Closing summary
Democrats have been rattled by new polling that shows Joe Biden is trailing Donald Trump in five of six crucial swing states, with less than six months to go until election day. It was the latest disquieting opinion survey for the president, who has struggled with low approval ratings throughout most of his term. However, Democratic pollster Geoff Garin pointed out that polling is often unreliable this far out from an election, and the data also showed that Democratic Senate candidates were ahead of their Republican challengers in key races – though Biden will probably have to win re-election for his allies to keep their majority in Congress’s upper chamber.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
Kamala Harris unexpectedly swore during an appearance at a Washington DC summit organized by the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies.
It’s infrastructure week at the White House once again.
Simon Rosenberg, a perennial Democratic optimist, is not too worried about the latest polling on Biden’s re-election chances.
The poll, which was conducted by the New York Times, Philadelphia Enquirer and Siena College, found voters were not paying particularly close attention to Trump’s business fraud trial in New York City. The prosecution’s star witness Michael Cohen took the stand today, and you can follow the latest developments here.
Republican lawmakers turned up outside Trump’s trial in New York to show their solidarity. Among the group was Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville, who lamented that the former president was not getting enough respect, and Ohio senator JD Vance, who is viewed as a potential running mate.
White House kicks off 'infrastructure week' in hopes of highlighting major legislative achievement
At her daily press briefing, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre gave no indication that the president was rattled by the poll released this morning showing him trailing Donald Trump in five crucial swing states.
Instead, she endeavored to direct the press’s attention to the $1.2tn infrastructure bill Biden oversaw passage of three years ago that will overhaul the nation’s roads, bridges, rail and broadband:
“While 'Infrastructure Week' became an empty punchline during the prior administration, President Biden is delivering an 'Infrastructure Decade' that will benefit communities for generations to come.”
— The Recount (@therecount) May 13, 2024
— Karine Jean-Pierre touts “Infrastructure Week” and lays out investments pic.twitter.com/KO1Jg1SRQH
The legislation was indeed a major accomplishment for Joe Biden and Congress’s then-Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, and one that had eluded Trump and Barack Obama. Whether voters will care is an open question. Biden’s approval ratings plunged into negative territory a few months before the bill’s November 2021 signing, and have not returned to positive territory since.
Lately, Biden has been campaigning on using the funds to undo damage done to minority communities when the nation’s interstates highways were built. Here’s more on that:
Perhaps the name Michael Cohen sounds familiar. Donald Trump’s personal lawyer was once his trusted fixer, but then publicly turned against him, and is now testifying against his one-time boss in court. Here’s more on the disaffected Trumpworld lieutenant, from the Guardian’s Edward Helmore:
Michael Cohen is Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer who was for more than a decade his Mr Fix-It, but is now the prosecution’s star witness as it builds its case that the former US president sought to conceal hush-money payments to an adult film star.
It is a classic story of two men who once worked hand-in-glove together, when Trump was a world-famous billionaire real estate mogul and reality TV star, but now face each other across a Manhattan courtroom with the world’s attention fixed on them.
Cohen served as Trump’s trusted adviser, personal attorney and self-described “attack dog with a law license”. But the relationship soured after Trump won the US presidential election in 2016 and did not offer Cohen a role in his administration.
Cohen’s testimony could place Trump at the center of a scheme to meet Stormy Daniels’s demand for $130,000 in exchange for her silence. The payment, made from an account Cohen had set up, was allegedly repaid while Trump was president but disguised as “legal services”.
The prosecution’s star witness, Michael Cohen, is on the witness stand in Donald Trump’s trial on charges of falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments ahead of the 2016 election. Here’s the Guardian’s Victoria Bekiempis with a rundown of what we have learned from his testimony so far today:
Donald Trump told his one-time fixer Michael Cohen to bury Stormy Daniels’s account of an alleged sexual liaison weeks before the election, demanding that he “just take care of it”, according to trial testimony in Manhattan court on Monday.
“This was a disaster, a fucking disaster,” Cohen, after he took the stand, recalled Trump saying. “Women will hate me.”
Cohen described Trump as angry at the possibility that Daniels, an adult film star, might come forward surfaced shortly after the Washington Post published a hot-mic recording from an Access Hollywood taping in which Trump bragged about groping women “by the pussy” without their consent.
