The Stage is Set for a Senate Showdown in Nevada
From the Dispatch Politics on The Dispatch
Happy Wednesday! We’re sending well-wishes to Sen. John Fetterman and his wife, Gisele, who were involved in a car accident Sunday—on their 16th wedding anniversary, no less. Both of them are doing all right.
Up to Speed
Former President Donald Trump will speak to the House Republican conference on Thursday at the Capitol Hill Club, according to Politico. Trump also will meet with the Senate’s GOP conference the same day at the National Republican Senatorial Committee headquarters, per NBC News. Present at the latter meeting will be Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has not spoken to Trump in person in years, despite having given a grudging endorsement of the former president after Super Tuesday in March, saying he had always planned to support his party’s nominee.
Members of the hardline House Freedom Caucus (HFC) openly complained about Trump’s endorsements in Republican primaries in comments to Punchbowl News in a story published Monday. “He is endorsing moderates in most races if there’s a conservative in the race,” Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio told the outlet. “We can’t send the swamp any people that are just going to keep funding the status quo.” Trump has endorsed incumbents critical of the caucus, including Rep. Austin Scott of Georgia. Recently, he endorsed Virginia state Sen. John McGuire in his primary bid against Freedom Caucus Chair Rep. Bob Good.
One Trump-endorsed incumbent with whom the Freedom Caucus was displeased had a close call in his primary Tuesday. South Carolina Rep. William Timmons defeated his challenger—state Rep. Adam Morgan, who chairs the state’s House Freedom Caucus—by just more than 3 points. In the same state, Rep. Nancy Mace easily fended off a challenge in her GOP primary against Catherine Templeton, winning by about 27 points Tuesday. Templeton attempted to oust Mace after the incumbent voted with multiple populist Republicans to eject then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy from his post. McCarthy had backed Templeton’s unsuccessful bid.
President Joe Biden’s campaign is launching Seniors for Biden, which will attempt to turn out older voters for the president in swing states. Programming includes a bingo night, pickleball tournament, and pancake breakfast, The Hill reported Tuesday. The campaign will run TV ads on programs popular with older age groups, such as Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, and daytime news shows. The news comes after Hollywood creators teamed up with former Biden campaign staff to launch Won’t PAC Down, a super PAC meant to pitch the president’s record to young voters.
Ahead of a June 25 primary, Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York appears to be in serious trouble in his effort to win the Democratic nomination in his House district. A new poll from Emerson College has the two-term incumbent trailing primary challenger George Latimer, 48 percent to Bowman’s 31 percent. Twenty-one percent of respondents said they were undecided. Bowman has struggled with embarrassing headlines about a bizarre incident last year when he pulled a House office building fire alarm on his way to the Capitol for a vote. Bowman’s progressive colleagues are backing him, but Latimer has earned support from the center-left, including former Rep. Mondaire Jones, who is running in another New York House district. Bowman’s opposition to U.S. support for Israel in its war against Hamas also has drawn the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) into the race, with the group backing Latimer and running ads to boost him. Bowman has criticized AIPAC’s involvement in the race.
Republicans’ Designs on Nevada Come Into Focus
Retired Army Capt. Sam Brown emerged victorious in Tuesday’s Republican primary for Nevada’s Senate seat, setting up a highly anticipated matchup with incumbent Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen in November.
Riding a recent endorsement from Donald Trump, Brown took almost 60 percent of the vote to defeat Jeff Gunter, the former president’s ambassador to Iceland, and Jim Marchant, who lost his 2022 race for Nevada secretary of state. Republicans are counting on Brown, who received a Purple Heart after sustaining burns all over his body in Afghanistan, to defeat Rosen in a race that will help determine which party controls the Senate in the next Congress.
While Republicans have not had much success this decade in Nevada Senate races—the GOP has won just two Senate elections there in the last 40 years—the Silver State’s residents appear to be shifting red. In 2022 the GOP defeated an incumbent Democratic governor, and Republican Senate nominee Adam Laxalt—to whom Brown finished second in that year’s primary—lost by less than 1 point, about 8,000 votes, to incumbent Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.
With former President Donald Trump running ahead of President Joe Biden in FiveThirtyEight’s Nevada polling average, outside observers and Rosen herself see the threat. The Cook Political Report changed its rating for the race to a toss-up two months ago, and Rosen invested in a record-breaking $14 million ad buy around the same time. The race is likely to see no shortage of money. In their latest filings with the Federal Election Commission, Brown had just less than $2.5 million on hand, while Rosen had more than $10.2 million.
