Biden’s approval rating for the economy remains at about a third, poll finds

President Joe Biden’s “Bidenomics” remains a tough sell to the public so far, with a new poll showing that still just over a third of Americans approve of his handling of the economy.

A poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research published Thursday found only 36 percent of surveyed Americans approve of Biden’s handling of the economy — and only 42 percent approve of his overall performance.

The results are consistent with other recent polling on Biden's handling of the economy. Thirty-four percent of surveyed Americans approved of his handling of the economy in June, and that figure inched up to 37 percent approving in July.

In recent months, the Biden administration has hit hard the president’s economic policy, known as “Bidenomics,” amid falling inflation, steady job growth and diminished talk of a forthcoming recession. But it’s struggled to catch on, evidenced by the poll also finding that only 34 percent of surveyed Americans would describe the economy as very or somewhat good.

Twenty-three percent of Americans said they have a great deal of confidence in Biden’s ability to effectively manage the White House, while 31 percent had some confidence and 45 percent had hardly any.

Looking ahead to the 2024 presidential election, only 24 percent of surveyed Americans said they want Biden to run again and 30 percent said they want former President Donald Trump to run again.

The poll was conducted Aug. 10-14 among 1,165 adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.

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Kansas prosecutor says police should return computers and cellphones seized in raid on newspaper

MARION, Kan. — A Kansas prosecutor said Wednesday that he found insufficient evidence to support the police raid of a weekly newspaper and that all seized material should be returned in a dispute over press freedoms that the White House acknowledged it is watching closely.

“This admin has been vocal about the importance of the freedom of press, here and around the globe,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at her daily briefing on Wednesday. “That is the core value when you think about our democracy, when you think about the cornerstone of our democracy, the freedom of press is right there.”

She said the raid raises “a lot of concerns and a lot of questions for us.”

On Wednesday, Marion County Attorney Joel Ensey said his review of police seizures from the Marion County Record offices found “insufficient evidence exists to establish a legally sufficient nexus between this alleged crime and the places searched and the items seized.”

“As a result, I have submitted a proposed order asking the court to release the evidence seized. I have asked local law enforcement to return the material seized to the owners of the property,” Ensey said in a news release.

Even without the computers, personal cellphones and other office equipment taken in the raid, the small staff scrambled and were able to put out a new edition on Wednesday.

“SEIZED … but not silenced,” read the front-page headline in 2-inch-tall typeface.

Police raids on Friday of the newspaper’s offices, and the home of editor and publisher Eric Meyer put the paper and the local police at the center of a national debate about press freedom, with watchdog groups condemning the police actions. The attention continued Wednesday — with TV and print reporters joining the conversation in what is normally a quiet community of about 1,900 residents.

Meyer said all of the returned equipment will be forensically audited to make sure that nothing is missing or tampered with.

“You cannot let bullies win,” Meyer said. “And eventually, a bully will cross a line to the point that it becomes so egregious that other people come around and support you.”

The raids — which the publisher believes were carried out because the newspaper was investigating the police chief’s background — put Meyer and his staff in a difficult position. Because they’re computers were seized, they were forced to reconstruct stories, ads and other materials. Meyer also blamed stress from the raid at his home on the death Saturday of his 98-year-old mother, Joan, the paper’s co-owner.

As the newspaper staff worked late into Tuesday night on the new edition, the office was so hectic that Kansas Press Association Executive Director Emily Bradbury was at once answering phones and ordering in meals for staffers.

Bradbury said the journalists and those involved in the business of the newspaper used a couple of old computers that police didn’t confiscate, taking turns to get stories to the printer, to assemble ads and to check email. With electronics scarce, staffers made do with what they had.

“There were literally index cards going back and forth,” said Bernie Rhodes, the newspaper’s attorney, who was also in the office. “They had all the classified ads, all the legal notices that they had to recreate. All of those were on the computers.”

At one point, a couple visiting from Arizona stopped at the front desk to buy a subscription, just to show their support, Bradbury said. Many others from around the country have purchased subscriptions since the raids; An office manager told Bradbury that she’s having a hard time keeping up with demand.

