Welcome to Thunderdome. I celebrated the official expiration of the Commission on Presidential Debates on my Fox podcast this week, which you can listen to here. It’s a long overdue mercy killing of an institution that has repeatedly failed in its duties and due diligence, with their repeated lies about C-Span’s Steve Scully and his “hacked” Twitter account. Enjoy the ignominious end to this ludicrously overpowered commission. Now the Biden White House and the Trump campaign have agreed on at least two debates, one in June and another in September. There really ought to be August and October debates, too — but those will likely only happen if Team Biden thinks he can convince some voters at a low risk for his candidacy.

The big question is: why do this? And the answer is: because the campaign thinks he’s losing, and he needs to prove he can still hack it on stage with Donald Trump. Nate Silver runs through the likely reality:

Preferring fewer debates is a particularly bad sign given that 1) Biden is trailing in the race and therefore should want more chaos and variance and 2) that the debates went well enough for him last time. In fact, Biden was judged the winner of both debates against Trump in post-debate polls in 2020 — something that’s been a consistent pattern for Democrats in recent years; Hillary Clinton also won all three debates against Trump in overnight polls, for instance. (Although given that Clinton lost outright and Biden badly underperformed his polls in November 2020, perhaps we should treat those overnight polls with more skepticism.)

It may be — as Axios reported this week — that the White House is in denial about its position in the polls and therefore is incorrectly being too risk-averse. That would be bad enough. But it’s an even worse sign if the White House thinks its candidate has lost his fastball and has deteriorated as a debater versus four years ago.

So what are we to make of this new early debate scenario? For one, it could be read as an effort to allay Democrat fears pre-convention — the last realistic moment where Biden could be replaced on the ticket. For another, it could be driven by a belief that Trump has — despite his daily courtroom appearances — largely righted his ship, and a disruption is needed to put him off his campaign game. But most of all, this should just be read as playing a weak hand to the max. Biden can’t go along with the CPD because their timeline, moderators and priorities don’t line up with his. So instead he’s grasping at Jake Tapper and Dana Bash for help, which they are happy to offer.

This week the NFL announced that Christmas would find two football games broadcast exclusively on Netflix. It’s absurd that the current president and the former president are reduced to arguing on the third-ranked cable news network. Going around the CPD is a big deal. But it’s just a first step. We deserve more debates — and ones moderated by people who actually know a thing or two about what’s going on in America. 

What if a veep was a treasure chest?

When RFK Jr. named Nicole Shanahan as his running mate, plenty of people were skeptical. But given that most voters don’t vote based on the VP choice, I advocated for another perspective on the choice: namely, that by choosing someone with considerable wealth, RFK was ensuring his ballot access to a much higher degree than before. And sure enough, it worked:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate is making an $8 million cash infusion into their independent bid for the White House.

The contribution from Nicole Shanahan, which the tech attorney and entrepreneur announced at a comedy show and campaign fundraiser on Wednesday night in Nashville, Tennessee, is more than double what the campaign raised from donors in March, the latest month available for campaign financial disclosures.

“This isn’t just about funding our own campaign,” Shanahan said in a press release on Thursday. “We want to liberate presidential elections from the grip of the existing two-party duopoly, and revitalize American democracy.”

Campaign manager Amaryllis Fox Kennedy said that the new funding will cover all of the campaign’s ballot access expenses. As an independent campaign, Kennedy must collect signatures in each state to get his name on the ballot.

Shanahan’s investment comes at a crucial time for the campaign. Kennedy may be edged out of the first presidential debate in June. The debate, hosted by CNN, has a polling requirement of at least 15 percent in select surveys and requires candidates to be on the ballot in enough states to earn a majority of Electoral College votes by June 20, seven days before the debate.

Making the debate stage would seem to be a crucial step for RFK, who could now be on track to meet the CNN criteria and cause chaos between the two major party candidates. He needs to get 15 percent in four polls and be on enough ballots to get to 270 electoral votes — a more feasible goal now that he’s on the ballot in California and turned in double the required signatures in Texas.

Could Biden and Trump tie?

