TRUMP'S TRIAL GETS INTO HIS PERSONAL AND FINANCIAL AFFAIRS: FROM THE POLITICS DESK
Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the campaign trail, the White House and Capitol Hill.
In today’s edition, we dive into Stormy Daniels' testimony at Donald Trump’s New York trial. Plus, Steve Kornacki digs in on the trend at the heart of Joe Biden's polling struggles with Black voters.
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Day 13 of Trump’s trial focuses on his affairs – personal and financial
By Adam Reiss, Gary Grumbach, Jillian Frankel and Dareh Gregorian
Adult film actress Stormy Daniels took the witness stand at former President Donald Trump‘s New York criminal trial on Tuesday, testifying under oath about the sexual encounter she says she had with Trump in 2006 and the $130,000 deal for her silence that was struck during the closing days of the 2016 presidential campaign.
Daniels described parts of the 2006 encounter in detail and said that at one point she thinks she “blacked out” and that Trump did not use a condom. That led Trump attorney Todd Blanche to “move for a mistrial” when the two sides returned from their lunch break, saying that Daniels’ testimony was “unduly and inappropriately prejudicial.”
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“There’s no way to unring the bell in our view,” Blanche said during a dramatic exchange with prosecutors.
Judge Juan Merchan shot down the mistrial request but acknowledged that “there were things that would have been better left unsaid,” and said he would strike some of her testimony from the record.
Daniels was the second witness called Tuesday. She testified that she met Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe in July 2006. Describing their first meeting as a “very brief encounter,” Daniels testified that she was 27 and remembered Trump being as old as her father — around 60.
Before Daniels, prosecutors called a longtime publishing executive to authenticate and read excerpts from some of Trump’s books.
Sally Franklin, an executive at Penguin Random House, read from “Trump: Think Like a Billionaire” that talked about how closely Trump tracks his money — something prosecutors will likely use to show he was well aware of what he was paying his onetime lawyer Michael Cohen back for.
“I always sign my checks so I know where my money is going,” he said in the excerpt.
Meanwhile: Judge Aileen Cannon has indefinitely postponed Trump’s classified documents trial in Florida pending the resolution of multiple pre-trial issues. The trial was scheduled to start May 20.
A generational divide splits Black voters ahead of Biden-Trump rematch
By Steve Kornacki
One of the more noticeable polling shifts between the last presidential campaign and this one is among Black voters.
While they remain overwhelmingly aligned with President Joe Biden, his level of support is lower than in 2020. And Donald Trump’s Black support is often clocking in at levels that would outpace all previous Republican nominees in the modern era.
These findings have produced understandable skepticism, fueled by red herring polls in past campaigns suggesting surprising levels of Black GOP support that failed to materialize on Election Day. Dating to the 1964 presidential race, no Republican presidential candidate has exceeded 12% Black support in exit polls, with most failing to reach double-digits.
But if you average the results of every high-quality, independent poll released since April 1, here’s how Black voters are currently breaking — and how they were breaking over the same period in 2020:
It’s important to note that in most individual polls, the sample size of Black voters is generally low, given that they typically make up just over 10 percent of the electorate. That translates to a considerable margin of error in any given poll. Nonetheless, the averages, which fold in subsample results from multiple polls, do suggest a change from four years ago.
And that change appears to be generational. Breakdowns of Black voters by age are available from several recent polls; and each shows a striking gap between younger and older Black voters:
Again, these reflect relatively small sample sizes, although the NBC News and CNN numbers are from “merged data” — datasets that combine the Black voter subsamples from the two national polls that each organization has sponsored this year, doubling the sample of Black voters. The age splits here are consistent and striking.
What’s clear and consistent across polls is that younger Black voters are more disillusioned with Biden and more open to Trump and third-party alternatives. If Trump can actually translate this into a historically high level of Black support, it could win him the election.
But that’s a huge “if.” The same polls also show that Biden-wary, younger Black voters are far less likely to turn out in November. And if it’s mainly the pro-Biden side of this generational divide that shows up in November, we could end up looking back at the current polling as just another red herring.
That’s all from The Politics Desk for now. If you have feedback — likes or dislikes — email us at [email protected]
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This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
2024-05-07T22:06:35Z dg43tfdfdgfd
