rest said they did not know. Optimists outnumbered pessimists among Democrats, Republicans and independents.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll gathered responses online from 4,414 U.S. adults July 11-17 and had a credibility interval, a margin of precision, of about 2 percentage points.

“A decline in inflation and decreasing likelihood of recession could deprive Republicans of their most potent argument against Biden and the Democrats heading in to the election,” said Jacob Rubashkin, an independent analyst with Inside Elections in Washington.

Biden led Trump 37% to 35% in a hypothetical matchup, with the remaining 28% saying they were not sure whom to pick or would vote for someone else or no one at all.

Concerns over the loss of abortion rights helped Democrats in last year’s congressional elections, and the poll showed that a majority of voters opposes presidential candidates who favor harsh abortion restrictions.

Some 73% of independents said they were less likely to support a presidential candidate who backs laws banning or severely restricting abortion access, compared with 27% who said they were more likely.

A solid 72% majority of suburban white women – seen by many political strategists as an important demographic – said they were less likely to back an anti-abortion candidate. 

Abortion has already taken a prominent role in ads in battleground states by the Democratic National Committee and a bevy of political fundraising committees that support Biden.

All of the candidates running for the Republican nomination support limiting the procedure in some form, with DeSantis among those who favor the most restrictive measures.

DeSantis recently signed a bill in Florida that bans the practice at six weeks of pregnancy. Both he and Trump supported the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last year to end the nationwide right to abortion.

IMMIGRATION WORRIES

Respondents voiced unease on immigration.

Some 48% of respondents said they agreed with a statement that immigration is making life harder for native-born Americans, compared with 37% who disagreed and the rest who were not sure. The views of independents generally mirrored those of the general population.

Trump and DeSantis have run on hard-right positions on immigration and border security, while the Biden administration has tried to find a middle ground between securing the border and accommodating those with claims of asylum.

GENDER AND SEXUALITY

DeSantis has premised much of his campaign on what he terms “parents’ rights” issues – opposing the teaching of gender identity to public school students and the participation of transgender girls in school sports.

Some 50% of respondents said they disagreed with a statement that issues related to sex, sexuality and gender identity should be taught in schools, compared with 36% who agreed with the statement and 14% who were not sure. 

Republicans were solidly against teaching gender issues in public schools, with 76% opposed, 20% in favor and the rest unsure. Democratic support was not as solid, with 62% in favor, 28% against and the rest unsure. Independents were less decided, with 49% against teaching gender issues, 27% in support and 24% unsure. 

About half of respondents disagreed with a statement that transgender athletes should be able to participate in children’s sports, compared with 32% who agreed and 16% who were not sure.

Some 57% of independents were against transgender people participating in children’s sports, compared with 77% of Republicans and 31% of Democrats.

Abortion has somewhat more weight in voters’ minds, with 78% of respondents describing the issue as important. Seventy percent described teaching of gender issues in schools that way and 61% saw importance in the issue of transgender athletes in children’s sports.

Analyst Rubashkin said the relative stability of the economy may be one reason why Republicans such as DeSantis are turning more and more to cultural issues to try to reel in swing voters who could swing to either Democrats or Republicans.

“Those are issues where Republicans believe they poll better,” he said, but added that there is “less evidence to suggest that voters will prioritize those issues at the ballot box over the economy and abortion.”

(Reporting by Jason Lange and James Oliphant in Washington; Editing by Scott Malone and Matthew Lewis)

source

By Jason Lange

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Donald Trump is dominating the U.S. Republican presidential nomination contest with 47% support within his party, well above 19% for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll.

The seven-day poll completed on Monday showed Trump, who was president from 2017 to 2021, rising from a June Reuters/Ipsos poll when he was the pick of 43% of Republicans.

The rest of the Republican field remains well behind the two front-runners, with Vivek Ramaswamy, a former biotechnology executive, at 9% in the poll, followed by former Vice President Mike Pence who had 7% support.

Ramaswamy, who only had 3% support in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in June, has been putting considerable sums of his own money toward promoting his candidacy. On Saturday he disclosed that he had lent his campaign about $15 million.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll, which surveyed 4,414 adults nationwide online, showed a tight race in the November 2024 general election should Trump face Democratic U.S. President Joe Biden, who is seeking reelection and is not expected to face serious competition for his party’s nomination.

Biden led Trump 37% to 35% in a hypothetical matchup, with the remaining 28% saying they weren’t sure who to pick or would vote for someone else or no one at all.

Neither Biden nor Trump were widely liked by people outside their parties. Just 31% of independents had a favorable opinion of Trump and 32% thought as much about Biden.

At 80 years old, Biden is the oldest U.S. president ever to sit in the White House, and 63% of Democrats in the poll agreed with a statement that he was too old to work in government. Thirty-seven percent disagreed.

Still, Biden leads the Democratic contest by even more than Trump leads the Republican field, with 63% of Democrats’ support compared with 15% for anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The poll’s results had a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of about 2 percentage points in either direction.

(Reporting by Jason Lange; Editing by Scott Malone and Jonathan Oatis)

source

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel on Tuesday announced felony charges against 16 Michigan residents for their role in an alleged false electors scheme following the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

The 16 Republicans in the state are accused of submitting a phony slate of electors in hopes of flipping the state from Democratic President Joe Biden to Republican Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

“The false electors’ actions undermined the public’s faith in the integrity of our elections and, we believe, also plainly violated the laws by which we administer our elections in Michigan,” Nessel said in a statement.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Chris Reese)

source

By Andrew Goudsward

(Reuters) – Donald Trump’s lawyers are due in court in Florida on Tuesday for a hearing in which a federal judge will begin to consider how to hold a trial of the former U.S. president on charges of mishandling classified documents without publicly exposing top secret information.

Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination to face Democratic President Joe Biden in the 2024 election, was charged last month with unlawfully retaining national defense documents after he left office in 2021 and conspiring to obstruct government efforts to retrieve them.

He has pleaded not guilty to the charges brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith, who was appointed by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland last year.

Tuesday’s hearing in federal court in the city of Fort Pierce, scheduled for 2 p.m. EST (1800 GMT), will be overseen by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by Trump during his presidency and is expected to preside over the remainder of the case.

Among the logistical issues Trump’s lawyers and prosecutors are expected to discuss are deadlines for prosecutors to turn over classified documents that may be used as evidence and the timing for when Trump’s lawyers must notify the government whether he intends to use classified documents to defend himself against the charges.

A 1980 U.S. law governs how classified material is handled in criminal cases, giving judges the authority to evaluate sensitive information before it is publicly revealed in court.

Trump has claimed that a U.S. law regarding the preservation of presidential records allowed him to keep even sensitive government documents after he left office following his 2020 election loss to Biden.

He also has claimed that as president he declassified the documents before taking them. That assertion is undercut by a taped conversation cited in the indictment, which said Trump showed a secret document to several people and said that he “could have declassified it” as president but did not.

The charges against Trump include violations of the Espionage Act, which criminalizes unauthorized possession of defense information. Trump, 77, would face a sentence of up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

Cannon initially scheduled the trial to start on Aug. 14 – a date that both the defense and prosecution opposed because they said they needed more time to prepare.

Smith’s team has recommended a Dec. 11 start date. The defense has sought an indefinite delay, citing among other factors the rigors of Trump’s campaign schedule.

After an FBI raid last year at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach that turned up classified documents central to the criminal case, Cannon ruled in the former president’s favor in a challenge he brought to the Justice Department’s investigation brought months before criminal charges were filed. Cannon’s ruling was later overturned on appeal.

(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Will Dunham, David Bario and Noeleen Walder)

source

By Nandita Bose

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Movie mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, who is advising Joe Biden on his re-election campaign, says he sees opportunity in what many consider to be the U.S. President’s biggest vulnerability in the 2024 presidential race – his age.

Biden, a Democrat who turned 80 in November, is already the oldest Oval Office occupant, and will be 86 before a second term ends.

Katzenberg, in a telephone interview, described Biden as “energetic” and “effective,” and suggested Republican attacks on his age will backfire.

“President Biden’s age is, in fact, his superpower,” Katzenberg said.

“I think people have tried to paint it as a liability or a negative and I think they are going to fail at that because his age is his knowledge and experience and as he has said, it is his wisdom.”

Polls show that an overwhelming number of Americans, some 86%, believe the cutoff for serving as president should be age 75 or younger, and while most Democrats consider Biden “mentally sharp,” nearly half of Democrats wonder if he’s up for the challenge of running in 2024.

Republican presidential candidates such as Nikki Haley have publicly questioned if Biden will make it to the end of his second-term while Republican lawmakers such as Ted Cruz have highlighted Biden’s age and questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’s ability to take over as commander-in-chief.

Biden’s top Republican challenger, former President Donald Trump, is 77. About one-fourth of Republicans have similar concerns about Trump.

Some Democrats expect such attacks on Biden’s age and family will increase in 2024.

“The age thing is going to become more important to them because other arguments [against Biden] have evaporated in recent months,” including inflation, high gas prices and record border crossings, predicts Simon Rosenberg, a veteran Democratic political strategist.

