Well, we got our July Surprise, at last.

My previous post was published around 10am this morning, and in it I noted an apparent lack of developments over the prior 48 hours in resolving the crisis over the Democratic presidential ticket. About three hours later, Biden released a letter via social media indicating that he was dropping out of the 2024 race, while remaining President for the remainder of his term. (The Biden contract on PredictIt immediately went from $0.32 to the minimum value of $0.01, and has since stayed there.) A few minutes after that, he supplemented that letter with a social media post offering his “full support and endorsement” to Vice-President Harris.

My wife and daughter and I were about an hour into the drive from Chicago to Minnesota when the news broke, which meant that we were well-positioned to simply listen to the situation develop over the next several hours. As I’m writing this post, shortly before heading to bed on the same day, it seems extremely likely that Harris will assume the Democratic nomination with little or no opposition. Anyone I can think of who would be a credible alternative candidate to Harris has already endorsed her within the first 8 hours of her candidacy. And the previous “Biden for President” campaign finance committee has already been renamed “Harris for President,” with the prevailing wisdom being that Harris (and only Harris) has the unfettered right to access monies previously donated for the Biden-Harris general election campaign.

I have been critical of Biden for not dropping out two weeks ago. However the way things have played out, maybe this timing worked out for the best. With a weakened Biden remaining in the race, Trump went all in on remaking the Republican party in his image, selecting as his VP candidate an ideologically aligned potential successor. Going with Vance rather than with somebody who could help shore up Trump’s electoral weaknesses was the move of a candidate who wasn’t worried about losing. If Biden had made his move earlier, perhaps Trump would have instead made a different and potentially more productive VP choice, rather than doubling down on the MAGA lane.

Stepping back for a second, it is hard to overstate how unprecedented this all is. The last first-term President to disavow any interest in running for a second term was, apparently, Polk way back in 1848. Truman dropped out in 1952 after losing New Hampshire; LBJ dropped out in 1968 after almost losing New Hampshire to Eugene McCarthy, a sign of weakness which then prompted RFK to enter the race. There’s no precedent for a candidate to have faced only token opposition throughout the primaries, only to then withdraw after their nomination was assured albeit not yet official. That means that, for the first time in the modern era where Presidential primaries have taken primacy over smoke-filled rooms, we will have a major-party candidate who did not actually run in any primaries.

One of the next things to watch will be who Harris selects as her vice-presidential candidate, and when & how that selection is made. There is an emerging consensus that the appropriate partner for a biracial Californian woman on the top of the ticket will be a straight (sorry Secretary Buttigieg) white (sorry Governor Moore) male (sorry Governor Whitmer) from a less liberal state (sorry Governor Newsom, although the 12th Amendment also sends its regards). That train of thought leads to a shortlist of Pennsylvania Governor Shapiro, North Carolina Governor Cooper, Kentucky Governor Beasher, and Minnesota Governor Walz. When a friend had asked me two weeks ago what I thought a putative Presidential nominee Harris ought to do for VP, my top choice was Shapiro, followed by Walz. Another name being bandied about is Senator Kelly of Arizona, although I am leery about the wisdom of potentially creating a Senate vacancy in a swing state.

To quote something that pundit and former Republican political strategist Steve Schmidt had written just this morning: “The 2024 campaign for president exists in a netherworld between being already lost and not yet begun.” Well, that core uncertainty has been resolved, and the cat is alive. We now face a whole host of new uncertainties: how will Harris perform on the trail, how effectively will the party unite behind her, will Democratic fundraising rebound (although early signs there are promising), will there even be any Trump-Harris debates, what will polling tell us and when. The next month will surely be very interesting as both parties adjust to the new reality.

But it’s a new dawn, a new day, and I’m feeling good.

And the hits keep on coming… Yesterday afternoon it was announced that President Biden had tested positive for COVID (for the 3rd time) and cancelled a campaign event in order to return to Delaware and self-isolate.

