“Eight years after New York City’s failed attempt to host the Democratic National Convention, Mayor Eric Adams is giving it another shot,” Politico reports.
“The Democratic mayor is entering a national contest with his counterparts from Chicago, Atlanta and other cities to host the presidential nominating convention in 2024.”
“President Biden said he would maintain longstanding U.S. policy toward Taiwan, a day after triggering global confusion when he said the U.S. would respond militarily to any effort by China to take the island by force,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
Said Biden: “My policy has not changed at all.”
The New York Times notes this is the third time Biden has suggested that the U.S. would defend Taiwan if China attacked — and in each instance, his remarks prompted a staff scramble to clean it up.
“How precarious is Senate Democrats’ majority? Just ask Colorado’s Michael Bennet,” Politico reports.
“The low-key Democratic senator hails from a state that President Joe Biden won by 13 points. His in-state colleague, Sen. John Hickenlooper, won by 9 points in 2020 against a Republican incumbent. Yet Bennet has an ominous warning for any Democrat feeling optimistic about holding the majority and even expanding it in November.”
Said Bennet: “When you’re in the same party as the president, that’s gonna be a tough cycle.”
Pennsylvania Senate candidate David McCormick (R) filed suit to try to force the state to count undated absentee and mail-in ballots in the very tight primary between him and Mehmet Oz (R), the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
If the polls are correct, Donald Trump is set to suffer a humiliating endorsement loss in Georgia’s Republican gubernatorial primary today, Politico reports.
“The Republican base is poised to take a turn delivering Trump a stinging rebuke in a state where, during his presidency, the GOP lost two Senate seats, two House seats and the state’s Electoral College votes for the first time since the mid-1990s.”
Playbook: “For Trump, the risk is not simply that his favored candidate could lose. It’s that a defeat here could further erase the sense of him as an untouchable GOP kingmaker. If Perdue goes down, it’ll be the third time this year that a Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidate has been defeated in a GOP primary.”
“If Trump is alive, Biden is running.”
— A longtime adviser to President Biden, quoted by New York magazine, on the 2024 presidential race.
“One of Donald Trump’s most steadfast aides acknowledges in a new book that the president lost the 2020 election and says he was ill-advised by campaign staff and the election deniers who surrounded him,” Politico reports.
Writes Kellyanne Conway: “Despite the mountains of money Trump had raised, his team simply failed to get the job done. A job that was doable and had a clear path, if followed. Rather than accepting responsibility for the loss, they played along and lent full-throated encouragement (privately, not on TV) when Trump kept insisting he won.”
“The team had failed on November 3, and they failed again afterward. By not confronting the candidate with the grim reality of his situation, that the proof had not surfaced to support the claims, they denied him the evidence he sought and the respect he was due. Instead supplicant after sycophant after showman genuflected in front of the Resolute Desk and promised the president goods they could not deliver.”
New York Times: “With such an important race in the balance, one that could decide the Senate majority, the state of Mr. Fetterman’s health is of intense public interest. Yet, despite repeated requests, his campaign did not make him or his doctors available to discuss his stroke and his medical treatment.”
“And specialists in stroke, heart disease and electrophysiology said that some of the campaign’s public statements do not offer a sufficient explanation for Mr. Fetterman’s described diagnosis or the treatment they say he has received.”
New York Times: “Already though, many of the thousands of migrants crossing each day are being let in — of the record 234,088 migrants who arrived in April, nearly half were released into the country for various reasons, including humanitarian exceptions to the public health order and insufficient detention space.”
“In some cases, the government cannot expel people — Cubans and Venezuelans, for example — because it has no diplomatic relations with the country of origin.”
A new AP-NORC poll finds Americans “are becoming less supportive of punishing Russia for launching its invasion of Ukraine if it comes at the expense of the U.S. economy, a sign of rising anxiety over inflation and other challenges.”
“Now 45% of U.S. adults say the nation’s bigger priority should be sanctioning Russia as effectively as possible, while slightly more — 51% — say it should be limiting damage to the U.S. economy.”
“In April, those figures were exactly reversed. In March, shortly after Russia attacked Ukraine, a clear majority — 55% — said the bigger priority should be sanctioning Russia as effectively as possible.”
“Democrats are set to blow through the soft Memorial Day deadline for reaching a deal with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) on a slimmed-down budget reconciliation bill to raise taxes, fight climate change and lower the cost of prescription drugs,” The Hill reports.
“Senate Democratic sources say there’s no chance of getting a deal this week but they argue that doesn’t necessarily mean the negotiations over a long-awaited budget reconciliation package are doomed.”
“Former Detroit police Chief James Craig (R) and businessman Perry Johnson (R), two of the top candidates for the Republican nomination for governor, didn’t submit enough valid petition signatures to make the ballot,” the Detroit News reports.
Texas Tribune: “Fourteen Republican members of the state House of Representatives have pledged to introduce bills in the coming legislative session that would bar corporations from doing business in Texas if they pay for abortions in states where the procedure is legal.”
“This would explicitly prevent firms from offering employees access to abortion-related care through health insurance benefits. It would also expose executives to criminal prosecution under pre-Roe anti-abortion laws the Legislature never repealed, the legislators say.”
“A private Christian university is considering strictly limiting the free speech rights of its students when it comes to sexuality and gender, from how they behave to what they wear and what they can say on campus or even online,“ the AP reports.
“The policy also forbids sex between unmarried heterosexuals.”
“Former Sen. David Perdue ended his Trump-inspired campaign for governor of Georgia with a racist appeal to Republican primary voters on Monday, accusing Stacey Abrams, the Black woman who is the presumptive Democratic nominee, of ‘demeaning her own race’ in how she has described the state’s problems,” the New York Times reports.
New York Times: “Offhand remarks that vary from the official talking points have become a feature, not a bug, of the Biden presidency, as he demonstrated again on Monday when he dispensed with decades of ‘strategic ambiguity’ and indicated that he would militarily defend Taiwan against attack by China.”
“Each time he says what he really thinks, there is the ritual cleanup brigade dispatched by the White House to pretend that he did not really say what he clearly articulated — or that even if he did, it did not really amount to a change in policy. But then Mr. Biden, unperturbed and unapologetic, goes out and does it all over again.”
“Congressional ethics investigators said on Monday that they had gathered “substantial” evidence that Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) improperly used campaign donations to pay for unlimited access for himself and his wife to a private dining club in Amarillo, Texas,” the New York Times reports.
“Mr. Jackson, who gained national attention as the White House doctor to former President Donald Trump and went on to win election to the House, is accused of using campaign money for the Amarillo Club, in violation of Federal Election Commission regulations prohibiting the use of campaign funds for such purposes.”
“Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney’s (D-NY) decision last week to leave behind his current congressional district to campaign for a colleague’s safer seat infuriated fellow Democrats, who saw the actions as unacceptable for the man tasked with protecting their House majority,” the New York Times reports.
“On Monday, a progressive New York lawmaker, Alessandra Biaggi (D), said she would try to stand in his way, channeling the ire of the party’s left wing at the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.”
Biaggi called Maloney “a selfish corporate Democrat.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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