The raids exposed a divide over local politics and how the Record covers Marion, which sits about 150 miles (241 kilometers) southwest of Kansas City.

A warrant signed by a magistrate Friday about two hours before the raid said that local police sought to gather evidence of potential identity theft and other computer crimes stemming from a conflict between the newspaper and a local restaurant owner, Kari Newell.

Newell accused the newspaper of violating her privacy and illegally obtaining personal information about her as it checked her state driving record online. Meyer said the newspaper was looking into a tip — and ultimately decided not to write a story about Newell.

Still, Meyer said police seized a computer tower and cellphone belonging to a reporter who wasn’t part of the effort to check on the business owner’s background.

Rhodes said the newspaper was investigating the circumstances around Police Chief Gideon Cody’s departure from his previous job as an officer in Kansas City, Missouri. Cody left the Kansas City department earlier this year and began the job in Marion in June. He has not responded to interview requests.

Asked if the newspaper’s investigation of Cody may have had anything to do with the decision to raid it, Rhodes responded: “I think it is a remarkable coincidence if it didn’t.”

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Federal judges agree to abortion pill restrictions, but the drugs remain legal for now

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday ruled that access to the abortion pill, mifepristone, should be sharply curtailed, ramping up the legal threat to the most popular method of ending a pregnancy.

The decision — if allowed by the Supreme Court to take effect — would roll back actions the federal government has taken since 2016 to make the pills more accessible, including rules allowing online ordering, mail delivery and pharmacy dispensing of the drugs.

Despite the appellate court’s ruling, there will be no change in how the pills are distributed until the Supreme Court revisits the issue, likely in 2024. But with bans in force in many states, the current patchwork of availability will continue.

Judge James Ho — appointed by former President Donald Trump — wanted to go further and strip FDA approval of the drugs, but he was overruled by his two colleagues. They said it's too late for anti-abortion groups to challenge the original approval given that the agency declared the drugs safe and effective more than two decades ago.

Though the decision has no immediate impact, the appellate court’s endorsement of conservatives’ bid to limit access to the abortion pill puts the medication in greater peril and could influence the Supreme Court when it hears the case.

The Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine — a coalition of anti-abortion medical groups that formed in Texas last year — challenged both the FDA’s original 2000 approval of mifepristone, arguing the agency didn’t adequately consider the drug’s safety risks, as well as later agency actions that loosened restrictions on the pills. The groups claim their physician members are harmed by the pills’ availability because they may at some point need to provide follow-up care for a patient who took them and had a complication.

Together with another drug, misoprostol, mifepristone is approved through 10 weeks of pregnancy, and is used in more than half of abortions nationwide.

The Biden administration and the pharmaceutical company Danco, which makes the drug, are defending federal regulation of the pills, pointing to their decadeslong safety record. They and other companies have warned that a win for the challengers would inspire copycat lawsuits targeting other drugs, such as Covid vaccines and contraception, and argued that treating rare complications is part of doctors’ jobs — not an infringement on their religious rights.

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No thanks, Joe: Britain won’t copy Biden’s IRA spending splurge

UK to focus on existing strategies in response to Biden “protectionism.”

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Tech lobbyists are running the table on state privacy laws

As Oregon lawmakers got ready to pass tough new digital privacy protections for their citizens this spring, they considered a major new approach to enforcement: giving citizens the right to sue companies for violations.

Consumer advocates, who had worked for three years to help draft the bill, saw it as a model for other blue states to follow, pushing back against an industry built on scraping and monetizing people’s data.

Their excitement didn’t last.

When debate on the bill finally kicked off this spring, the legislation was immediately set upon by the tech lobby. Representatives from TechNet, the Computer and Communications Industry Association and the State Privacy and Security Coalition successfully urged Oregon’s legislators to kill that key provision, known as a private right of action.

