2024 U.S. elections campaign 20 June-

July 15-18, 2024
The Republican National Convention
Milwaukee, WI
Watch live

The Democratic National Convention
August 19-22, 2024
Chicago

Heather Cox Richardson June 23, 2024
On Thursday, Moody’s Analytics, which evaluates risk, performance, and financial modeling, compared the economic promises of President Joe Biden and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. Authors Mark Zandi, Brendan LaCerda, and Justin Begley concluded that while a second Biden presidency would see cooling inflation and continued economic growth of 2.1%, a Trump presidency would be an economic disaster.
Trump has promised to slash taxes on the wealthy, increase tariffs across the board, and deport at least 11 million immigrant workers. According to the analysts, these policies would trigger a recession by mid-2025. The economy would slow to an average growth of 1.3%. At the same time, tariffs and fewer immigrant workers would increase the costs of consumer goods. That inflation—reaching 3.6%—would result in 3.2 million fewer jobs and a higher unemployment rate.

28-29 June

Trump’s Gish Gallop and Brandolini’s law
(Daily Kos) It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has. It is similar to what Trump did to Biden during a debate in 2020. In that case, though, the lack of muting on the mics left Biden simply saying: “Will you shut up, man?” a comment that resonated with the audience. Giving Biden the enforced space to answer by killing the mic of the person not speaking tonight actually made the technique more effective.
During a Gish gallop, a debater confronts an opponent with a rapid series of specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies in a short space of time, which makes it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of a formal debate.[2] Each point raised by the Gish galloper takes considerably more time to refute or fact-check than it did to state in the first place, which is known online as Brandolini’s law.[3] The technique wastes an opponent’s time and may cast doubt on the opponent’s debating ability for an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved or if the audience has limited knowledge of the topics.
See also How to Beat Trump in a Debate
(The Atlantic) Donald Trump is probably unaware that he’s an avid practitioner of a debating method known among philosophers and rhetoricians as the Gish Gallop. Its aim is simple: to defeat one’s opponent by burying them in a torrent of incorrect, irrelevant, or idiotic arguments. Trump owes much of his political success to this tactic—and to the fact that so few people know how to beat it.

Ian Bremmer on debate: A big loss for Biden
…we have just seen the first, maybe the last presidential debate of 2024. I was skeptical about the strategy from day one of Biden getting on stage with Trump. Biden has never been a great campaigner, doesn’t have a lot of discipline, and isn’t enormously entertaining. But they decided they needed to do it. And the rules benefited a normal politician. The microphones shut off, except for the person who was allowed to speak, and there was no live audience, and it was CNN. So the questions are going to be, at the very least, balance between the two. And, if there’s going to be a slant, it’ll be towards Biden and not towards Trump. And despite all of that, Biden got absolutely pasted.
And it’s not about his speaking points per se; there were some points that he made, if you just look at the transcript, that clearly was in his favor, I would say, on balance, on the economy, his command of the facts was stronger than that of Trump. I saw that, in terms of talk of inflation and jobs. I saw that in terms of China and the trade deficit with China, that’s actually narrowed as opposed to increased. Certainly, on abortion, I think that Biden would have landed more punches if you were only looking at the transcript. But no one is looking at the transcript. They’re looking at the performance. And the performance, Biden was abysmal.
Around the world, the debate renews questions about American stability.
In Europe and Asia, the back-and-forth between the blustering Mr. Trump and the faltering Mr. Biden set analysts fretting — and not just about who might win the election in November.
“That whole thing was an unmitigated disaster,” Simon Canning, a communications manager in Australia, wrote on social media. “A total shambles, from both the candidates and the moderators. America is in very, very deep trouble.”
Sergey Radchenko, a historian at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, posted, “This election is doing more to discredit American democracy than Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping could ever hope to.”

