PROGRAMMING NOTE:
There will be no podcast tomorrow (Thursday, October 26) due to scheduling conflicts. The podcast returns Friday.
Biden busts century old tradition, won’t place name on New Hampshire’s presidential primary ballot
President Biden is breaking with 100 years of tradition with the news that he won’t file to place his name on New Hampshire’s Democratic presidential primary ballot.
The Biden 2024 re-election campaign announced on Tuesday that the president will pass on filing, due to the pledge by the Democratic National Committee to discipline candidates who compete in unsanctioned primaries like the one New Hampshire is planning to hold next year.
“While the president wishes to participate in the Primary, he is obligated as a Democratic candidate for President to comply with the Delegate Selection Rules for the 2024 Democratic National Convention promulgated by the Democratic National Committee,” Biden 2024 campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez wrote in a letter to longtime New Hampshire Democratic Party chair Ray Buckley.
“In accordance with this guidance, Biden for President will refrain from submitting a Declaration of Candidacy for the Primary ahead of Friday’s candidate filing deadline for the Primary,” Rodriguez explained.
New Hampshire has held the first presidential primary in both major political parties’ nominating calendars for a century, and Iowa’s held the lead-off caucuses for the Democrats and Republicans for half a century.
But Democrats for years have knocked both Iowa and New Hampshire as unrepresentative of the party as a whole, for being largely White with few major urban areas. Nevada and South Carolina, which in recent cycles have voted third and fourth on the calendar, are much more diverse than either Iowa or New Hampshire. Nevada and South Carolina were added to the Democratic calendar nearly two decades ago to increase the diversity of the early states electorate.
Donald Trump Promises to Halt All Refugee Resettlement in Response to War in Middle East
Former President Donald Trump, the front-runner in the Republican presidential primary, is again promising to halt all refugee resettlement to the United States in response to war in Israel following terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas.
“A vote for crooked Joe is a vote to turn the United States into a hotbed for jihadists and make our cities into dumping grounds resembling the Gaza Strip,” Trump told voters in Derry, New Hampshire. “A vote for President Trump is a vote to … keep radical Islamic terrorists and their supporters the hell out of our country.”
According to Trump, he will reinstate a travel ban for “terror-afflicted” foreign countries while also pausing all refugee resettlement to the U.S.
“If you hate America, if you want to abolish Israel, if you sympathize with jihadists, then we don’t want you in our country, and you are not getting in,” Trump said.
The former president’s distinction to stop refugee resettlement altogether is significant, as fellow GOP presidential primary candidates have said they will oppose importing Palestinians from Gaza to the U.S. but have not commented on the federal government’s resettlement program.
Refugee resettlement also inevitably adds so-called “chain migration” to the U.S. as refugees secure green cards and, eventually, naturalized American citizenship. From there, they are able to sponsor an unlimited number of foreign relatives for green cards. About seven in ten legal immigrants arrive through chain migration every year.
In 2022 and 2021, President Joe Biden’s administration brought many refugees from Arab nations — those most likely to sympathize with Hamas — to the U.S.
For example, the Biden administration has resettled nearly 9,500 nationals from Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Yemen, Syria, and Sudan in the prior two fiscal years.