“It is frustrating for me as a legislator, learning that lobbyists in many cases win the day based on the information that they’ve provided to members and members not necessarily taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture,” the lead sponsor, Democratic Sen. Floyd Prozanski, said in an interview.

It’s not just Oregon. A POLITICO analysis of every state privacy law passed in 2023 shows that the tech industry has notched a steady series of wins. In Oregon and the six other states that passed legislation between January and July, lawmakers enacted bills that bore clear hallmarks of lobbying influence. If any legislation emerged that would impose stronger privacy protections, industry successfully watered it down.

“The tech lobbyists are kind of winning,” said Matt Schwartz, a policy analyst for Consumer Reports. “They’ve pretty much gotten their way.”

The tech lobby’s rash of state-level successes marks a turning point in America’s long-running fight over digital privacy protections. When California passed the nation’s first comprehensive data privacy law in 2018, lobbyists worried its strict protections would quickly spread to other states. But the tech lobby has instead run the table, pushing through industry-friendly laws in 11 states. The victories have come in both red and blue states, highlighting the tech industry’s sway. And to date, no state has followed California’s model.

“One thing that I think everyone assumed was going to happen when just California had passed a privacy law was that basically every other liberal state would pass a pretty similar law very quickly after,” said Ashley Johnson, a senior policy analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation think tank. “That hasn't really happened.”

The tech lobby is proud of its achievement. TechNet CEO Linda Moore said her group “worked hard to make sure” that the industry-friendly bill passed in 2021 by Virginia became the template nationwide. At an event held on Capitol Hill last month, Jordan Crenshaw, head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Technology Engagement Center, said that “with the exception of California, we've actually seen ... states pass privacy legislation that all tend to go around the Virginia model.”

The tech industry’s success in the states has also changed its calculus in Washington, D.C. After years spent bombarding Capitol Hill with warnings that a state-by-state privacy “patchwork” is untenable, lobbyists are now spending less time and money on Congress.

In lobbying disclosures for the first three quarters of 2022, NetChoice — a powerful tech group that counts Amazon, Google, TikTok and Meta among its members – listed “a national standard on privacy legislation” as one of its priorities. But that language disappeared from those forms in the last quarter of 2022 and has not reappeared.

Carl Szabo, general counsel at NetChoice, said his organization needed to channel its limited lobbying resources into statehouses. “That's where a lot of the time and energy ends up getting spent,” Szabo said. And it’s not just NetChoice. Graham Dufault, general counsel at ACT — The App Association, said his group is “spread thin” addressing the recent spate of state privacy bills.

Hayley Tsukayama, senior legislative activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights nonprofit, said the tech lobby may even be hoping to pass more industry-friendly state privacy laws before turning its full attention back to Washington. If the tech industry can reach critical mass in enough statehouses, it could “influence what a federal law may look like,” she said.

“They say they want a federal privacy bill, but I can’t imagine that they would make trouble for themselves where they don’t need to,” Tsukayama said.

Tech takes over the patchwork

The tech industry’s drive for a federal privacy law began immediately after the 2018 passage of the California Consumer Privacy Act, which tech lobbyists called unworkable and unduly burdensome. Industry launched a two-pronged approach to ensuring it didn’t catch on as a national model.

The first move was to urge Congress to pass a national data privacy law — one that would preempt all state laws to avoid a complex patchwork of rules that they warned could cost businesses as much as $1 trillion. That number was based on a study released by ITIF, which often promotes policies that conform with industry interests.

The second strategy was quieter, but just as dedicated. It started after it became clear a quick fix from Capitol Hill wasn’t coming, with the two parties stuck in a debate over whether to preempt state privacy laws and allow people to sue companies for violations.

As Congress dithered, the tech industry was forced to play defense in the states.

An opportunity to counter California’s privacy rules arrived with Virginia in 2021, where the state’s Consumer Data Protection Act had the tech industry’s fingerprints all over it. The first draft of the bill was written by an Amazon lobbyist, and input on how to implement the law came from industry groups like CCIA and SPSC.