Looking at the PredictIt contract, Biden had been losing a little ground during the day yesterday, drifting back down to a trading range just north of $0.50. Then the COVID news comes out, and he lost ground in heavy trading, settling in overnight just south of $0.40.

But now in the last 2 hours, on heavy trading the Biden contract is collapsing further. As I write this Biden is down to $0.22, which I think is a new low; Harris is up to $0.61.

I’m not entirely sure what news is driving the most recent price movements, though? Yesterday, prior to the COVID news, Rep. Schiff (also the Democratic nominee for the open Senate seat in California) became the most prominent legislator to publicly join the “dump Biden” camp. I’m not aware of any specific similar announcements so far today. But with the RNC coming to an end tonight, it would be an interesting time to try and steal some of Trump’s thunder by having Biden change his stance on remaining in the race.

Vance gave his acceptance speech last night, which seems to have been pretty well received. I watched several seconds of it, catching the following phrase: “We need a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man, union and nonunion alike. A leader who won’t sell out to multinational corporations…” Pretty strange stuff to hear at a Republican convention.

A strange moment from yesterday’s RNC: One of the day’s convention speakers had woken up that very morning inside federal prison. That would be Peter Navarro, a former top economic advisor to Trump who just yesterday completed his four-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress, specifically in refusing to comply with a subpoena from the Jan 6th Committee.

Today will be day 3 of the RNC in Milwaukee. I haven’t watched any of it, choosing instead last night to watch baseball’s All-Star Game.

It does seem particularly clear after Vance’s nomination, however, that the break between today’s Republican Party and the party of the recent past is now complete. McConnell was booed on Monday; the president of the Teamsters union was an RNC speaker yesterday, although his union has not yet endorsed either candidate; and none of President Bush, Vice-President Pence, Vice-President Cheney, Vice-President Quayle, and former Presidential nominee Romney are attending the RNC. The Trump-Vance Republican party is unabashedly isolationist, protectionist, populist, and anti-immigration, in addition to the more traditional Republican virtues of being anti-taxation, anti-regulation, pro-gun, and anti-abortion.

Yesterday Senator Menendez was convicted on all counts in his federal corruption trial, after 12 hours of jury deliberation. Majority Leader Schumer has called on Menendez to resign; we’ll see. Somewhat more likely is that the Senate would need to vote to expel him, and there hasn’t been a successful expulsion vote since the Civil War. Perhaps the most likely outcome is that he quietly serves out the rest of his term. It is equally unclear whether Menendez will remain on this fall’s Senate ballot as an independent, or whether he will withdraw his candidacy.

One side effect of Saturday evening’s assassination attempt is that the ensuing changes in political fortunes appear to have taken the wind of out of the sails of the “dump Biden” movement within the Democratic party. The Biden contract on PredictIt has been hovering around the $0.70 mark ever since the assassination attempt, and there is reporting that the DNC will seek to install Biden as nominee in the near future via a virtual roll call (a move that was already in the works in order to ensure that the Democrats would make the Presidential ballot in Ohio).

In other market-related news, DJT stock had spent most of last week trading stably around the $30 mark, but spiked up about 50% when the markets opened on Monday morning, presumably as a sign of support for Trump among his fans for surviving the assassination attempt. It has since retreated down to around $37, which still makes it a $7 billion market cap company.

And as for the would-be assassin, “investigators are struck by the lack of leads they’re finding about Crooks’ mindset and possible motives,” per CNN.

Three significant things have happened (so far!) today, and I’ll list them in reverse order of how unexpected they were.

The first is that, on the opening day of the RNC, the Republican party formally nominated Trump for President. We’ve seen this train coming down the tracks for a long time, so it’s no longer surprising in an immediate sense.

