Welcome to Thunderdome. Democrats had a plan for 2024, a plan that they executed very well at the beginning. They would unleash a barrage of legal challenges on Donald Trump, designed to render him unacceptable to all but the hardcore Republican base whose support would still vault him to the nomination of a GOP contest where his only competition was really Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. That plan succeeded perfectly, perhaps even faster than they wanted, given that the candidates never really had time to tear each other down. Step one: a major success.

Step two: use these assorted legal challenges to weigh down the Trump campaign with legal costs and distractions that pull him all over the country with hearings and pleadings and requirements to show up before various courts. This was at least a partial success, at first. But then came the collapse of the Fani Willis situation, the sustained appeals for delays and — most embarrassingly — the utter rejection of the attempt to remove Trump from the ballot, advocated for nearly universally by a set of dull-witted Democratic officials who couldn’t reckon with the consequences of their own actions. But hey, he’s still distracted, he’s still off the campaign trail, he’s still burning money on lawyers instead of ads… so step two: a middling success.

Then came step three: actually convict the guy on something, which every poll indicates is a major ding in the minds of Independent voters. This was supposed to be the easiest step. He’s Donald Trump after all, he has to be guilty of something. But somehow, some way, it turned out the only case where he’s actually getting close to a real verdict is the one case most Democrats find unappealing, because it depends on the business filing of an NDA payment to a former adult entertainer, and the judge is a clear partisan, and the main witness is a disgraced disbarred walking perjury charge in nut-crushingly tight pants, and it hinges on an old version of Quicken-like accounting software, and… it’s just so dissatisfying to anyone but the latest-night MSNBC host and the braindead ladies of The View. Step three: oof, couldn’t this have gone better?

The case hasn’t even been good for the people who pushed for it the most: the thoroughly corrupt anti-Trump media, who thought this parade of cases would turn into fascinating broadcasting the likes of which we haven’t seen since the days of O.J. Simpson or the Impeachments, all of them. Instead, well, just look at the numbers:

CNN’s average monthly viewership among the key 25-54 age demographic slipped to its smallest audience since 1991. The network brought in 96,000 average demo viewers for the month — with its previously lowest-rated month coming in March 2023 with 100,000 average demo viewers.

For Democrats who had counted on this three-step process as a no-brainer path to re-election for President Biden, reality is setting in — and it is coming hard:

All year, Democrats had been on a joyless and exhausting grind through the 2024 election. But now, nearly five months from the election, anxiety has morphed into palpable trepidation, according to more than a dozen party leaders and operatives. And the gap between what Democrats will say on TV or in print, and what they’ll text their friends, has only grown as worries have surged about Biden’s prospects.

“You don’t want to be that guy who is on the record saying we’re doomed, or the campaign’s bad or Biden’s making mistakes. Nobody wants to be that guy,” said a Democratic operative in close touch with the White House and granted anonymity to speak freely. But Biden’s stubbornly poor polling and the stakes of the election “are creating the freakout,” he said.

And some Democrats are even putting their names to it, publicly: 

On the day after news broke that Biden had trailed Trump in fundraising last month, Massachusetts governor Maura Healey raised the pressure on donors as she introduced the president to a crowd of 300.

The cluster of fundraising events Biden attended in Boston that day were expected to bring in more than $6 million for his political operation. But Healey said that wasn’t good enough.

“To those of you who opened up your wallets, thank you,” said Healey, a Democrat in her first term. “We’d like you to open them up a little bit more and to find more patriots — more patriots who believe in this country, who recognize and understand the challenge presented at this time.”

Laughter rippled through the room. But Healey’s voice turned serious. With unusual urgency for Healey, the governor implored the room of high-dollar donors and local Democratic leaders to “think long and hard” about the stakes of the election.

In the end, it won’t come down to the donors, though. It’ll come down to Biden losing major ground among black voters, the failure of his efforts to hold on to Latino voters and his “glaring” problems with young voters. The same constituencies that Democrats have counted on as lockstep voters who really didn’t need much motivation or even an agenda that speaks to their priorities are tuning Joe Biden out. And, far too late in the game, Democrats are discovering there’s no step four for solving this situation.

A dying country led by octogenarians?

The hopelessness of America’s voting youth.

As part of the online poll of 943 18-30-year-old registered voters, Blueprint asked participants to respond to a series of questions about the American political system: 49 percent agreed to some extent that elections in the country don’t represent people like them; 51 percent agreed to some extent that the political system in the US “doesn’t work for people like me;” and 64 percent backed the statement that “America is in decline.” A whopping 65 percent agreed either strongly or somewhat that “nearly all politicians are corrupt, and make money from their political power” — only 7 percent disagreed.