Virginia’s rules soon became the model for state privacy regulations, finding their way into nearly every law that later passed. States would have different variations — but ultimately, the tech industry was setting its own bar for privacy rules across the country.

“Industry has an inordinate amount of influence on what happens in these bills,” said Schwartz. “The reality is, we’re working off a model in many of these states that was introduced by Amazon.”

Additional successes in places like Colorado, Utah and Connecticut gave the tech lobby an even greater edge. It could now point to a growing body of industry-friendly laws and warn state legislators that deviating from those templates would cause chaos for businesses operating across state lines.

“Even minor statutory divergences between frameworks can create onerous costs,” said Khara Boender, CCIA’s state policy director, in her June testimony on Delaware’s privacy law.

Connecticut’s approach became the favored one for the tech lobby following its passage of a privacy law in 2022. While slightly stronger than Virginia’s law –—it gives people the ability to “opt out” of their data being processed for things like targeted advertising with a single click, for example — it was still mostly based on the Amazon-inspired legislation. And because it was somewhat stricter, lobbyists could successfully sell it to Democratic states like Oregon.

“Connecticut, being the strongest of the weaker bills, does appeal to some of the legislatures, where it’s like, ‘Well, this was clearly a good compromise,’” said Tsukayama.

Washington on the back burner

In a drab conference room tucked into a corner of the Rayburn House Office Building, Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) was begging a group of tech lobbyists to dial up pressure for a federal privacy bill.

“We need to make sure folks have a huge sense of urgency around this,” said DelBene, the chair emeritus of the moderate New Democrat Coalition, speaking at July’s relaunch of United for Privacy — a coalition of over two dozen tech groups that had reconvened to pressure Congress on a privacy bill.

From the sidelines of the meeting, some industry reps said it should not have taken them more than six months after the start of the new Congress to start beating the privacy drum.

Dufault admitted lobbyists should have pushed Congress on a privacy law “earlier and more often” in 2023. He said The App Association, which is funded in significant part by Apple, spent much of this year recovering from the “hangover” of last year's antitrust fight in Congress, where it devoted the bulk of its resources working to defeat bills that would have weakened Apple and Google’s power over the mobile app marketplace.

Early optimism that leaders on the House Energy and Commerce Committee would replicate a bipartisan deal negotiated last year on the American Data Privacy and Protection Act gave way to cynicism, after lawmakers failed to reintroduce the bill before the August recess.

The delay is in part a function of efforts by House Republicans, including Energy and Commerce Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), to renegotiate portions of last year’s privacy deal now that the GOP holds the majority. And although tech lobbyists continue to say that a federal privacy bill is urgently needed to preempt a patchwork of state laws, some are willing to wait on a better bill. While Moore broadly backed last year’s privacy deal in the House, the TechNet CEO now says she “generally" supports McMorris Rodgers’ effort to tweak the bill in a pro-industry direction.

Although tech lobbyists have largely dominated the privacy debate in state capitals, they’re not declaring victory — or giving up their quest for a federal standard.

“It definitely could’ve been worse,” said Dufault. “But we are definitely gearing up for major costs and major compliance issues that will nonetheless be high enough that we are highly motivated to get something done [in Congress].”

While admitting that some of his members aren’t particularly engaged in the push for a federal privacy law, Dufault said that could change if more state laws are enacted and companies start being pulled in conflicting directions.

Industry is also keeping a close eye on California, which has since passed another round of privacy rules that gives a state agency new rulemaking powers. After touting the tech lobby’s many statehouse wins at last month’s meeting, Crenshaw cautioned the assembled lobbyists about “what could go wrong,” including the emergence of an even stricter set of rules out of California or new rights for people to sue companies over privacy breaches.

But while lobbyists fret that their luck could still turn, privacy activists see few paths forward in the states — and are increasingly pessimistic about their ability to beat the tech industry.

“It’s bleak out here for consumer advocates,” Schwartz said.

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Mark Meadows seeks to move Georgia prosecution to federal court

Mark Meadows, who was Donald Trump’s chief of staff during the 2020 election and the ensuing efforts to overturn its results, is trying to transfer his Georgia state prosecution to federal court with the goal of having the charges against him dismissed.

