Tara Palmeri: “Once upon a time, declaring late, in the third wave, was considered a mistake, or the vanity of the uber-wealthy. Trump’s golden elevator descent, in June 2015, was considered late at the time. Mike Bloomberg was humbled after he entered the Democratic primary, in late November 2019, thinking that he could blow past Iowa and New Hampshire and focus on delegates in California and on Super Tuesday contests.”

“This cycle, however, that philosophy may be reversing itself. Conventional wisdom suggests that Trump and DeSantis may bludgeon each other significantly enough to open a new lane that won’t be filled by any of the milquetoast Haley-Pompeo-Pence also-rans, who are barely able to make a noise amid the clatter.”

“And all of this might clear the way for a late entrant dark horse. I’m told from people close to Chris Christie and Rick Scott that they could see late openings for themselves, for different reasons. Glenn Youngkin, with his deep pockets and ability to self-fund, is also being advised to make a later entry. Those advising Youngkin could see him entering the race around the first debate, which could be late July or early August, per smoke signals from the R.N.C., or he could skip the first debate altogether and jump in for the second.”

“An Arizona appeals court has rejected Republican Kari Lake’s challenge of her defeat in the Arizona governor’s race to Democrat Katie Hobbs, denying her request to throw out election results in the state’s most populous county and hold the election again,” the AP reports.

“In a ruling on Thursday, the Arizona Court of Appeals wrote Lake, who claimed problems with ballot printers at some police places on Election Day were the result of intentional misconduct, presented no evidence that voters whose ballots were unreadable by tabulators at polling places were not able to vote.”

Former Vice President Mike Pence became the latest prominent Republican to propose sunsetting Social Security and Medicare, telling Fox News that “we can replace the New Deal with a better deal.”

A new Stanford Business School study finds that election-denying Republicans in statewide races outperformed their co-partisans in the GOP primary by roughly 2%, while they underperformed in the general election by about 2.3%.

Key takeaway: “The general-election penalty is larger than the margin of victory in battleground states in recent close presidential elections, suggesting that nominating election-denying candidates in 2024 could be a damaging electoral strategy for Republicans.”

“At the same time, it is small enough to suggest that only a relatively small group of voters changed their vote in response to having an election-denying candidate on the ballot.”