Cohen is core to the case against Trump, because he is accused of shuttling $130,000 to Daniels days before the 2016 election – in exchange for her silence about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump 10 years earlier. Cohen told jurors that he had kept Daniels’s account under wraps in 2011, working with her then lawyer to remove a story about it that had been on a gossip site.
“He was really angry with me,” Cohen recalled of Trump’s reaction after he informed him about Daniels. Trump, he said, remarked: “I thought you had this under control? I thought you took care of this.”
A group of Republican lawmakers appeared outside the New York City courthouse where Donald Trump’s trial on charges of falsifying business records is taking place today.
The group, which included Ohio senator JD Vance, who is thought to be a potential running mate for the former president, denounced the prosecution spearheaded by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg. Here’s Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville:
“I'm disappointed in the courtroom. I'm hearing 'Mr. Trump, Mr. Trump.' He is 'former President Trump.' Give him some respect.”
— The Recount (@therecount) May 13, 2024
— Sen. Tommy Tuberville, outside Donald Trump's hush money trial in New York pic.twitter.com/25HpLhGST9
Beyond just winning the GOP’s presidential nomination, Donald Trump has moved to consolidate control over various parts of the Republican party, including its national committee. But as the Guardian’s Richard Luscombe reports, Trump has asserted himself in no other state like Florida:
In practical terms, Barron Trump’s truncated stint on the political stage as a Florida delegate to the Republican party’s national convention was little more than symbolic. His father Donald Trump’s third successive presidential campaign as the Republican nominee was all but certain anyway, and the names of those who will confirm it are essentially inconsequential.
It did affirm to many analysts, however, how the former president has maneuvered to seize almost total control of the party’s state apparatus nationwide. Nowhere is that more apparent than Florida, where the capitulation was completed by the choice of delegates for July’s convention in Milwaukee.
Even though 18-year-old Barron Trump now stepped down, ostensibly after his mother, former first lady Melania Trump, discovered a pressing prior engagement, there will be plenty of other family members as representatives. Barron’s step-siblings Don Jr, Eric and Tiffany are named, along with Kimberly Guilfoyle, Don Jr’s fiancée.
Tiffany’s husband, Michael Boulos, and an assorted slew of other notable Trump acolytes and loyalists, are also on the list.
The parallels in Trump’s subjugation of the national Republican party, and the installation of Lara Trump, Eric’s wife, as its co-chair, are hard to miss – especially as it was Florida’s hard-right governor, Ron DeSantis, who was once seen as a potential “Trump killer” in the party’s nomination race until, of course, Trump quickly vanquished him.
Polls routinely show immigration as one of the biggest issues on American voters’ minds ahead of the November elections – no matter how far from the Mexican border they may live. The Guardian’s Chris McGreal reported that the issue has become the talk of a town in a northern Wisconsin city, after its police chief appealed to the Biden administration for help with new arrivals:
Rhinelander is closer to the Arctic Circle than to Mexico, so it is no great surprise that few people in the small Wisconsin city have laid eyes on the foreign migrants Donald Trump claims are “invading” the country from across the US border 1,500 miles to the south.
But Jim Schuh, the manager of a local bakery, is nonetheless sure they are a major problem and he’s voting accordingly.
“We don’t see immigrants here but I have relatives all over the country and they see them,” he said. “That’s Biden. He’s responsible.”
Large numbers of voters in key swing states agree with Schuh, even in places where migrants are hard to find as they eye cities such as Chicago and New York struggling to cope with tens of thousands of refugees and other arrivals transported there by the governors of Texas and Florida.
Trump has been pushing fears over record levels of migration hard in Wisconsin where the past two presidential elections have been decided by a margin of less than 1% of the vote. A Marquette law school poll last month found that two-thirds of Wisconsin voters agree that “the Biden administration’s border policies have created a crisis of uncontrolled illegal migration into the country”.
The day so far
Democrats have been rattled by new polling that shows Joe Biden is trailing Donald Trump in five of six crucial swing states, with less than six months to go until election day. It was the latest disquieting poll for the president, who has struggled with low approval ratings throughout most of his term. However, Democratic pollster Geoff Garin pointed out that polling is often unreliable this far out from an election, and the data also showed that Democratic Senate candidates were ahead of their Republican challengers in key races – though Biden will probably have to win re-election for his allies to keep their majority in Congress’s upper chamber.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
Kamala Harris unexpectedly swore during an appearance at a Washington DC summit organized by the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies.