Polling has thus far tilted in Rosen’s favor. In a Cook poll from two weeks ago, while Trump led Biden by 9 points in Nevada, Rosen led a generic Republican nominee by 7 points.
Democrats will likely focus in no small part on abortion to turn Rosen’s polling lead into an election win. A Monday press release from the state party principally attacked Brown over his previous position on the issue, including his support for a 20-week restriction in Texas, where Brown ran unsuccessfully for the state legislature in 2014. The release also noted his service as leader of the Nevada branch of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a conservative evangelical group, between runs for Senate in 2022 and 2024.
Brown’s campaign website says he will not interfere with Nevada law, which permits abortion until 24 weeks. “Nevada voters have made it clear where they stand on this issue, by enshrining protections for abortion in our state law,” the section on abortion reads. “As a U.S. Senator, I will not vote to overturn the decision of Nevadans—I will not support a national abortion ban.”
But Brown has also taken the issue head-on in a personal manner. His wife, Amy, shared her experience of having an abortion when she was 24 in an on-camera interview with NBC News in February. “When I made my choice, I was under the impression that I was choosing freedom, but I did not receive freedom,” she said. “I received a five-year sentence to living with regret and shame and just having my life wrecked.”
In response to Brown’s win, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) issued a release announcing an ad calling him a “MAGA extremist.”
“Sam Brown is a MAGA extremist, with a self-serving political agenda that would hurt hard working Nevadans: banning abortion, phasing out Social Security and Medicare, and even re-opening Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste repository,” DSCC spokeswoman Amanda Sherman Baity said in the release. “He’s shown Nevadans that his plans are too extreme and too dangerous for him to be anywhere near the U.S. Senate.”
Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and a Criminal Conviction
Joe Biden’s son Hunter was convicted on three felony gun charges in federal court Tuesday. A special edition of The Collision newsletter has the details:
As we’ve noted in this newsletter before, the younger Biden was indicted in Delaware last year by the Department of Justice (DOJ) for lying about his drug use on a federal firearms application form, lying about his drug use to a federally licensed gun dealer, and for possession of a firearm while being a user or addict of illegal drugs. (He also faces a separate federal indictment on tax charges in California, with that trial set to begin in September.)
Although the maximum sentence for these three offenses is a total of 25 years in prison—a number you will no doubt hear a lot in the coming weeks—federal guidelines recommend a much shorter sentence. On the gun possession charge, for example, which is the most serious, the guidelines recommend 10 to 16 months in prison for someone with no criminal history. Federal judges are not bound by these recommendations, but the judge is required to consider them to calculate an appropriate sentence. And if she chooses to depart from the recommended sentence, she must publicly explain why. U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika, who presided over the trial, did not yet set a sentencing date.
That said, Hunter is likely to appeal the verdict. “We are naturally disappointed by today’s verdict,” said Abbe Lowell, Hunter’s attorney, in a statement. “We respect the jury process, and as we have done throughout this case, we will continue to vigorously pursue all the legal challenges available to Hunter.”
In a pretrial motion, he argued both that he was the victim of selective prosecution and that barring drug users from owning guns violates the Second Amendment. As we wrote last week when discussing Donald Trump’s avenues for appeal, however, selective prosecution claims rarely succeed.
Biden’s Second Amendment arguments are more interesting. Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit held that the same law Biden was convicted of violating was invalid as applied to an admitted marijuana user pulled over with a gun and a joint in his car, since law enforcement lacked evidence that he was high at the time. In doing so, the court also wrote that “our history and tradition may support some limits on an intoxicated person’s right to carry a weapon, but it does not justify disarming a sober citizen based exclusively on his past drug usage.”
While the president released a brief statement expressing his love and support for his son as well as calling for “respect” for the judicial process, a Trump campaign spokeswoman blasted the trial as a “distraction” from the “real crimes of the Biden Crime Family.”
“Crooked Joe Biden’s reign over the Biden Family Criminal Empire is all coming to an end on November 5th, and never again will a Biden sell government access for personal profit,” said the Trump campaign’s Karoline Leavitt.
Be sure to subscribe to The Collision to keep up to date with all of the developments at the place where presidential politics and the law collide.
Notable and Quotable
“The Hunter Biden gun conviction is kinda dumb tbh.”
—GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida in a tweet, June 11, 2024
