On the menu today: Audrey Fahlberg, National Review‘s political reporter, here, filling in for Jim today while he’s on the National Review Institute cruise to Alaska. Today, I’ll take a quick look at how Hunter Biden’s legal troubles might factor into the presidential election and why Nevada is looking good for Republicans.
Hunter Biden Verdict Hits the Trail
Boom: In another historic verdict, the president’s son, Hunter, was convicted on Tuesday on all counts in his felony gun case — making him the first first son to be convicted on felony counts while his father is in the White House. (Read our James Lynch’s latest bylines to catch up on the ins and outs of the verdict and what to expect from Hunter’s separate tax-evasion trial, which is set to begin in September.)
Will the first son’s legal troubles affect the presidential race? I’m skeptical. Over the next few days, you’ll see a bunch of headlines that will continue to suggest Hunter’s conviction “undercuts,” “upends,” or even “shatters” Trump’s narrative that the justice system is rigged against him, especially now that Biden has said he will not pardon his son. In Politico Playbook’s view, Hunter’s “plight could become a coat of armor, [some Democrats] say — a tidy rebuttal to Trump’s omnipresent claims of a rigged ‘witch hunt’ prosecution orchestrated by Biden and his ‘weaponized’ Justice Department. It’s the ‘silver lining they weren’t looking for,’ former Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) told us.”
More likely than not, this verdict isn’t going to move the electoral needle in any meaningful sense. As NR’s editors wrote yesterday, “The president’s son is not on the ballot.” They continue:
The Biden camp’s claims that Hunter was unfairly singled out for gun prosecution are absurd. This was not a so-called lie-and-try case, in which an ineligible person (e.g., a drug addict, a prior felon, an illegal alien) applies to purchase a gun, lies on the form, and the lie is quickly discovered so the gun transaction is never consummated. Hunter Biden lied-and-succeeded: He got the gun and handled it irresponsibly — such that his then-girlfriend (and widow of his brother) took it from him and discarded it near a school, out of fear Biden would hurt himself and others. This is exactly the sort of situation for which these laws exist. To the extent Biden was singled out, it was for favorable treatment — others would have been prosecuted within weeks of the discovery of the crime.
It’s possible that Trump will use the first son’s legal troubles to get under Biden’s skin on the debate stage later this month. If he goes full scorched-earth mode, the 81-year-old incumbent could run the risk of becoming overly defensive of his adult son and hurling the “convicted felon” label right back at Trump — only further playing into the GOP’s campaign narrative that Biden is rooting for his political opponent to go to prison.
One interesting tidbit: The guilty verdict does take the wind out of the GOP’s sails from a fundraising standpoint. As the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, and Michael Gold report, the “shiftless and broadly muted G.O.P. response to the verdict” speaks to frustration among Trump allies who had been “secretly rooting for an acquittal.” More from the Times:
A person with knowledge of the Trump campaign’s fund-raising plans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said there had been discussions about how much an acquittal would help Mr. Trump, potentially raising tens of millions of additional dollars as they planned to cite it as more evidence the justice system was rigged. After Mr. Trump was convicted in Manhattan on 34 felony counts, his campaign raised record sums online, and some of his advisers recognized that an acquittal of Mr. Biden’s son had the potential to raise Mr. Trump far more cash than a conviction, the person said.
I’ll leave you with this line from the Wall Street Journal’s Annie Linskey: “Perhaps most significantly,” she reports, “the conviction gives the president a new reason to worry about the health of his son, whom he already contacts daily out of a concern that his recovery will be disrupted.”
Why Nevada Looks Good for Republicans
Businessman and retired Army captain Sam Brown’s Republican Senate primary win in Nevada last night puts another spotlight on 1) the strength of National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman Steve Daines’s aggressive candidate-recruitment strategy, and 2) Trump’s six-month-strong Silver State polling lead.
While it’s true that things are looking pretty darn rough for Biden in Nevada five months out from Election Day, this is still a swing state (sorry Jim!). Remember: No Republican presidential candidate has carried the state in 20 years, and the state is historically difficult to poll.
“Historically, what’s been kind of rare about Nevada, at least among the competitive blue-leaning states, is it’s been one where polls have tended to, if anything, underestimate the Democrats there, because you have the Culinary Union which runs a very tight ship in terms of getting out its voters,” J. Miles Coleman, an election analyst with Sabato’s Crystal Ball, told NR.
As for the Senate race, I reported last night that it will be “tough but doable” for Brown to defeat Democratic senator Jacky Rosen in this “transient, hospitality-worker-heavy state” with a high Hispanic population “that hasn’t elected a Republican to the U.S. Senate since 2012.” Unlike Democrat-held battleground Senate seats in states such as Ohio and Montana, both of which Trump carried easily in 2020, Nevada isn’t currently seen as one of Senate Republicans’ top-tier pickup opportunities. That could change over the next few months depending on the polls.
If he wants to win, Brown should keep a close eye on Reno. During the Obama times, the rule of thumb for Democrats was that they had to carry Clark County (the state’s largest county) by ten points to win statewide. That’s no longer the case thanks to Republican shifts in Clark County and demographic changes in Reno. “What’s helped [Democrats] offset that reddening in Clark County is the Washoe area, the Reno area,” Coleman told NR. “A lot of people move into that area who are priced out of areas like California — people who are young and often college-educated.”
In 2016, for example, Clark County was the only county Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto carried. In 2022, the vulnerable Democratic senator held onto her seat by eking out a slim victory over Republican Adam Laxalt, the former state attorney general, thanks to inroads she made in Washoe. She carried Clark County last midterm cycle by eight points and Washoe County by four.
Nevada’s first-term Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, published an op-ed in the New York Times on Monday explaining why Trump is leading in polls, and how other Republicans can catch up. In short:
As the 2024 election inches closer, candidates would be wise to consider the effect of their actions on voters’ everyday lives. If recent polling on Democratic candidates in Nevada is any indication, and I think it is, Mr. Biden has a big problem to overcome, because after three and a half years, Nevadans are losing confidence in him to do something meaningful about inflation and housing and are left with the feeling that he just doesn’t get it.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it, Trump is scheduled to meet with House Republicans Thursday morning and Senate Republicans a few hours later in Washington, D.C. Mitch McConnell told reporters this week he’s planning to attend the Senate GOP meeting. If he and Trump say hello to each other during that meeting, it will mark the first time they’ve spoken in years. Oh, to be a fly on the wall in that meeting!