The presence of a third party effort makes it likelier:

It sounds outlandish. It was literally a plot point in HBO’s political satire, Veep. It hasn’t happened for 200 years, not since the House clawed the presidency from Andrew Jackson, who won the popular vote but didn’t manage to win over the Electoral College, and elected his opponent, John Quincy Adams — prompting a massive populist backlash that remade American politics.

And yet it’s an entirely plausible outcome once again, thanks to recent efforts that could lead to a scenario in which neither candidate makes it to that golden number of 270. If that comes to pass, the fallout could be just as existential as it was in 1824.

In Nebraska, Republicans are attempting to change the way the state awards its electoral votes; it’s one of only two states, along with Maine, that allocates electors by congressional district — meaning both candidates can pick up electoral notches in their belts. The liberal stronghold around Omaha reliably delivers one vote to Democratic candidates, but that would change if Republicans get their way; all of the bright-red state’s electors would go to Trump, tipping the already delicate Electoral College balance ever so slightly in his favor.

Adding to the equation, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign threatens to pull just enough votes to tip states like New Hampshire, Nevada and Michigan into Trump’s column. A 269-269 tie is not impossible to imagine, and for a party that has lost the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections, it may be the best avenue to victory, if the already uneven scales in the Electoral College don’t deliver a sufficient edge.

In the case of a tie, which hasn’t happened in exactly 200 years, the House decides the election, per the Twelfth Amendment, with each state delegation allotted one vote. Republicans currently control twenty-six House delegations. Democrats control twenty-two, and two others are tied.

We could be on the road to an unthinkable scenario: Democrats win the popular vote for the presidency and House, but Republicans return Donald Trump to the White House through the Twelfth Amendment mechanism.

It’s a good thing today’s House is so well-run and norm-based, without any partisan chaos!

Veepstakes in full gear

So difficult to gauge what Trump wants in a veep, but there’s definitely a sentiment that Governor Doug Burgum has moved up the list, while two senators, J.D. Vance and Tim Scott, are at odds with each other. 

Senator J.D. Vance’s surprise appearance at a Manhattan courthouse to support former president Trump, and his qualified answer about supporting the results of the 2024 election, show he’s challenging Senator Tim Scott as the Senate frontrunner to be Trump’s running mate in the fall.

GOP senators and strategists say it’s hard to predict whom Trump will choose, but they say Scott and Vance are viewed as the two most likely choices within the Senate GOP conference.

Vance and Scott are stepping up their efforts to grab Trump’s attention by staying close to his orbit and showing off their skills and loyalty.

Vance showed up Monday in Lower Manhattan to rip District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Trump as politically motivated and pan the judge’s handling of the trial as a “disgrace.”

He told Fox News host Martha MacCallum on Tuesday that he was there “to support a friend,” calling it a “very depressing way to spend five, six weeks of your life when you know that you’re innocent.”

He will also attend an intimate, high-dollar fundraiser with Trump in Cincinnati on Wednesday. Guests are being asked to contribute $50,000 per person to a joint fundraising committee for the occasion.

Scott, meanwhile, was scheduled to attend a high-dollar fundraising even for Trump in Manhattan on Tuesday, with tickets costing $100,000 and a photo and a seat in the VIP section costing nearly $900,000.

Scott will host a policy summit in Washington next month with major donors and power players including Ken Griffin, the founder and CEO of the investment fund Citadel; Bill Ackman, the founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management; Marc Rowan, the CEO of Apollo Global Management, and Tim Dunn, the founder of CrownQuest.

One more thing

There’s no love lost between Mitt Romney and Donald Trump, but in what can easily be considered an exit interview this week, Mitt argued that Joe Biden should hsve pardoned Trump for the sake of maintaining normalcy. “You may disagree with this, but had I been President Biden, when the Justice Department brought on indictments, I would have immediately pardoned him. I’d have pardoned President Trump. Why? Well, because it makes me, President Biden, the big guy and the person I pardoned a little guy.” For once, Romney has the right of it — politically, much as pardoning Trump might have angered Biden’s base, the effect it would have had would be eliminating the martyrdom complex that has elevated Trump to an easy second nomination for the presidency. If you truly wanted to prevent Trump’s return to the White House, a pardon would have done more to effect that result than the failed lawfare of the past two years. But then, this White House has never been able to see beyond the next chess move — or checkers, even.