1. Nikki Haley kept running long after it was clear she didn’t have a shot. But this morning, the former South Carolina governor — and only woman to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 — will end her yearlong bid, ceding the GOP nomination to Donald Trump. Haley’s departure follows a brutal series of losses in states across the map on Super Tuesday, where she failed to halt Trump’s momentum. And it marks the end of what remained of the GOP’s nominal attempt at soul-searching this presidential cycle, when few of the dozen candidates who signed up to run against Trump would dare to take him on directly. (Source: politico.com)
2. With the last embers of the Republican primary extinguished after Super Tuesday, the country is lurching into a new phase in the 2024 presidential election: a one-on-one matchup between President Biden and former President Donald Trump that is unlike any other contest in modern history. Never has America had to choose between two candidates so old, and never in modern times has the choice been between two so strongly disliked hopefuls who both are essentially running as incumbents, already having established White House track records. (Source: wsj.com)
3. Donald Trump’s sweep through Tuesday’s Republican primaries….erases any lingering doubt that a Republican Party long-defined by allegiance to Ronald Reagan’s world view has been transformed into a party singularly dominated by Trump’s. Having won nearly every 2024 GOP primary and caucus, Trump is on the cusp of clinching his third consecutive presidential nomination. He’s likely to achieve that in next week’s round of primaries. “When a party nominates somebody three times in a row, it’s not a fluke or an accident — it’s because the party belongs to him,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist and veteran of Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign. Read the rest. (Source: bloomberg.com)
4. “Uncommitted” took plenty of votes in Minnesota. President Biden, who faces less prominent challengers, continued to win by larger margins than Trump. But as in Michigan last week, he ceded significant votes to such options as “uncommitted.” That option was getting nearly 20 percent of the vote in Minnesota with about 85 percent of the vote counted, after pro-Palestinian activists sought to turn it into a protest vote again. The uncommitted share in Minnesota should wind up being larger than it was in Michigan (13 percent) despite a less-robust effort — and despite Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) taking another 8 percent. Biden’s current 70 percent overall share of the vote in Minnesota means it could be his lowest share in any state, apart from the 64 percent he took as a write-in candidate in New Hampshire. (Source: washingtonpost.com)
5. Nate Cohn:
The general election is about to begin. On paper, Mr. Biden ought to be the favorite. He’s an incumbent president running for re-election against the backdrop of a healthy enough economy, and against an opponent accused of multiple federal crimes. Yet according to the polls, Mr. Trump begins the general election campaign in the lead. Mr. Trump’s lead is modest but clear. Over the last four months, he has led nearly every poll in Michigan, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia, along with the states he carried in 2020 — enough to give him 283 electoral votes and the presidency. He also leads in most national polls over the last month, including a New York Times/Siena College poll last weekend. This is not what many expected from a Biden-Trump rematch, especially after Democrats were resilient in the midterms and excelled in special elections by campaigning on issues like democracy and abortion.
But Mr. Trump is winning anyway, and there’s a simple reason: Mr. Biden is very unpopular. His job approval rating is stuck in the upper 30s, and voters simply don’t look upon him favorably the way they once did. Nearly three-quarters of voters, including a majority of Democrats, say he is too old to be an effective president.
6. Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell told lawmakers today that the central bank expects to cut interest rates "at some point this year," but not until policymakers have gained confidence the war on inflation is won. "If the economy evolves broadly as expected, it will likely be appropriate to begin dialing back policy restraint at some point this year," Powell said before the House Financial Services Committee. "But the economic outlook is uncertain, and ongoing progress toward our 2 percent inflation objective is not assured," Powell said. (Sources: axios.com, financialservices.house.gov)
7. Center for Immigration Studies:
Thanks to an ongoing Center for Immigration Studies Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, the public now knows that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has approved secretive flights that last year alone ferried hundreds of thousands of inadmissible aliens from foreign airports into some 43 American ones over the past year, all pre-approved on a cell phone app.
But while large immigrant-receiving cities and media lay blame for the influx on Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s busing program, CBP has withheld from the Center – and apparently will not disclose – the names of the 43 U.S. airports that have received 320,000 inadmissible aliens from January through December 2023, nor the foreign airports from which they departed. The agency’s lawyers have cited a general “law enforcement exception” without elaborating – until recently – on how releasing airport locations would harm public safety beyond citing “the sensitivity of the information.”
Now, though, CIS’s litigation has yielded a novel and newsworthy answer from the government: The public can’t know the receiving airports because those hundreds of thousands of CBP-authorized arrivals have created such “operational vulnerabilities” at airports that “bad actors” could undermine law enforcement efforts to “secure the United States border” if they knew the volume of CBP One traffic processed at each port of entry. (Source: cis.org/bensman)
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