In court papers filed Tuesday, lawyers for Meadows argued that the case against him should be moved out of Georgia state court so that Meadows can argue in federal court that he is immune from the prosecution under the U.S. Constitution. The charges against him, his lawyers said, amount to "state interference in a federal official's duties" in violation of the Constitution's supremacy clause. Meadows intends to file a separate request for "prompt dismissal" of the charges, his lawyers added.

Meadows is one of 19 defendants, including Trump himself, ensnared in the wide-ranging indictment unveiled on Monday night by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. The indictment alleges a sprawling "criminal enterprise" aimed at overturning the 2020 presidential election, and it details Meadows’ facilitation of Trump’s communications with Georgia state officials as Trump pressured them to upend the results. Meadows was charged with two felony counts: one for racketeering and another for soliciting a public officer to violate the oath of office.

“Mr. Meadows has the right to remove this matter,” Meadows’ team wrote Tuesday, referring to the legal term, "removal," used to designate the transfer of a case from state to federal court. “The conduct giving rise to the charges in the indictment all occurred during his tenure and as part of his service as Chief of Staff.”

Meadows is the first defendant to try to take the case federal, but others — including Trump — are expected to follow suit. A federal law, known as a “removal statute,” generally allows an “officer of the United States” facing charges in state court to transfer the proceedings to federal court if the alleged behavior falls under their governmental duties.

Some legal experts have argued that transfer in these circumstances is not appropriate because interfering with the results of an election does not count as conduct falling within an officer's official duties.

Meadows filed his motion in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, where his request was assigned to Judge Steve Jones, an Obama appointee.

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Trump indictment forces a GOP reckoning on 2020

Hours after being indicted for his attempts to overturn the election results in Georgia, Donald Trump signaled that he is going to re-litigate the matter once more. This time, it will be part of his campaign to win the presidency, not retain it.

Trump announced on his social media site that he would be holding a “major news conference” on Monday where he'd present a detailed and "irrefutable report” on voter fraud from three years ago.

The post had all the whiffs of a Four Seasons Total Landscaping moment. And it quickly transported the Republican Party right back to a conversation it studiously has tried to avoid for nearly three years.

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), campaigning at the Iowa State Fair on Tuesday, was asked if pressure Trump put on public officials in Georgia to overturn the election was “anti-American.” At a press conference the same day, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was also forced to field questions about the indictment. Both Republicans instead criticized what they described as a weaponization of the legal process.

Operatives within the party were less evasive. With Trump doubling down on his stolen-election rhetoric — and his decision to schedule a media event about it two days before the first Republican debate — the consensus was he is all but guaranteeing his GOP rivals would be forced to spend time on stage next week talking about an issue that continues to divide the party.

“This is Politics 303: Mind Games and How Campaigns Fuck With Other Campaigns,” said Dave Carney, a New Hampshire-based Republican strategist. “You do something, you make an announcement — they’re just trying to dominate the news going into the debate and get everyone to defend him.”

But, Carney said, it’s a terrible position to be in for anyone trying to win 2024 for Republicans. “If our party is talking about 2020, we’re going to lose,” he said.

For Trump’s rivals in the primary, there’s no avoiding the question now.

Pressed on whether he had listened to the recorded phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump urged the GOP election official to “find 11,780 votes,” Scott said, “Yes, but we just draw different conclusions.” He declined to answer whether he, as president, would have made the same request of Raffensperger.

DeSantis called the indictment “an example of this criminalization of politics.”

Trump’s opponents have every reason to be wary of the issue. Though election denialism may be fraught terrain for the party in a general election, in recent Republican primaries, the electorate has most often rewarded those who side with Trump on it.

After Trump’s defeat in November 2020, majorities of Republicans told pollsters they agreed with his claims that the election was stolen. And more recently, a New York Times/Siena College poll last month found three-in-four GOP primary voters said they thought Trump’s actions only reflected “his right to contest the election.”