Simon Rosenberg, a perennial Democratic optimist, is not too worried about the latest polling on Biden’s re-election chances.
The poll, which was conducted by the New York Times, Philadelphia Enquirer and Siena College, found voters were not paying particularly close attention to Trump’s business fraud trial in New York City. The prosecution’s star witness Michael Cohen took the stand today, and you can follow the latest developments here.
Updated
In recent months, Dan Pfeiffer, a former adviser to Barack Obama, has become an influential voice for Democrats trying to gauge Joe Biden’s chances in his looming rematch with Donald Trump.
From his newsletter, here’s what he had to say about this morning’s authoritative, and disquieting, polling for the president:
My advice with this and all polls is to take it seriously, but not literally. No poll is flawless; even the most accurate one can’t predict the future. Instead, think of polls as snapshots of how voters feel right now. Focus on the overall trends and significant insights rather than getting caught up in the day-to-day fluctuations. Use the poll data strategically to understand what resonates with voters and how to communicate our message effectively.
As the first woman and first person of African-American and South Asian heritage to serve as vice-president, Kamala Harris is a barrier breaker.
During an appearance today at a Washington DC summit organized by the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies, Harris shared some advice for others looking to do the same, in notably strong language (well, she said fuck). See the moment here:
“Sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open; sometimes they won't. And then you need to kick that fucking door down.”
— The Recount (@therecount) May 13, 2024
— Kamala Harris reflects on her role as the nation’s first Asian American VP, and shares advice for young people pic.twitter.com/vcjGlURKHo
Simon Rosenberg has distinguished himself in the world of Democratic strategists by being a steadfast optimist throughout Joe Biden’s presidency, even as he has struggled with low approval ratings.
His views were vindicated in 2022, when he predicted that Democratic candidates would perform better than expected. Indeed, the party managed to keep control of the Senate and lose the House of Representatives only narrowly, despite predictions of a wipeout for lawmakers aligned with the president.
Rosenberg’s forecasts for the presidential election this November are similarly rosy. Here is what he had to say in response to the poll released today by the New York Times, Siena College and Philadelphia Enquirer showing Biden trailing Donald Trump in several swing states:
Some notes on NYT poll...
— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) May 13, 2024
Like other recent polls we see MI/PA/WI up for grabs and Biden performing better among LVs.
NYT LVs, Biden-Trump:
MI 47-46
PA 45-48
WI 46-47 (Biden leads among RVs)
More on why Biden's strength w/LVs matters below: 1/https://t.co/OfmeSTuyn3
As with other recent polling, findings about life satisfaction remain remarkably high.
— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) May 13, 2024
74% satisfied
22% not satisfied
Simply there is not broad discontent in America, part of why Dems keep winning elections across US. 2/ pic.twitter.com/UvpwhJUhws
The big finding in these NYT polls is Biden's weakness with young and people of color. Recent large sample polls had very different results with 18-29 year olds:
— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) May 13, 2024
Pew Biden 59-38 (+21)
Harvard/IOP Biden 56-37 (+19)
We will see. 3/https://t.co/8VqpUmWHZq
From the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly, here’s more about the major poll released today that shows Joe Biden trailing Donald Trump in several swing states, and what it says about the state of the presidential race:
Donald Trump leads Joe Biden in five crucial battleground states less than six months out from election day, new polls showed.
The surveys from the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena College put the former president up in Pennsylvania (three points), Arizona (seven), Michigan (seven), Georgia (10) and Nevada (12). Biden led by two points in Wisconsin.
All leads bar Trump’s in Georgia and Nevada were within the margin of error.
As the poll resonated throughout the political scene, the Biden campaign issued a statement from Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster.
“The only consistency in recent public polls is inconsistency,” Garin said.
“These results need to be weighed against the 30-plus polls that show Biden up and gaining – which is exactly why drawing broad conclusions about the race based on results from one poll is a mistake.”
Trump is currently on trial in New York City, on 34 criminal charges arising from hush-money payments to an adult film star who claimed an affair.
Despite his electoral struggles, Joe Biden has few open detractors in the Democratic party. The same cannot be said for Donald Trump, who has had several former top allies in the GOP turn his back on him – but that doesn’t necessarily mean they will vote for Biden in November, the Guardian’s David Smith reports:
They have broken with Donald Trump. They have gone public with their concerns about the threat that he poses to democracy and the rule of law. But vote for Joe Biden? That is a bridge too far.
