Palmetto Political Stock Index: 8/20/2023

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Christmas is still more than four months away, but for political junkies across the nation something akin to it is coming this Wednesday evening in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

This week’s Republican presidential debate – the first of the 2024 cycle – marks the initial thrust of the proverbial winnowing fork within the field of GOP hopefuls.

Who will enjoy a breakout moment? Who will fall flat? Who has the most to gain? The most to lose? And perhaps the biggest question of all: Can any Republican emerge as a viable alternative to presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump?

Clearly there’s a reservoir of support out there for such an alternative … but which candidate can tap into it? And can they tap into it in time to make a difference?

Breaking down big moments like this is why we publish the Palmetto Political Stock Index …

FITSNews founding editor Will Folks and political columnist Mark Powell assemble this index each week – tracking the rising and falling fortunes of individuals and institutions as well as the interplay of state and national politics in our early-voting South Carolina home, which quadrennially hosts the “First in the South” presidential primary.

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Beyond the big debate – set to begin at 6:00 p.m. EDT on Fox News – what else is on tap in this week’s index?

Biden befuddled as Maui burns …

Another round of Trump indictments …

A Nikki Haley scandal no one is covering …

Once again, our index is simply an assessment of how those discussed herein fared over the past week. Positive reports certainly don’t reflect endorsements, while negative ones shouldn’t be construed as vendettas. We just call ‘em like we see ‘em. To borrow Walter Cronkite’s famous line, “That’s the way it is …” No more, no less. 

Also, just because your favorite (or least favorite) politician didn’t wind up on this week’s list doesn’t mean we aren’t tracking them. Look for them in future indices … and, of course, you can check prior installments to see how we’ve covered them in the past. To view last week’s edition, click here. And to get your historical fix, click here.

Got a hot “stock tip” for our consideration? Email Will (here) and/ or Mark (here). Just make sure to include “Palmetto Political Stock Index” in the subject line.

Where should you invest your political capital this week? To the index!

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JOE BIDEN

STOCK: FALLING

They say Nero fiddled while Rome burned. As Hawaii’s beautiful island of Maui was going up in flames during America’s deadliest wildfire in more than a century last weekend, Joe Biden did Nero one better. He was a beach bum in Delaware as scores of people were dying on the other side of the country.

Just when it seemed the optics couldn’t get any worse for him, Biden found a way. Asked about the tragedy last Sunday, he coldly told a reporter, ” no comment.” He later took a break from a bike ride (the wisdom of a soon-to-be 81-year-old cycling is another question for another time) and spoke with a different reporter – but brushed off the catastrophe by saying his administration was “looking into it.”

On top of all that, during a speech in Milwaukee on Tuesday, Biden mentally groped for an uncomfortable minute as he forgot Maui’s name, referring to the island as the “big one … not the one you see on television all the time.”

This is the chief executive of your government in a crisis, people. A crisis which, when all is said and done, could wind up with a death toll in the hundreds (as of this writing, more than 1,000 people remained unaccounted for in the aftermath of the blazes).

The White House finally announced Biden will visit Maui tomorrow. Let’s hope they remember to take the teleprompter with them.

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DONALD TRUMP

STOCK: RISING

It’s amazing how quickly people adapt to changing realities. The nation was shocked back in March when a former U.S. president was charged with a crime for the first time in history. But when the fourth case against Donald Trump was announced in Atlanta last Wednesday, the country gave a collective shrug.

Trump faces an onslaught of prosecutions from midtown Manhattan, down to D.C., on to Florida, and now over to Atlanta – yet he soars higher than ever in the polls (at least among Republicans). Consider the RealClearPolitics composite polling updated this weekend. It showed Trump leading his nearest Republican rival, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, by a whopping 40.5 percentage points nationally. That’s his largest margin since RCP began tracking the 2024 GOP campaign.

At this point, anyone who doesn’t believe the charges piling up against Trump are politically motivated will have no trouble believing in pixies, Peter Pan and perpetual motion. As a lawyer in Georgia told us last week after reading through the new indictment, “I’ve seen slices of Swiss cheese with fewer holes in them than this case has.”

Trump is drawing some fire for reportedly opting to skip Wednesday’s GOP presidential debate in favor of doing an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson instead. But if years of watching Donald Trump have taught us anything, it’s that he’s quite capable of changing his mind at the last minute.