But stepping back: one of the two major parties has, with little controversy within the party, nominated (a) a former President (this hasn’t happened since Cleveland in 1892, although T. Roosevelt ran on a third-party platform in 1912 after his own party wouldn’t nominate him), who (b) is widely considered by historians to have been one of the very worst Presidents in history, and who since leaving office has (c) been convicted of state felonies arising out of conduct in his original Presidential election campaign, (d) been indicted at the both the federal and state level for felonies relating to conduct in his re-election campaign, (e) been indicted for federal crimes relating to alleged non-compliance with the Presidential Records Act and alleged obstruction with the investigation into those allegations, (f) been assessed an 8-digit monetary fine for defamation relating to his having committed sexual assault, and (g) been assessed a 9-digit monetary fine relating to his business. Regardless of how one feels about Trump, that is a truly astonishing litany.

The second is that Trump announced that his Vice-Presidential candidate will be Ohio Senator J.D. Vance. Vance, a 39-year-old white male, was an ex-Marine and Yale Law graduate who came to prominence in 2016 when his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” because a surprise bestseller. He only turned to politics in 2022, running in the Republican primary to replace the retiring Senator Portman. He was running 5th in the polls when Trump endorsed him, less than three weeks before the primary. He won comfortably with 32% of the vote, then beat Democratic Representative Tim Ryan 53-47. And now, less than two years later, he is poised to become the youngest VP since Nixon (if inaugurated, Vance will be about four months older than Nixon was when he assumed the #2 job in 1953 at the age of 40). Nixon, like Vance, was only two years into his first Senate term when nominated, but at least he had spent 4 years in the House prior to that.

I’m old enough to remember when the Republican Party attacked Senator Obama for being too inexperienced, running for President in the fourth year of his freshman term in the U.S. Senate, after having previously served 8 years in the Illinois Senate. Today’s Republican Party is nominating a ticket whose cumulative time spent in elected politics, at any level, is less than 6 years.

The third is that Judge Cannon issued a bombshell ruling today in U.S. v. Trump (Florida edition), the Mar-A-Lago documents case: She dismissed the indictment on the grounds that Special Counsel Smith was not appointed in a manner consistent with the Appointments Clause of the U.S. Constitution and therefore lacks the ability to prosecute anybody.

As I had previously noted, this argument had been raised at a couple different phases of the other U.S. v. Trump case, largely by Federalist Society co-chair Steven Calabresi, on occasion by pulling the strings behind former Attorney General Meese as an amicus. Two weeks ago, when SCOTUS finally ruled in Trump v. U.S., Justice Thomas had authored a solo concurrence expressing sympathy for this argument. At the very end of its February opinion in that case, the D.C. Circuit declined in a footnote to entertain this argument on the grounds that it had not been raised at the District Court level. However down in Florida, Judge Cannon had in June taken the unusual step of holding a hearing with witness testimony from amici on both sides about this Appointments Clause issue.

One imagines the government will appeal forthwith to the 11th Circuit, but we shall see.

As if this Presidential election needed more drama…

Yesterday evening there was an assassination attempt on Trump, at one of his election rallies in Pennsylvania’s 16th district, a safe Republican seat (having voted Trump 58-40 in 2020) north of Pittsburgh. A bullet fired from a rooftop several hundred feet away pierced Trump’s right ear, drawing blood; however Trump was safely escorted off-stage and is reportedly fine. The New York Times has an incredible picture that appears to show one of the bullets streaking past Trump’s head.

The would-be assassin did reportedly kill one rally attendee, before himself being killed at the scene. This morning the shooter’s identity has been announced as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old white male and registered Republican with no criminal record who lived about an hour away from the rally site. As of this writing, nothing is known of Crooks’ motive.

The RNC is expected to commence as scheduled in Milwaukee tomorrow.

Last night Biden held an hour-long press conference in the early evening, at the conclusion of the NATO Summit in Washington DC, aired live on the three traditional broadcast networks as well as the cable news networks. (More people watched it than watched this year’s Oscars.) After a few minutes of opening remarks delivered via teleprompter, things got off to a very shaky start when, in the first sentence of his answer to the first question, he referred to Kamala Harris as “Vice-President Trump.”