A split has emerged in the “Never Trump” movement in the Republican party. There are some who denounce the former US president and contend that, in what is essentially a two-party system, there is a moral imperative to vote for his Democratic opponent in November.
Then there are the Republicans who forcefully disparage Trump but stop short of endorsing Biden, suggesting that both choices are unpalatable, forcing them to consider another option such as writing in a different name on the ballot.
How might Joe Biden turn his situation around ahead of November’s election? One way would be to remind Americans of the steps he has taken to improve their financial situation, the Guardian Steven Greenhouse reports:
To the dismay of Democrats, blue-collar voters have lined up increasingly behind Donald Trump, but political experts say Joe Biden can still turn things around with that large and pivotal group by campaigning hard on “kitchen table” economic issues.
With just six months to go until the election, recent polls show that Trump has stronger support among blue-collar Americans than he did in 2020. But several political analysts told the Guardian that Biden can bring back enough of those voters to win if he hammers home the message that he is helping Americans on pocketbook issues – for instance, by canceling student debt and cutting insulin prices.
According to Celinda Lake, a pollster for the Democratic National Committee, Biden needs to talk more often and more effectively about how his policies mean “real benefits” for working families and how he’s battling on their behalf against “villains” like greedy pharmaceutical companies.
“We need to have a dramatic framing that we’re going to take on villains to make the economy work for you and your family,” said Lake, who did polling for Biden’s 2020 campaign. “The villains can be a lot of things – corporations that don’t pay any taxes or drug companies that make record profits while they gouge you on prices.”
One more finding of the poll released this morning into Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s swing state support.
Though the survey was conducted after the beginning of Trump’s trial on charges related to falsifying business records connected to hush money payments, it did not find that voters were watching it particularly closely. Thirty-five percent of respondents thought it would end in a conviction, and only 29% were paying attention at all.
Today is set to be one of the biggest days of the New York trial thus far, with the prosecution’s star witness Michael Cohen taking the stand. We have a live blog following his testimony, and you can read it here:
Democrats lead in races that could determine Senate control, poll finds
For all the worries it sparked about Joe Biden’s chances in November, this morning’s New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena College poll contained good news for Democrats’ chances of maintaining their Senate control.
The party’s candidates were ahead in four states that will be crucial to determining whether or not Republicans are able to seize back the majority in November. The poll found, specifically:
Incumbent Tammy Baldwin was up against her challenger Eric Hovde in Wisconsin, with 49% support against his 40%.
In Nevada, Jacky Rosen led her challenger Sam Brown with 40% support against his 38%.
In the race for Arizona’s Senate seat, Ruben Gallego is ahead with 45% support against Kari Lake’s 41%.
Pennsylvania senator Bob Casey has 46% support against David McCormick’s 41%.
However, the poll did not cover Ohio and Montana, both red states where incumbent Democratic senators will have to win re-election in order for the party to keep its majority, assuming Democrats do not pick up seats anywhere else, which is considered unlikely.
And even if they triumph in all these states, Democrats are expected to lose a seat representing deep-red West Virginia, giving them a 50-50 tie with Republicans in the Senate – meaning Biden will have to win re-election in order for them to keep their majority.
Democratic pollster says too much 'inconsistency' to draw conclusions about Biden, Trump rematch
Joe Biden’s campaign reached out to share the thoughts of Democratic pollster Geoff Garin regarding this morning’s survey finding the president trailing Donald Trump in several swing states.
Garin argues that the poll clashes with other surveys that found Biden is gaining support – and that it is simply too early to tell how the election will shake out. Here are his thoughts:
The only consistency in recent public polls is inconsistency. These results need to be weighed against the 30-plus polls that show Biden up and gaining – which is exactly why drawing broad conclusions about the race based on results from one poll is a mistake. The reality is that many voters are not paying close attention to the election and have not started making up their minds — a dynamic also reflected in today’s poll. These voters will decide this election and only the Biden campaign is doing the work to win them over.