Still, when you’re riding as high in the polls as Trump is these days, you can afford to have the race’s supporting cast beat up on you in absentia.

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RON DeSANTIS

STOCK: FALLING

We’re getting very close to being able to officially call it: Ron DeSantis is turning out to be the biggest flop since New Coke. So much has gone so wrong for Florida’s governor since he announced his presidential bid it’s hard to know where to start.

Let’s first look at the numbers – which are not pretty for the team from Tallahassee. According to the aforementioned RealClearPolitics composites, DeSantis has dropped down to 14.3 percent nationally. Making matters worse, one full month has passed since any poll showed him at or above 20 percent … and even that number was well below earlier readings.

Last week the wheels continued coming off with a debate memo leak. A strategy document to prepare DeSantis for Wednesday’s big encounter made its way into the hands of the always-friendly New York Times. It offered advice that was so bad one wonders whether it was intended for use by a presidential candidate or someone running for high school class president.

The memo urged DeSantis to defend Donald Trump and instead focus his attacks (“take a sledgehammer to” was the way the memo put it) entrepreneur Vikek Ramaswamy by smearing him as “Fake Vivek” or “Vike the Fake.” Seriously, that amateurish level of “advice” is more worthy of a candidate running for the Mayberry Town Council.

Still, there were fresh reasons for the DeSantis faithful to remain hopeful late last week. The governor gave a speech in Nashua, N.H. Friday night that was a marked departure from his past performances. Gone was the litany of Sunshine State policy achievements he had rattled off like bullet points. In its place was a warmer, far more personal presentation filled almost exclusively with anecdotes from his life. In short, Ron DeSantis was (finally) telling voters about Ron DeSantis. And that audience, at least, loved it.

One good night does not a turaround make. Could it be the first act in what might eventually become the greatest comeback story in political history? Or is it the first last gasp of a dying campaign?

As they always do, future indices will tell the tale …

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MIKE PENCE

STOCK: HOLDING

He served four years as vice president of the United States, yet his support among the GOP electorate remains mired in the mid-single digits. Ouch! Still, Mike Pence did make the cut for the first GOP debate this Wednesday – and it was revealed late last week he cleared an even higher hurdle established by the Republican party for the second debate, scheduled for September 27, 2023 at the Ronald Reagan presidential library in Simi Valley, California.

Accordingly, Pence gets a “holding” rating this week.

The 48th vice president has yet to indicate he has anything resembling a path to relevance – let alone a path to victory in a presidential election. Still, he’s staying in the mix.

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NIKKI HALEY

STOCK: FALLING

The self-proclaimed hardest-working candidate in presidential politics has some explaining to do … or at least she would have some explaining to do if the mainstream media bothered to grill her about what should be a major scandal.

No, no, no … not that.

It turns out Haley’s husband, Michael Haley, is in line to make major bank off of her incessant neoconservative saber-rattling. It’s a long, complicated affair that involves an undefined ownership interest in a shadowy defense subcontracting firm – all of which was reported a week ago by William Bredderman of The Daily Beast.

You can read our take on it here …

The gist? Haley’s husband – who seems to always find himself on the receiving end of once-in-a-lifetime business opportunities – is part of of a defense subcontracting firm applying to export military hardware (specifically military vehicles) to Taiwan. Why is that important? Because Haley is using her presidential campaign to call for equipping Taiwan with these vehicles as part of her ongoing bid to start World War III somewhere … anywhere.

Who else covered this story? Hardly anyone, it seems.

Haley the perpetual warmonger may have dodged scrutiny of this scandal from the press … but will her GOP opponents give her a pass on it this Wednesday on the debate stage?

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PERRY JOHNSON

STOCK: RISING

Perry Johnson was practically giddy last Friday night. The Michigan businessman-turned-Republican presidential candidate’s campaign issued a news release which glowingly announced he had met the qualifications to participate in Wednesday night’s debate.

So if a friend texts you during the debate asking, “Who’s that guy on stage who looks like a cross between comedian Martin Short and TV preacher Joel Osteen?” you’ll know what to tell them.

A 30-year veteran in the quality standards field with a degree in mathematics (“I’m kind of a math junkie,” he tells interviewers), Johnson has never held political office, making him the outsiders’ outsider. These days he’s pushing his “Two Cents to Save America” – which would cut two cents from every dollar of federal discretionary spending in order to end inflation and lower the national debt.