22-27 June
What to Watch at the First Trump-Biden Debate
Both candidates have been eager for this rematch, with President Biden aiming to focus on their starkly different visions for America, and Donald Trump keen to attack his rival’s record.
How Trump’s criminal conviction will shape the first debate
When Joe Biden and Donald Trump meet on Thursday night in Atlanta for their first 2024 debate, they will be joined by a very large elephant in the debate hall: Trump’s newly minted status as a felon.
The issue is almost certain to come up during the 90-minute debate, which will be moderated by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. The event will provide the candidates with their most prominent platform to date to address Trump’s criminal conviction in Manhattan last month — a legitimately new electoral issue in the annals of American presidential politics. It will be the first time that either Trump or Biden will confront the prospect of sustained questioning on the subject, as well as the first time that the two men will have the opportunity to speak directly to one another about it.
Make no mistake about it: There appear to be real political stakes here — particularly among the much-coveted independent and swing voters who may effectively decide the election — so the candidates’ approach to the subject will be worth watching closely. According to polling data recently conducted by Ipsos for POLITICO Magazine, for instance, 21 percent of independents said that Trump’s conviction made them less likely to support him and that it would be an important factor in their vote.
Both candidates, however, have struggled to land on a coherent and accurate message about the conviction for voters, albeit in very different ways and for very different reasons.
Ian Bremmer: US presidential debate -More risk for Biden than Trump
I think there’s a lot more downside for Biden precisely because his age is perceived to be so much more of a problem. The State of the Union, he did very well. But this is a live-fire exercise. It’s not a set piece. And so in that regard, there’s more ways you can go badly. Having said that, if he’s able to stand his ground, and if Trump seems like he’s slobbing more, this is a lot more about how they appear than what they actually say.
Let’s see if a debate can change the trajectory of voter sentiment
Biden and Trump each look to bring down the other in the biggest event so far in a 2024 election that has remained tight from the start.
Analysis by Dan Balz, Chief correspondent
(WaPo) If there is to be a genuine turning point in the presidential campaign, it could come Thursday night in Atlanta, when President Biden and former president Donald Trump meet for the earliest and what could be one of the most consequential political debates in history.
For the better part of a year, the contest between Biden and Trump has been a flat line in the polls, with Trump holding the narrowest of advantages in national polls and a slightly larger advantage in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. This has made Democrats increasingly nervous. Why? Because Biden never trailed Trump in Washington Post-ABC News national polls in 2020.
Recently, there has been some movement in Biden’s direction. It has come since Trump was convicted of 34 felony charges in the New York trial involving hush money payments to an adult-film actress and the falsification of business records. The movement is incremental at best, leaving the two candidates still in a statistical dead heat nationally. The battleground states remain competitive, though Trump has had a narrow advantage in more of them than Biden this year.

Trump campaign seeks to head off convention revolt from its right flank
Aides scrambled to foil a plot to throw the nominating process into chaos as suspicions abound about potentially disloyal delegates.
(WaPo) Arizona delegates to the Republican National Convention gathered this month in a Phoenix suburb, showing up to get to know each other and learn about their duties.
Part of the presentation included a secret plan to throw the party’s nomination of Donald Trump for president into chaos.
The instructions did not come from “Never Trumpers” hoping to stop the party from nominating a felon when delegates gather in Milwaukee next month. They instead came from avowed “America First” believers hatching a challenge from the far right — a plot to release the delegates from their pledge to support Trump….

21 June
Biden settles on a message against Trump: He’s even worse than before
The president and his allies argue that Trump “snapped” and has become more self-obsessed, more dangerous and more extreme since his 2020 loss.

20 June
Biden and Trump will face each other at next week’s debate. They are preparing much differently
(PBS) The CNN debate will be full of firsts, with the potential to reshape the presidential race. Never before in the modern era have two presumptive nominees met on the debate stage so early in the general election season. Never before have two White House contenders faced off at such advanced ages, with widespread questions about their readiness.
President Joe Biden begins an intense period of private preparations Friday at Camp David for what may be the most consequential presidential debate in decades.
Biden heads to Camp David to prepare for 1st presidential debate with Trump
He aims to hold Trump accountable for comments on the trail, officials said.
(ABC news) Moderated by CNN anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, the debate will run for approximately 90 minutes with two commercial breaks. It is the first of two scheduled between the candidates — the second of which will be hosted by ABC News on Sept. 10.
In what will be the first real showdown between the two this election cycle, the face-off could potentially shift the narrative for both candidates and each is looking to attract undecided voters in what is expected to be a very tight race.

20 June
Three potential wild cards for a razor-close Biden-Trump election
With the 2024 race seemingly frozen and super-close, let’s consider some scenarios.
(WaPo) The Trump-Biden rematch is too close (40.8 percent to 40.3 percent in the FiveThirtyEight polling average on Wednesday) to handicap with confidence, and too frozen (Trump’s barely statistically significant lead has held for months) to deliver much horse-race drama. But if the candidates remain as neck-and-neck as they currently appear, some unexpected things could happen after the polls close in November. Three wild-card outcomes deserve closer consideration.
The first is the possibility that Trump ekes out the most votes — and loses the presidency.
Yes, it’s unlikely. …if Trump did end up coming up short in electoral votes despite a strong popular-vote performance, it would likely be because he overperformed in solidly Democratic states without actually winning them. …
Trump wins the presidency but Democrats hold the Senate.
States usually vote for the same party for senator and president. But as the Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter has pointed out, there is a surprising divergence between presidential and Senate polling this cycle. … That would make for an extraordinary second Trump term. Trump’s Cabinet picks would be at the mercy of the Democratic Party, and few if any federal judges could be confirmed.
an electoral college tie, throwing the election to the House of Representatives.
One route to a 269-269 electoral college split would be Trump winning back Pennsylvania and Michigan from Biden’s 2020 column and the map otherwise staying the same.
The House would then break the tie as the 12th Amendment requires. But that doesn’t mean the majority party in the House would necessarily get its way. …