How Much Trump Paid for Each Vote
Plus: What DeSantis ultimately gets from running for president.
1. JVL Is Always Right
So the comments yesterday went crazy over my suggestion that the DNC had gone out of its way to treat Asa Hutchinson shabbily and that this choice was bad on all the levels.
Most readers agreed. A minority of you (maybe 20 percent?) took the position that Asa is no hero, that he made the Republican party what it is today, and that Democrats owe him no grace because he participated in the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
I don’t want to belabor this argument, because partly it stems from a deeper disagreement about whether or not today’s Republican party was an inevitable result of the GOP dating back to Romney/Bush/Dole/Reagan/Goldwater/Nixon, or whether it is a contingent outcome.
So we’ll shelve the philosophical and focus on the practical: You know who agreed with JVL? JRB.
Good on President Biden. He gets it. Always.
2. Burn Rate
Yesterday I got an email from a reader in Johnson County, Iowa, who caucused for Nikki Haley in a strategic bid to try to hurt Trump.
Haley won Johnson County by 1 vote—meaning that it was a Bulwark reader who kept Trump from being able to say that he won every country in Iowa.
Sir: We salute you.
Anyway, the point of his email is that he ran the numbers on total Iowa spend divided by votes earned for the candidates and whoa, Nelly: