On the menu today: Teamsters Union members prefer Donald Trump to Kamala Harris by almost a two-to-one margin, but the Teamsters chose not to endorse either major-party presidential candidate; with under 50 days until Election Day, Donald Trump chooses to spend a day holding a rally on Long Island. That’s a favor to the House GOP, but not much help to his own campaign. Meanwhile, Lindsey Graham and the Trump campaign want the Nebraska state government to pass a last-minute change to make the state winner-take-all in its electoral votes, which would give Trump five electoral votes in that state instead of four. And finally, you won’t believe how many big cities never got their data into the FBI’s official crime statistics. Read on.
The Unions Just Keep Causing Problems
From the write-up in the Washington Post, the Teamsters’ decision not to endorse a presidential candidate sounds like a defeat for the Kamala Harris campaign:
For the first time in nearly three decades, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters won’t endorse a candidate in the presidential race — a blow to the Democratic Party, which has reliably received the union’s approval for years.
The Teamsters confirmed the decision not to endorse Wednesday, as the union’s executive board met in Washington and voted on the endorsement.
The non-endorsement comes two days after union leaders and members met privately with Vice President Kamala Harris and she laid out her case for an endorsement, underscoring the current administration’s many achievements for unions.
“Unfortunately, neither major candidate was able to make serious commitments to our union to ensure the interests of working people are always put before Big Business,” said Teamsters president Sean O’Brien in a statement. The union had “sought commitments from both Trump and Harris” specifically about their union campaigns, core industries and right to strike, but “were unable to secure those pledges,” he added.
And hey, if you’re Trump, a non-endorsement is better than a Harris endorsement. But judging from the polling of its members that the Teamster Union released Wednesday, Trump was indisputably the preferred choice of the Teamsters rank-and-file. Members surveyed electronically preferred Trump to Harris, 59.6 percent to 34 percent, and members surveyed by phone preferred Trump, 58 percent to 31 percent.
Seriously, the Teamsters must rank among the most pro-Trump demographics in America.
Keep in mind, the Trump campaign already gave the union an unprecedented gift: Teamsters president Sean O’Brien gave the closing address on the first night of the Republican National Convention, serving up a 17-minute speech that spent a lot of time bragging about how effective the Teamsters are, denounced corporations for “economic terrorism,” and praised Missouri senator Josh Hawley for changing his position to oppose national “right to work” legislation. (Dominic Pino reminds us what the Teamsters Union actually is.)
My Three Martini Lunch podcast co-host Greg Corombos and I spent the first segment on Tuesday discussing the rumors that the Teamsters were going to betray Trump and endorse Harris. Trump dodged the worst-case scenario, but . . . based on that poll, he earned the Teamsters endorsement, and the leadership of the union wouldn’t give it to him. A non-endorsement is a tie that really should have been a Trump win.
Donald Trump’s New York State of Mind
Yesterday was 47 days to Election Day, and Donald Trump held a rally at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y., on Long Island.
Now, there are three competitive House races on Long Island. If you’re GOP representative Anthony D’Esposito of the fourth congressional district, GOP representative Nick LaLota of the first congressional district, or GOP congressional challenger Mike LiPetri of the third congressional district, Trump did you one of the biggest favors a presidential campaign can do.
But that’s about all that’s competitive in that neck of the woods. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is cruising to reelection; despite the occasional contention that she’s “vulnerable,” an August poll showed her at 63 percent. The governor’s race isn’t until 2026, and Democrats have a roughly two-to-one advantage in the New York state senate and state assembly, which are also on the ballot this year.
Trump is repeating a familiar — some would say tired — refrain that despite history, polling numbers, and the latest registration numbers that show 6.4 million registered Democrats and 2.9 million Republicans in New York, he’s about to pull a rabbit out of a hat:
“When I told some people in Washington, ‘I’m going up to New York, we’re doing a campaign speech,’ they said, ‘What do you mean, New York? You can’t ever — nobody can win. Republicans can’t win,’” Trump recounted to the cheering fans nearly filling a 16,000-seat arena. “I said, ‘I can win New York, and we can win New York.’ We’re going to win!”
Every four years, we go through this. It’s not just that Trump loses New York, it’s that he doesn’t even come close to keeping it close. In September 2016, speaking at the New York Conservative Party’s convention, Trump insisted he could win New York. That year, he won 36.5 percent of the vote to Hillary Clinton’s 59 percent. It was his sixth-worst performance in all the states, seventh if you count his 4.09 percent of the vote in the District of Columbia.
Then, in August 2020, in an interview with the New York Post, Trump insisted, “New York is in play”:
Trump brandished a map of New York’s 2016 presidential election results.
The map showed most counties in red, meaning he won them, despite losing the state by 22 points to Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Trump tossed the paper across the Resolute Desk toward reporters from The Post. Aides also had copies of the map and handed them out too.