“I think these statements blow me away, the scale of these numbers with young voters,” Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s lead pollster, told Semafor. “Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys. They see a dying empire led by bad people.”

While 45 percent of those polled said their own lives would be either a lot or a little bit better than their parents’, the same wasn’t true for how they felt America as a whole is doing: 54 percent — a number that included a solid mix of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents — believed the country is going downhill.

The data also found the Covid-19 pandemic has left a lasting, bad taste in the mouths of young voters: 51 percent of those polled said they were happier before the Covid-19 pandemic, 77 percent said that the event changed the country for the worse, and 45 percent said they feel less connected to friends and acquaintances compared with five years ago.

“Step one is more fully admitting that people are hurting, concerning young voters and all voters, particularly around the economy [and] inflation,” Smith said. “And that we’re doing something about it. That it’s not all roses, and communicating that really, really strongly: That we don’t think everything is great.”

Voters don’t care about Trump verdict

One way or the other, they’ve baked it in.

The NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist national poll showed 67 percent of registered voters nationally wouldn’t be swayed by a guilty verdict against Trump, while 15 percent said it would make them more likely to vote for him. Another 17 percent said a guilty verdict would make them less likely to vote for Trump…

Among Republicans surveyed in the poll, 25 percent said a guilty verdict would make them more likely to vote for the former president, while 10 percent said it would make them less likely to vote for him. Only 7 percent of Democrats said a guilty verdict would make them more likely to vote for Trump, and 27 percent said it would make them less likely to vote for Trump.

Among coveted independent voters, 15 percent said a guilty verdict would make them more likely to vote for Trump, and 11 percent said it would make them less likely. In contrast, 76 percent of all voters said a not-guilty verdict wouldn’t affect their votes.

Will Libertarians vote for Trump?

The Libertarian Party experienced a backlash to the dominance of the Mises Caucus in recent years in the form of a decidedly left-libertarian candidate who favored government vaccine mandates, Covid lockdowns and was decidedly pro-BLM… turning him into yet another lefty spoiler for Joe Biden, instead of someone who could articulate an alternative liberty agenda to Donald Trump. So what does that mean for the fall?

Politico references Oliver’s description of himself as “armed and gay” and reports “his foray into politics came as an anti-war protester in the early 2000s, and… he plans to target young voters angry about the Israel-Hamas war on college campuses, Twitch and TikTok.” Oliver has also expressed support for Drag Queen Story Hour, which he says is “like the Wiggles,” is pro-Black Lives Matter, supports gender-dysphoric children taking puberty blockers and hormones and undergoing facial feminization surgeries — and advocates for open borders policies. 

Some members of his own party don’t seem super keen on Oliver’s candidacy, however. Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported that the Libertarian Party had planned to have Trump headline their national convention this month; 45 was then “booed and heckled” at the event. Prominent libertarian Jeremy Kauffman even held up a sign during Trump’s speech declaring, “MAGA = Socialist.” But when the Libertarian Party announced Oliver as their candidate, Kauffman labeled him “a gay race communist” and pledged his support to Trump. Clint Russell, the host of the Liberty Lockdown podcast, similarly said, “I just want to make this very clear: Chase Oliver does not represent most libertarians and very few of us will be supporting him come November.” Former Libertarian Party presidential nominee Austin Petersen asserted, “Chase Oliver is the best Libertarian Party candidate for helping reelect Donald Trump.”

One more thing

The burgeoning RFK campaign handed in more than three times the necessary signatures to make the ballot in New York state this week and is creeping closer to the qualifications previously announced by CNN for their June 27 debate. These qualifications, which include making it to 15 percent in four quality national polls (RFK has already done this three times) and making it onto the ballot in enough states to win 270 electoral votes (he’s hovering around 200 at the moment) are obviously random and determined by CNN itself — but RFK is advancing the novel argument that these standards might amount to a contribution in-kind to the Trump and Biden campaigns if he is denied entry. It’s not an argument that’s likely to pass muster, but it is another reminder of how corrupt the old now-dead approach of the Commission on Presidential Debates was, as they set similar barriers in place without ever acknowledging them. And if RFK can’t make the June debate in time, he’ll absolutely qualify for the next scheduled debate at least on paper, which means… they’ll probably change the rules to keep him out. Defenders of Democracy, unite!