The Mooch Says Trump Will Fake Illness, Drop Out of Campaign

“I think the absence of his family members in this campaign is gonna knock him out of the race. He just doesn’t do well without them.”

— Anthony Scaramucci, who served as former President Donald Trump’s White House communications director for 10 days in 2017, claimed on CNN that his old boss may fake an illness to end his 2024 campaign.

Nearly Half of Dems Don’t Want a Biden Candidacy, but Don’t Have an Alternative

44%

A new Monmouth poll finds 44% of Democrats do not want President Biden to seek re-election, even though 74% have a favorable opinion of him. Also interesting: 51% of the Democratic electorate cannot offer a name when asked who they would like to see as the party’s nominee if Biden does not run. Among those who do have a preferred alternative, Vice President Kamala Harris (13%) is the only potential contender who registers above single digits.

DeSantis PAC Spending Challenged by Florida Democratic Party

Says Governor Dines at Miami's "Dirty French Steakhouse" Where a Porterhouse is $255

Fried Tweet
“Dirty French Steakhouse?”
The new chair of the Florida Democratic Party is fearless. Nikki Fried was the only Dem in the cabinet of Ron DeSantis because Floridians elected her as our agriculture secretary and he couldn’t do anything about it. But she opted to run in the primary leading up to the 2022 gubernatorial election and lost because our team was so afraid of DeSantis winning a second term that they made the utterly wrong calculation that former governor, former Republican, former U.S. Representative Charlie Crist was the safer bet.

I knew Fried had what it would take to beat DeSantis. Unfortunately, you can’t go full nuclear on a fellow “Democrat” in a primary so Crist won on name recognition and voter laziness. DeSantis went on to take 59.4 percent of the vote, in an election with 53.6 percent turnout, or the votes of 4.6 million people in a state with 22.2 million people. But DeSantis touts his “landslide” victory and since it makes a better story, the press goes along with it and it becomes accepted fact.

But we still have Fried and she is not sleeping on retiring Ron DeSantis.

Frum: Is Ron DeSantis Flaming Out Already?

From former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum at The Atlantic:

DeSantis will be a candidate of the Republican base, for the Republican base. Like Trump, he delights in displaying his lack of regard for everyone else. Trump, however, is driven by his psychopathologies and cannot emotionally cope with disagreement. DeSantis is a rational actor and is following what somebody has convinced him is a sound strategy. It looks like this:

1. Woo the Fox audience and win the Republican nomination.
2. ??
3. Become president.

Written out like that, you can see the missing piece. DeSantis is surely intelligent and disciplined enough to see it too. But the programming installed in him prevents him from acting on what he sees. His approach to winning the nomination will put the general election beyond his grasp. He must hope that some external catastrophe will defeat his Democratic opponent for him—a recession, maybe—because DeSantis is choosing a path that cannot get him to his goal.

House GOP to Target 37 Dem Seats in 2024

37

“The National Republican Congressional Committee is plotting a sprawling battlefield in 2024, naming 37 Democrat-held House districts to its initial list of targets,” Axios reports. “It’s an ambitious strategy in a presidential year, when House results are often closely correlated with top-of-the-ticket margins. The last three presidential elections — all close by historical standards — saw flips of six to 14 seats in the House.”

DeSantis Fundraisers — A Million or Nuthin’

$1 million

“It’s going to cost a lot to get Ron DeSantis to show up in person to collect political checks: about $1 million,” NBC News reports. “That’s the aggressive goal set to draw the Florida governor and likely 2024 presidential candidate to travel out of his way for fundraising events, according to three Republicans involved in efforts to raise cash for DeSantis during the shadow primary period.”

Trump Surges Ahead of DeSantis in National Poll

12 points

A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that after trailing for the last three months, Donald Trump has suddenly surged to a substantial lead over Gov. Ron DeSantis in a two-man matchup for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Previously, DeSantis led Trump 45% to 41% among Republican voters. Now Trump leads DeSantis 47% to 39% — a net swing of 12 percentage points in Trump’s direction since early February.