The problem for Trump is that while he indeed wins most of the counties in the state, he wins the rural counties that have a lot fewer voters, while his Democratic opponents run up huge margins in the cities. In both 2016 and 2020, in Kings County, which includes Brooklyn, the Democratic nominee won with a margin of around a half-million votes.
In 2020, Trump won 37.7 percent of the vote to Joe Biden’s 60.8 percent. It was again his sixth-worst performance in all the states, eighth worst if you count D.C. and Maine’s first congressional district as separate from Maine statewide.
Believe it or not, the 2024 presidential election has begun. Arkansas, Delaware, Kentucky, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Wisconsin have already begun mailing out absentee ballots. In Virginia and Minnesota, in-person absentee balloting, a.k.a. early voting, begins Friday.
If the Republicans keep the House by a narrow margin with the help of some wins on Long Island, perhaps Wednesday’s rally will be remembered as worthwhile. But if that doesn’t come to pass, and Trump loses the presidential election, many will fairly ask why he was spending a weekday in the middle of September holding a rally in a state he was just about guaranteed to lose in a landslide.
Trump also announced at yesterday’s rally that he would go to Springfield, Ohio and Aurora, Co. in the coming weeks.
There may be some messaging value to holding events in those cities, but polls indicate Trump is currently winning Ohio by about nine percentage points. There’s only been one poll of Colorado since Harris became the Democratic nominee; it showed Harris ahead, 55 percent to 40 percent.
The Trump Campaign Is Worried about Omaha, and I Don’t Mean Steaks
Tuesday’s newsletter looked at the reasons Trump has the advantage as we get closer to November; Wednesday did the same for Kamala Harris. You didn’t have to look far to find commenters complaining that Tuesday’s edition was unfair or ignoring Harris’s advantages, and that Wednesday’s was one-sided and ignoring Trump’s advantages. Yes, that’s the point. Would it help if I typed slower?
For everyone who grumbled about yesterday’s edition and insisted Trump will win in a landslide, I will point out that the Trump campaign is not acting like it expects to win in a landslide. From KOLN in Lincoln, Neb.:
Sen. Lindsey Graham met with more than a dozen Republican members of Nebraska’s Unicameral at the governor’s mansion Wednesday morning, multiple state senators confirmed. Graham visited with lawmakers about the topic of winner-take-all in Nebraska.
“He wanted us to kind of understand the national picture,” State Sen. Tom Brewer, the head of the Legislature’s Government, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee. That’s the committee that would likely take up a winner-take-all bill if a special session gets called.
On Friday, Gov. Jim Pillen said that a special session to make Nebraska a winner-take-all state in the Electoral College has been in the works. But Pillen will not call a special session until he has 33 votes to ensure a bill is passed.
Most of the state senators who gathered at the governor’s mansion are ready to pass a winner-take-all bill, but a few holdouts remain, according to lawmakers. Senators estimate that 30 to 31 votes have been confirmed.
Sen. Graham spoke to the senators with the hopes of encouraging the final holdouts to change their minds.
“Depending on how the count comes up, it may very well decide who the next president United States is going be,” Brewer said. “And [Graham] just wanted us to understand the big picture, that this is a national issue, not just in Nebraska.”
If you think you’re on your way to winning in a landslide, you don’t spend time and effort trying to pass a last-minute change to ensure you win five electoral votes instead of four in Nebraska.
ADDENDUM: Over in my column in the Washington Post, a deeper dive into why the FBI crime statistics in recent years aren’t a particularly reliable measuring stick of whether violent crime is up or down:
As the Marshall Project explains, in 2021, “in an effort to fully modernize the system, the FBI stopped taking data from the old summary system and only accepted data through the new system. Thousands of police agencies fell through the cracks because they didn’t catch up with the changes on time.” That year, Miami-Dade, New York City and Los Angeles did not submit their data. Philadelphia reported nine months’ worth of data; Chicago reported seven months, and Phoenix reported only one month. For 2021, the FBI noted, “crime estimates will fill in the gaps where data is not available.”
In 2022, Miami-Dade, Philadelphia and Chicago got the data in, but Phoenix didn’t, and neither did New York or Los Angeles. Crime statistics that don’t include information from the two largest U.S. cities would seem to guarantee an incomplete understanding about the state of crime in America.
The stumbling transition to the new FBI reporting system meant big variations in the number of law enforcement agencies that participate year by year. In 2020, 16,572 of 18,641 participated (88 percent). The following year, when the new system was introduced, saw a big drop in participation: just 13,344 of 18,939 (70 percent). The next year, 2022, brought a rebound, with 16,100 of 18,930 participating (85 percent).
But even for 2020, the FBI was missing crime reports from about 2,000 jurisdictions. The most recent complete year in the FBI Crime Data Explorer is 2022, but the numbers in the quarter that Garland cited included data from 13,719 of 19,268 law enforcement agencies in the country — 71 percent.
It is increasingly clear that many people participating in our public debates don’t care about whether what they’re saying is true; they just want to assert that their guy is doing a terrific job.