Uh-oh.

It got better from there, though. I thought David Frum had the best summary of the evening, writing in The Atlantic in an article entitled Biden’s Heartbreaking Press Conference:

“So here’s the heartbreak.

Three-quarters of an hour of detailed, sophisticated answers. Mastery of detail. Knowledge of world personalities. Courtesy to the reporters before him. Accurate recall of facts and figures. Justified pride in a record of accomplishment. A spark of sharp humor at the very end.

Also: Verbal stumbles. Thoughts half-finished. Strangled vocal intonations. Flares of unprompted anger. Glimpses of the politician’s inner monologue—resentment at how underappreciated he is—spoken aloud, as it never should be, in all its narcissism and vulnerability.“

The narcissism and resentment that Frum referenced was my wife’s biggest takeaway from the press conference. She found it very off-putting, and it made her think less of Biden than she did going in.

As such, the press conference appears to have done little to resolve the post-debate chaos that has embroiled the Democratic party. On PredictIt, the Harris contract spent most of today trading above the Biden contract, although in the evening hours the Biden contract has rallied to $0.49 after being mired in the low $0.40s. The current tally of sitting Democrats Congresspeople who have called for Biden to drop out has risen to 1 Senator (Welch, of Vermont) and 18 Representatives.

A group of 24 former Democratic Congresspeople, the most prominent of whom is Senator Harkin of Iowa, released a letter today calling on Biden to release his delegates so that the upcoming DNC could be an open convention, the kind we had in the 30s (and, most recently, in 1952).

A new ABC poll released yesterday says that 85% of voters think Biden is too old to be elected to a new term as President, while 60% think the same of Trump. Those numbers are up from 68% and 44%, respectively, 14 months ago. The poll also indicates that 52% of Biden supporters, and 67% of all voters, think Biden should withdraw.

I don’t know where we go from here.

In other news, today the jury started deliberations in the federal corruption trial of Senator Menendez and did not reach a verdict after their first three hours.

Things remain unsettled in Democratic circles, despite Biden’s best efforts to put any uncertainty behind him.

On Monday morning Biden made an unscheduled dial-in appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”, bringing back memories of Trump dialing into Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” from the White House residence. Shortly before that, Biden had sent a two-page letter to Congressional Democrats, reiterating his commitment to the campaign and urging the party to unify behind him. With those actions, the Biden contract on PredictIt spiked upwards on Monday morning, trading as high as $0.67 and ending the day at $0.59.

After a steady day of trading yesterday, things started to turn badly for the Biden contract this morning after Nancy Pelosi’s appearance on “Morning Joe.” On the show, when asked if she supported Biden’s continued candidacy, she said something to the effect of “the President needs to decide what he’s going to do,” which is an odd statement in light of Biden’s letter on Monday in which he was crystal clear on what he intended to do. Another factor today may have been George Clooney’s NYT op-ed called “I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee.” In his piece Clooney writes:

“We are not going to win in November with this president. On top of that, we won’t win the House, and we’re going to lose the Senate. This isn’t only my opinion; this is the opinion of every senator and Congress member and governor who I’ve spoken with in private. Every single one, irrespective of what he or she is saying publicly.“

The Biden contract dropped from $0.61 early this morning to $0.41 as I write this, with the Harris contract now back up to $0.43.

Today the Cook Political Report moved AZ/GA/NV from “Toss Up” to “Leans Republican”, and moved MN/NH/Omaha from “Likely Democratic” to “Leans Democratic”. All of this is consistent with what we had previously discussed with respect to Nate Silver’s model.

Speaking of Silver, his team published an analysis today estimating the 2024 “electoral college lean” as R +2.0, versus R +3.5 in 2020 and R +2.9 in 2016. Given this lean, in 14% of their scenarios Biden wins the popular vote but loses the electoral college.

