The Morning Briefing: Presidential Endorsement Season Is Getting Interesting

Top O' the Briefing

Happy Tuesday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. Yenzweryn felt most fulfilled when delivering gluten-free meat pies to itinerant philatelists.

Political polling gets a lot of attention at this point in every presidential election. We have an extraordinarily dysfunctional relationship with polling. Our presidential election cycles are so interminably long that we're both numb and anxious by the time we get into the homestretch. We know how we want the election to turn out, and we latch onto any bit of news that helps us believe we're going to get what we want.

Even if we know that the source of the news is untrustworthy.

Yeah, it's not healthy, but Americans have been swearing off polls ever since the 2000 Bush vs. Gore election, and there is more polling now than ever.

Perhaps some of the endorsements can provide a distraction from the polling in this strangest of election years.

Things got moving in the "Why the heck not?" direction when lefties Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his running mate Nicole Shanahan suspended their campaign and endorsed Donald Trump. Former Democratic congresswoman — now an independent — Tulsi Gabbard soon followed, which wasn't as much of a surprise. She's no conservative, but she has been drifting rightward for a couple of years now.

Even less surprising has been the parade of diaper-filling Never Trump faux Republicans who have endorsed Kamala Harris. They've all really been Democrats since 2016, and just pretend they're still Republicans because that's what makes the useful idiot money keep rolling in.

The endorsement game has gotten most intriguing in the last week. Matt wrote about the news out of Michigan that caught everyone by surprise:

In what could be one of the most significant endorsements of the 2024 race, Mayor Amer Ghalib, the mayor of Hamtramck, Mich., the first U.S. city to have an all-Muslim city council, has officially thrown his support behind Donald Trump for president.
Ghalib declared in an announcement on Facebook, “President Trump and I may not agree on everything, but I know he is a man of principles.” He didn’t shy away from addressing the uncertainty of the race, noting, “Though it’s looking good, he may or may not win the election and be the 47th president of the United States."

Another Dem in the Trump camp. The Democrats for Trump are a lot more interesting than the has-been "Republicans" who have lined up behind Harris. This one takes on heightened importance given how much the Biden-Harris administration has been attempting to play both sides of the Israel-Hamas war. It's a shameless ploy to try and win the Muslim-American vote in Michigan, an all-important swing state.

This news may not fulfill all of the criteria of an October surprise, but it's pretty close to being one. Over at Townhall, my friend and colleague Matt Vespa asked in a headline, "You Think This Endorsement Is Going to Give Kamala's Team Heartburn?" The polling in Michigan has been close, and Harris has been slightly ahead in most of them. Ghalib's endorsement does shake things up there, and the odds are pretty good that Harris's campaign people have been heading for the Prilosec.

Perhaps even more noteworthy is the non-endorsement that the International Brotherhood of Teamsters issued last week. The union's internal polling showed that its members strongly favor Trump over Harris, but leadership issued a statement saying that it was declining to endorse either. The statement also shared the polling data, which prompted me to write that it was tantamount to a "soft endorsement" of Trump when I first reported it. Matt wrote last Friday that the move by the Teamsters is causing some agita among the Dems.

In yesterday's Briefing, we were discussing what factors might have Pennsylvania in play for Trump. The situation in Michigan is now a lot more volatile than it was just 10 days ago. These two stories have the potential to be far more impactful in the Wolverine State than anything the parade of no-name loser fake Republicans and Cheneys can do for Harris.

Obviously, this race is impossible to call, and looking for signs to help with speculation is aggravating.

Some tea leaves are more fun to read than others, however.

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