Former Disney executive Katzenberg’s opinion is likely to be reflected in Biden’s campaign in the months to come. A longtime Democrat donor and fundraiser, he’s the only non-politician named campaign co-chair when Biden announced his re-election plans in April.

Katzenberg has known Biden since the 1980s, and the two became close as Katzenberg supported former President Barack Obama. After Trump’s election, Katzenberg encouraged Biden to run, Biden aides have said, and then to seek a second term.

‘SUMMER CYCLE’

Katzenberg, who is tasked with raising money and help with messaging strategies,said he has not seen any “pockets of resistance” from corporate donors whose industries may have been hurt by White House policies, which include pushing higher corporate taxes and cracking down on junk fees and other profit-plumping activities.

The campaign, which released its fundraising haul for the first quarter last week, has held more than nearly 40 fundraising events for the wealthy compared to a handful of political rallies for the public. Ten donors, including Katzenberg and Linkedin co-founder Reid Hoffman gave $500,000 or more to the Biden Victory Fund. Another 82 donors contributed $100,000 or more since Biden announced.

Katzenberg predicts fundraising for the president’s re-election campaign will slow in coming months. “When you go into the summer cycle things quiet down,” Katzenberg said. “People are away on vacation and it’s not as rich an environment to be raising” funds.”

Some Democratic strategists have also questioned the campaign’s slow start. Biden’s campaign had four members on the payroll and spent a total of $1.1 million in the first three months since launch.

Katzenberg said it is part of a strategy to survive a grueling 16-month campaign without exhausting its resources. “It’s July 2023. Building out the leadership of that operation today, so they can sit around and twiddle their thumbs for the next six months would be nuts,” he said.

(Reporting by Nandita Bose in Washington, Additional reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt. Editing by Heather Timmons and Michael Perry)

source

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Joe Biden will literally keep his re-election campaign headquarters close to home – Wilmington, Delaware, that is.

Biden’s 2024 campaign team announced on Tuesday that the campaign apparatus will be headquartered in Wilmington, the Delaware city where the president has lived for decades.

“My family’s values, my eternal optimism and my unwavering belief in the American middle class as our nation’s backbone comes from my home – from Delaware,” Biden said in a statement. “That’s why there is no better place for our re-election campaign to have its headquarters.”

Biden, as a U.S. senator representing Delaware, frequently took the Amtrak train back home for weekends, earning the nickname “Amtrak Joe.”

He has spent many weekends there as president, although he has suspended trips there for the time being while unspecified work is done on his house there.

Biden’s 2020 campaign was based in nearby Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

(Reporting by Steve Holland; Editing by Alexandra Hudson)

source

By Kanishka Singh

(Reuters) – Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel on Tuesday announced felony charges against 16 Michigan residents for their roles in an alleged false electors scheme intended to help then-President Donald Trump overturn his loss in the 2020 U.S. election.

The 16 Republicans in the state were accused of submitting a phony slate of electors in hopes of flipping the winner of Michigan in the presidential election from Democrat Joe Biden to Trump.

“The false electors’ actions undermined the public’s faith in the integrity of our elections and, we believe, also plainly violated the laws by which we administer our elections in Michigan,” Nessel, a Democrat, said in a statement.

The charges include forgery, conspiracy to commit forgery and conspiracy to commit election forgery, each carrying a possible penalty of five to 14 years in prison.

The defendants were alleged to have met covertly in the basement of the Michigan Republican Party headquarters in December 2020, and signed their names to multiple certificates stating they were the “duly elected and qualified electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America for the State of Michigan,” according to Nessel.

“These false documents were then transmitted to the United States Senate and National Archives in a coordinated effort to award the state’s electoral votes to the candidate of their choosing, in place of the candidates actually elected by the people of Michigan,” Nessel said.

Multiple audits showed that Biden had received more than 2.8 million votes in Michigan, about 154,000 more votes than Trump, Nessel added.

“That the effort failed and democracy prevailed does not erase the crimes of those who enacted the false electors plot,” Nessel said.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Chris Reese and Will Dunham)

source

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden’s chief spokesperson sharply criticized Democratic presidential opponent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for alleging in a recently released video that COVID-19 was targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people and that Jewish and Chinese people are most immune.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre joined a chorus of Democratic outrage at the comments from the 69-year-old son of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, a member of the Kennedy political dynasty who was assassinated while running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2024, putting him directly in competition with Biden, who is seeking a second four-year term. Kennedy is a long shot for the nomination, with a poll average from election data website FiveThirtyEight showing that about 15% of Democrats support him.