This morning’s poll comes with less than six months to go until the 5 November election, and underscores how formidable of a challenger Donald Trump will be to Joe Biden. But, as the Guardian’s David Smith reported, the political landscape is historically unstabl,e and plenty could change in the months before polls open:
“You know what I hate?” Donald Trump asked in Freeland, Michigan, on Wednesday night. “When these guys get on television, they say – pundits, you know, the great pundits that never did a thing in their whole lives – ‘You know, we have two very unpopular candidates. We have Biden or we have Trump. These are very unpopular.’”
Watched by a crowd of adoring fans in Make America Great Again (Maga) regalia, against the backdrop of a plane marked “Trump” in giant gold letters, the former US president protested a little too much: “I’m not unpopular!”
Opinion polls disagree, showing Trump with a low approval rating thanks to voter concerns over his stance on abortion, his four criminal cases and the threat he poses to constitutional democracy. Fortunately for the Republican presidential nominee, Biden has job performance troubles of his own centred on inflation, immigration and his handling of the war in Gaza.
Call it the resistible force against the movable object. Six months out from one of the most consequential elections in American history, only a fool would bet with confidence on the outcome of the first presidential rematch in nearly 70 years.
Larry Jacobs, director of the center for the study of politics and governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “It’s almost impossible to imagine Biden winning when you start stacking up the case against him. The economy appears to be in decline with high inflation. You’ve got signs of the Democratic coalition fraying, including the extraordinary protests and arrests of youth on college campuses, the backlash among Arab Americans with regards to Gaza.
“You put that together and it’s like, how could Biden win? And then you turn to Trump and it’s, how could a candidate who’s openly running on defying the will of voters win? It’s just an incomprehensible set of choices.”
Updated
Gaza war, desires for change in America weigh on Biden, poll finds
The New York Times, Siena College and the Philadelphia Inquirer poll released today found that one of the reasons why Joe Biden is lagging in support among groups who backed him in 2020 is his handling of Israel’s invasion of Gaza. The survey also found a more surprising explanation for why many voters do not want another four years of Biden: a desire for change in the United States – which they do not believe the president can bring.
Biden’s handling of the conflict in Gaza, or his foreign policy more broadly, was the reason cited by 13% of those who voted for him in 2020 but do not plan to do so again this year, the poll found. Of that group, only 17% called themselves sympathetic to Israel. That finding underscores the tensions among Democrats and their supporters over the president’s approach to the war, amid concerns of excessive civilian deaths.
The poll also found a substantial desire for change in the country, and a belief that Donald Trump was more likely to deliver it. A majority of respondents backed making changes in America, with 14% saying the system needs “to be torn down entirely”, and 55% backing “major changes”. Trump would bring more change the survey finds, although voters are split over whether that would be good or bad. But unlike Biden’s detractors over Gaza, these voters are moderate or conservative leaning, underscoring the breadth of the groups the president may have to win back to triumph in November.
Despite months of campaigning, Trump leads Biden in five key swing states, new poll shows
Good morning, US politics blog readers. The Biden campaign woke up to some disquieting news this morning, when a major poll was released showing that Donald Trump still leads Joe Biden in five of the six swing states that will be crucial to deciding the November election. Perhaps the most concerning part about the poll from the New York Times, Siena College and the Philadelphia Inquirer was that while it was news, it was not exactly new – surveys have for months found the president trailing his predecessor in states he carried four years ago. What’s notable about this one is that the presidential campaign is now well underway, with Biden campaigning across the country in recent weeks, and his allies spending millions on advertisements intended to rebuild the coalition that elected him to the White House in 2020. Yet despite all that effort, the poll does not show much of an increase in his support.
Perhaps more worrying for Biden’s prospects is what the survey says about the voting groups that are turning against him. While Black voters have been a reliable Democratic voting bloc, Trump’s support among them is 20%, the highest for a Republican presidential candidate in decades. The two men are also tied in support among Hispanic voters and 18-29-year-olds, groups that Biden won majorities of in 2020. We’ll tell you more about what else this poll has to say – and how Biden’s supporters are taking it – later on.
Here’s what else is going on:
Trump’s trial on business fraud charges continues in Manhattan, with the prosecution’s star witness Michael Cohen expected to take the stand. Follow our live coverage here.
Bob Menendez, New Jersey’s Democratic senator, goes on trial today on a raft of corruption charges connected to allegedly using his position to aid the governments of Egypt and Qatar.
Despite Biden’s worrying poll numbers, the same survey finds Democratic candidates leading in races that will decide control of the Senate.
Updated