Trump has kept an unusually low profile in the past week, which seems like smart politics with Biden under such pressure. With the RNC starting on Monday, Trump is widely expected to announce his vice-presidential candidate over the weekend. The three names one now hears the most are Ohio Senator Vance, North Dakota Governor Burgum, and Florida Senator Rubio. I don’t quite understand how Rubio would fit on the ticket, in light of the 12th Amendment, but Bush-Cheney overcame that problem.

It continues to be a big week, globally, for elections: On top of Labour’s victory in the UK earlier this week, yesterday Iran elected a new moderate president, while today it appears that tactical voting by the left and centrist parties have prevented the far-right National Rally from getting a majority in in France, although the outcome remains unclear as I write this.

Between the 2020 and 2024 US elections, not only did I change my voter registration from Illinois to Minnesota, but also our Minnesota house was redistricted out of a safe Democratic seat and into a much more competitive seat: the Minnesota 2nd, currently held by Democrat Angie Craig. I mention this because yesterday our Representative became the first sitting Democratic Representative from a swing district, and 5th overall, to call for Biden to drop out of the race.

So far Biden remains competely committed to running, saying in his Friday interview with George Stephanopolous (which, at only 20 minutes in length, was shorter than I had been thinking it would be) that only the “Lord Almighty” could convince him to drop out of the race. The prediction markets have not rebounded in his favor over the weekend, however, with the Biden contract sitting at $0.41 as I write this. And reports are coming out that, on a private call among House Democratic leadership today, more leaders spoke in favor of Biden dropping out than spoke in favor of him staying.

Before and after the fireworks last night, I was glued to my television watching BBC coverage of the 2024 UK election. The final results were very consistent with expectations: a comfortable majority for Labour even though they didn’t really expand their vote share, as they exploited shifts away from the SNP in Scotland and away from the Conservatives to the new Reform UK party in England. The Conservatives are down but not, unlike the 1993 Progressive Conservative party in Canada, out; here Reform finished 3rd in the popular vote but only managed to gain 4 seats, the same as the Greens and Plaid Cymru. Meanwhile the centrist Liberal Democrats, despite finishing 4th in the popular vote, grew their seat count to an all-time high of 71.

One has to admire British efficiency when it comes to running an election. Polls closed everywhere at 10pm. Paper ballots only. No early voting. Mail-in voting is allowed, but the vote has to be received by 10pm for it to count. This was the first election for which voter photo ID was mandatory, which was mildly controversial but does not appear to have depressed turnout much if at all. Counting starts at 10pm, and – here’s the craziest part – no preliminary results are released! As such, for the first hour-and-a-half of TV coverage, there was nothing to talk about except the exit polling, which has historically proven to be exceptionally accurate. The swiftest seats reported before midnight, and most seats between 3am and 6am. By shortly after 5am, enough winners had been officially declared to ensure a Labour majority government; a few hours after that, the transition of power was formally completed and Keir Starmer became prime minister.

Of course, the US has five times the population of the UK and two-thirds the number of constituencies, so the vote to be counted in a typical US congressional district would be something like 7.5x that of a typical UK riding. Plus, in the UK there was only the one election on the ballot, because local elections are held at a completely separate time. Still, how nice it would be to have complete finality about vote-counting within hours of the polls being closed.

On PredictIt, the Biden contract had recovered from the steep dip on July 3rd that prompted my last post, closing the day back at $0.47. Since then things have again moved a little against Biden; at this writing the Biden contract is at $0.40 while the Harris contract is at $0.48. Today Biden is giving a lengthy interview to ABC, which will be aired on a tape-delayed basis tonight. Silver’s model has ticked up to 71% for Trump over Biden based just on polling updates (i.e., the model doesn’t know about the debate performance and the emerging controversy over Biden), and now sees Trump as the popular vote favorite also.