Sarah Longwell, a Trump-averse Republican strategist who has chided his opponents in the field for not forcefully criticizing him, said focus groups she has conducted show Republican voters are divided on Trump’s 2020 election claims. But as much as half of the GOP primary electorate are fine with the idea of re-litigating the last presidential election, she said.

“Part of the reason he’s leaning into this with his press conference is he only wants people talking about this, and talking about him,” Longwell said. “The other candidates are going to have to talk about it, because it’s going to be the dominant issue in our politics. And it’s how Trump walks to the nomination.”

The problem, as Longwell and others surmise, is that stop-the-steal-style media events won’t do Trump or the party any favors in a general election with independent voters in swing states like Georgia and Arizona.

“Trump’s news conference Monday may set a record for the eyeroll emoji-use in iPhone and Android,” said Barrett Marson, a GOP strategist in Arizona. “Who’s going to believe this wacky bullshit?”

Trump’s revival of questions about the 2020 election represents a subtle but significant shift in his own messaging. Despite spending months after his November 2020 loss talking nonstop about the election being stolen from him, Trump so far in his 2024 bid had leaned less heavily on the issue.

The majority of his political operation's Facebook ads have focused on the notion that the rule of law has been corrupted because of the prosecutions of him, and his fundraising appeals have similarly focused on the current court cases against him, rather than 2020 results.

The X (formerly known as Twitter) account Trump Fundraising Emails, the which tracks all solicitations put out by the campaign, spotlighted just one message in the past three calendar years that explicitly said the 2020 election was "stolen." That came in late December 2022. By and large, the person who operates the account told POLITICO, the current focus of the Trump fundraising team is warning that prosecutors and the Biden administration's Department of Justice are trying to steal the next election.

The fallout from Trump recentering his message on an allegedly stolen 2020 election is already expanding beyond the presidential primary field, touching all corners of the GOP. Running in Senate primaries ahead of what are forecasted to be difficult races against Democratic incumbents in Montana, Ohio and West Virginia, GOP candidates Tim Sheehy, Bernie Moreno and Jim Justice quickly rushed to Trump’s defense on Monday and Tuesday.

Inside the Capitol on Tuesday, Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) claimed there was no way to be sure whether Trump won Georgia, as he has falsely asserted.

"I don't know. And the problem is, I don't think we'll ever know, because there were legitimate issues,” Griffith told a reporter.

In Georgia, in particular, the issue remains fiercely divisive in the Republican Party. Former chair David Shafer — one of the 19 who was indicted Monday — declined to run again. But other new leaders elected during the state GOP’s June convention are vocal defenders of Trump’s stolen election claims.

On the other side of the schism, Gov. Brian Kemp won his primary in a landslide over Trump-backed challenger David Perdue last year despite firmly rejecting Trump’s claims of a stolen election. On Tuesday, he hit back at the former president’s latest claims of a rigged contest in Georgia.

“The 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen,” Kemp wrote on social media. “For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward — under oath — and prove anything in a court of law.”

He reiterated that Georgia’s elections were secure and fair.

Few states have felt the consequences of Trump’s election fraud grievances more acutely than Georgia. Republicans there lost two Senate seats in a January 2021 runoff as Trump and his allies cast doubt on the legitimacy of the state’s election systems. And a third Republican running for Senate, Trump-endorsed Herschel Walker, lost his race in November 2022, even as Kemp and down-ballot GOP candidates cruised to victory.

“It’s not a winning message,” said Jason Shepherd, the former chair of the Cobb County, Ga., Republican Party. “It’s been shown to be a losing message.”

Kelvin King, a Republican who ran against Walker in the May 2022 Senate primary, said a key component of the GOP in Georgia starting to win big federal races again is moving on from allegiance to Trump and an obsession with stolen elections.

“I think it hurt Donald Trump,” he said. “And if we step backwards and lead with that same argument, we’re missing what’s on people’s minds.”

Steven Shepard and Sam Stein contributed to this story.

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