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Benjy Sarlin Profile picture
Benjy Sarlin
@BenjySarlin
Washington Bureau Chief at @semafor. Hit me up at besarlin at gmail dot com.
7 subscribers
Sep 18 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
🟡NEW: JD Vance reopens the pre-existing condition debates

His NBC interview Sunday included several apparent references to Trump-era proposals to replace or pare back the ACA's protections for pre-ex conditions.

Why's that so notable? Trump has pointedly not said if he'd try to pass them again. If Vance is right, his new "concepts of a plan" may look like his old ones.

semafor.com/article/09/17/… FWIW, we asked Trump campaign about whether they'd rule out ideas like moving people with pre-existing conditions into a separate risk pool (a big 2017 GOP repeal/replace idea). No specifics, except to say the Trump and Vance "share the underlying principles of using more choice in the marketplace and efficiency as tools for better, more affordable health care."
Oct 6, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
🟡NEW: Team Trump readies attacks on RFK Jr. as internal polling finds him helping Biden, @ShelbyTalcott reports semafor.com/article/10/06/… “It’s single digits, but it’s enough where it counts to make a difference,” said one person familiar with internal Trump polling showing RFK Jr. helping Biden. semafor.com/article/10/06/…
Jun 15, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
"When your opponent is so popular the voters don’t care if he gets indicted, your problem isn’t the indictment. It’s his popularity." joshbarro.com/p/its-time-for… Chris Christie: Definitely a @semafor reader semafor.com/article/04/19/… ImageImage
Jun 14, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
All federal cases charged in DC: Illegitimate. A perfectly normal standard that wasn’t invented to rationalize a set of problems around one very specific person. It’s a natural evolution given his own legal issue, but the R argument has migrated from FBI being inherently illegitimate to just Americans on juries
Jun 12, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Big pivot from her prior statement, also maybe why you should not do statements before anything is known The Biden DOJ is launching its self-coup, we must prepare for our final battl—ah wait that looks kind of bad now that I see it
Jun 11, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
“He’ll implode on his own!” The entire basis for Trump’s appeal is “vote for me, it enrages all the right people.” The idea you can beat him by arguing — or worse, hoping it sinks in subconsciously — that “he’s made too many people mad, so we need someone new” seems transparently ludicrous.
Jun 7, 2023 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Obviously he's had a lot of time to stew on this, but as a reporter who was there this whole time..... Image 1) He did hit Christie in that debate! Repeatedly! In fact that was what half the attack was over, Christie called it a "drive by shot" paired with a "memorized 25 second speech" and said it was part of a practiced DC strategy. You can watch yourself.
May 8, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
One key here: He’s still using all the hedges about protecting benefits for current recipients rather than disavowing support for benefit cuts. That’s what R’s tried the whole Paul Ryan era, before Trump kicked the issue to the curb. “Trump used to support this thing I used to support, it was just what R’s did then” is a VERY different stance then “Trump used to support this thing that I support now and it’s wrong of him to attack it”
Apr 22, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Tough to tell who is going to win some kind of high-profile insult comedy fight between @dril and the 420 guy that also draws dramatically more attention to a campaign to break his business model, could go either way I mean sure it was clever on paper giving a reason for stuff like this to potentially end up in newspaper articles tomorrow, but will have to see how the back and forth goes
Apr 4, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I am amenable to “Trump is covered too much” critiques but I don’t know what exactly people are expecting on the day a former president and current 2024 frontrunner is arraigned in court See now we just disagree on this
Apr 3, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
It is kind of funny seeing so many people who at some point in 2016 were explicitly warning Trump would get into this exact kind of scenario 20x over, now incredibly upset at the terrible shocking precedent this scenario coming to pass will set “Don’t elect Trump because he will get into legal problems from some combination of his shady business, habitual lying, and serial philandering” was not some rare hot take on the GOP side in 2016
Mar 20, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Via @MTPFirstRead: If Jan 6 did not fundamentally change Trump’s polling — even in the short term — it seems kinda silly to speculate about the Manhattan DA case Trump’s polling story has been years of stability with R’s, D’s and everyone in between. People made their mind up many years ago on whether he’s a crook or a victim, specifics of one case (or more) probably aren’t going to matter much within that frame.
Mar 19, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Lol that passed quickly It’s like a toxic mix of inflammatory content from people I’ve never heard of and bad Reddit content lately
Jan 18, 2023 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
In all seriousness, this is (if true) the likely tipping point in the House. "Kevin McCarthy sent a dog-abusing swindler of disabled veterans to look after your small business" is the kind of thing that starts dragging down people beyond Santos.
patch.com/new-york/oyste… Side note, what did Roger Williams ever do to Kevin McCarthy?
Dec 15, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
. @ShelbyTalcott wrote a story earlier this month about how Trump's campaign doesn't seem to be doing much

semafor.com/article/12/08/…

Anyway, Trump teased a "MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT" and then launched a line of NFTs today Getting in just at the right time
Nov 3, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Stan Greenberg op-ed:"D's had so little credibility on crime that any message I tested this year ...ended up losing us votes, even messages that voters previously liked." prospect.org/politics/how-d… Core of Greenberg op-ed is that if you treat crime primarily as a political annoyance for two years, not a core issue you are out there solving, you can't just suddenly pivot to some nice poll-tested message a month before an election. prospect.org/politics/how-d…
Nov 1, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Finally looking inward, getting to the root of the problem Good for Steve Nash, though, seriously
Nov 1, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Verification was a lot less important when Twitter wasn’t where all news broke and was just a running conversation like Reddit. But once you make the news part your core product… If you believe there’s no difference between a random user, the NYT, and the “Santa Monica Observer,” in terms of news, then sure, make it a free-for-all. But there’s already social media sites for people who share that view and they’re not exactly profit machines right now.
Oct 31, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Seems the only two categories for a $20/mo blue check are "I have an employer who requires/expenses it" or "I am way too into Twitter in an off-putting way and want to advertise that fact" Anyway, the big plan to get rid of bots is to...make people voluntarily pay $240 a year to prove they're not a bot?
Sep 12, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Polls aren't only indicator something's up: Special elections, Kansas referendum, recent voter reg numbers, small donor fundraising, also things we know tend to benefits incumbents like falling gas prices. But even then, not sure how it all translates to midterm turnout. But the basic @Nate_Cohn point is important and (probably) internalized by everyone after two presidential cycles with catastrophic polling misses. Nobody should be surprised if things are very different on election day than they look in polls, especially in the midwest.
Aug 26, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Something to watch. The issue is making loan repayment terms easier for students to manage moving forward (good!) also provides universities an obvious incentive to raise prices absent some kind of mechanism that discourages them (bad!) It’s great that even a student with $100k in a debt can know that if they just pay 5% of their discretionary income under Biden’s plan, they’ll be able to manage it and build a career and family. It’s not great if the schools take that as invitation to put them $100k in debt.