“The assertion that COVID was genetically engineered to spare Jewish and Chinese people is deeply offensive, and incredibly dangerous. Every aspect of these comments reflect some of the most abhorrent antisemitic conspiracy theories throughout history and contributes to today’s dangerous rise of antisemitism,” Jean-Pierre said.

The New York Post on Saturday published a video that appeared to show Kennedy speaking at a dinner in Manhattan. In the video, the candidate says “COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately.”

“COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” he says in the video, adding that it was not known whether the virus was deliberately targeted or not.

Kennedy said on Sunday on Twitter than the “insinuation by @nypost and others that, as as result of my quoting a peer-reviewed paper on bio-weapons, I am somehow antisemitic, is a disgusting fabrication.”

(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt and Steve Holland; Editing by Heather Timmons and Deepa Babington)

source

By Joseph Ax

(Reuters) – Georgia’s top court on Monday rejected former President Donald Trump’s latest effort to block an investigation into whether he and his allies illegally sought to interfere with the state’s 2020 election, weeks before prosecutors are expected to seek formal charges.

Court records showed the Georgia Supreme Court unanimously dismissed the petition, filed last week by Trump’s lawyers, that had sought to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and to quash a special grand jury report that recommended indictments against certain individuals.

The report has remained largely under seal while Willis finalizes her investigation. The special panel, which did not have the authority to issue its own indictments, produced the report after interviewing about 75 witnesses over the course of nine months, including some of the state’s top officials.

Willis’ probe began soon after a recorded January 2021 phone call in which Trump urged Georgia’s top election official to “find” enough votes to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s statewide victory, falsely claiming that widespread fraud had tainted the results.

Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has denied any wrongdoing and accused Willis, an elected Democrat, of targeting him for political reasons.

Willis has indicated to local officials that she will seek indictments in the case from a regular grand jury in August.

Trump’s lawyers previously filed a separate petition asking the state judge who oversaw the grand jury to quash its report and disqualify Willis from the case. The judge has not yet ruled on that request.

Trump became the first former U.S. president to face criminal prosecution in March, when New York prosecutors charged him with falsifying business records to hide hush money payments to a porn star who said she had an affair with him. Trump has denied her account.

He was separately charged in federal court in June with unlawfully retaining classified documents after leaving office and obstructing efforts to retrieve them.

He has pleaded not guilty in both cases.

(Reporting by Joseph Ax)

source

By Nathan Layne

(Reuters) – Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, a Republican running for U.S. president, said on Monday that Donald Trump has “done great harm” to trust in federal law enforcement through “self-serving” attempts to undermine investigations of his conduct.

Hutchinson, one of the few Republicans seeking the 2024 nomination who has criticized the former president, spoke at the National Press Club in Washington to outline his plans to reform the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies.

“Donald Trump has done great harm to our rule of law in this country and to federal law enforcement. He has undermined their credibility in the eyes of the public. He has continued his victimization,” Hutchinson said.

Hutchinson’s comments come as some Republicans in Congress have stepped up their critiques of the Justice Department, aiming to undercut U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith’s probes in to Trump’s retention of classified documents and his role leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Trump has long alleged without evidence that the probes in to his actions are politically motivated.

Hutchinson said he regarded some of Trump’s criticisms of the federal investigation in to his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia, which concluded in 2019, as justified. But he blasted the former president’s ongoing attacks on the justice system as unwarranted and dangerous.

“They have become self-serving and they have undermined exactly what we are trying to accomplish in this country, which is a rule of law that works and criminal justice system that is equal in its treatment of all individuals,” Hutchinson said.

Hutchinson, who has been polling in the low single digits, far behind the front-runner Trump, laid out a series of reform ideas he believes would shore up confidence in the FBI and other agencies. They include requiring that FBI agents record their interviews to improve transparency and he also said he would reaffirm a policy ensuring the president does not interfere with federal investigations.

Hutchinson said he does not support “defunding” the FBI, as has been proposed by some of Trump’s allies in Congress and several of his Republican rivals for the nomination. Last week Republicans in the House of Representatives hammered FBI Director Christopher Wray about what they call the “weaponization” of federal law enforcement against Trump. Wray denied any partisan bias in how investigations are conducted.

“I don’t believe in chaos. I believe in doing things the right way,” Hutchinson said. “This is a plan with balance that has very dramatic reform, but doesn’t go crazy that undermines our public safety, undermines our counterterrorism efforts.”

(reporting by Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut; Editing by Scott Malone and Matthew Lewis)

source