Still, you’ll want to remember Perry Johnson’s name; it will likely be the answer on a Trivial Pursuit card one day. 

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THE NON-TRUMP GOP PRESIDENTIAL FIELD

STOCK: HOLDING

“When I hear your new ideas, I’m reminded of that ad: ‘Where’s the beef?’”

“I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

“Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”   

What do those zingers have in common? Each one enabled the candidates who spoke them to catch lightning in a bottle and be heard above the herd. And as you read this right now, campaign staffers for all the Republicans who will be taking the stage in Milwaukee on Wednesday are frantically pounding away at their keyboards, trying to come up with a new one – a memorable moment that will be the night’s big takeaway.

The first debate of presidential candidates for the party out of power marks the start of a new phase in the contest. Typically, it is the political version of an old-fashioned coming-out ball where debutantes were presented to high society’s would-be suitors (voters being the suitors).

But there is nothing typical about this election cycle. And so the stakes in this encounter are way, way higher than usual. The field had early hopes and dreams of toppling Trump; so far, all have failed.

Now they’re hoping for 15 seconds of magic, that dash of political razzmatazz that will have the rest of us talking about it for days. The only problem is that everyone on that stage will be trying to for the exact same thing. You’ll be able to smell the reek of desperation all the way down here in South Carolina.

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CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’

STOCK: RISING

By far, the most fascinating bit of political intrigue last week involved a trio of Golden State political figures. And it’s too good not to share here.

It all originated with an editorial in the Los Angeles Times. Democrats, it would appear, have two big headaches from California. They’re named Diane Feinstein and Kamala Harris. Feinstein has served in the Senate since 1992. But time and advanced age have caught up with her. Now 90, wheelchair-ridden and in declining mental and physical health, her many absences are causing serious problems for Chuck Schumer and his Democratic Caucus. As for the train of disasters that is Harris, suffice it to say the Veep is a political albatross around her party’s neck.

The solution? Persuade Feinstein to resign and have California governor Gavin Newsom appoint Harris to replace her. While that would take a heap of persuading for Harris, it would ultimately come down to Biden. Other presidents have made their VPs walk the re-election plank. (Think Gerald Ford giving the heave-ho to Nelson Rockefeller in 1976; FDR telling “Cactus Jack” Garner and left-wing looney Henry Wallace to take a hike in 1940 and 1944, respectively; heck, even Abe Lincoln got rid of Hannibal Hamlin for Andrew Johnson in 1864. So it can be done.)

Now here’s where it really gets interesting: The Machiavellian among us speculate with the vice presidency suddenly open (for in this scenario, Harris would have to step down from the office), Biden could then appoint as her replacement—wait for it—Gavin Newsom! 

He’s a pinup boy for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, his age (55) would seem downright youthful compared to Biden’s soon-to-be 81, and his presence as running mate would give the Democratic ticket a desperately needed dose of enthusiasm and excitement (Newsom’s appointment as vice president, incidentally, would require the approval of the Senate, which Democrats control by the narrowest of margins).

Will any of this happen? Probably not, but national Democrats are salivating at the prospects …

ALAN WILSON

STOCK: RISING

Our previous index mentioned South Carolina attorney general Alan Wilson would be celebrating his birthday with a big bash in Columbia, S.C. Well, the turnout at Thursday evening’s gathering was jaw-dropping. 

Several hundred people streamed through the three-hour get-together to share their best wishes with the general. There was a cadre of current and past attorney general’s office staffers, state legislators, sheriffs, solicitors, lobbyists and journalists (with the founding editor of this publication among the attendees). There was also the obligatory bevy of D.C. politicians, including South Carolina congressmen Russell Fry, Ralph Norman, William Timmons, and of course, the guest of honor’s dad, Joe Wilson.

The love wasn’t limited to the Palmetto State, either. Rumor had it no fewer than seven attorneys general from other states attended the party.

The AG seemed to be immensely enjoying himself, beaming throughout the evening like a kid turned loose in a candy shop. 

Two things stood out about the gathering. First, a wellspring of genuine affection for Alan Wilson runs deep throughout the ranks of South Carolina Republicans. But even more striking was the large number of attendees from opposite ends of the GOP ideological spectrum: both hardcore MAGA-philes and establishment Republicans. 

Republicans may be at war with each other in the Palmetto State, but leaders of both camps seem to genuinely like Wilson – who has done a skillful job of staying in everyone’s good graces.

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