Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.
* Despite recent polling showing nearly 70% of Republican voters agreeing that Donald Trump won the 2020 race, reality be damned, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told NBC News, in reference to the former president, “Of course he lost.”
* The bad news for Sen. Jon Tester is that only two of his bills have become law this year. The good news for the Montana Democrat is that he’s had more legislative successes in 2023 than literally any other member of Congress, making him Capitol Hill’s most productive lawmaker ahead of his 2024 re-election race.
* In Iowa, Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson hosted a fundraising barbecue in Cedar Rapids yesterday, and seven GOP presidential candidates attended the event. As the Associated Press noted, none of the 2024 hopefuls referenced Trump’s criminal indictments, and “few even mentioned his name.”
* In his home state of Kentucky, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke at the annual “Fancy Farm Picnic” on Saturday, but the Republican faced some rather fierce booing from attendees, many of whom chanted “retire” during the senator’s comments.
* Robert Bigelow, the biggest individual donor to a group supporting DeSantis’ presidential bid, told Reuters late last week that he’s ending his financial support for the governor, and he won’t return unless the Floridian “attracts new major donors and adopts a more moderate approach.”
* Ahead of Trump’s appearance in Alabama on Friday night, the former president locked up endorsements from every GOP member of the state’s U.S. House delegation.
* Late last week, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie became the latest Republican presidential hopeful to make the trip to Ukraine to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
* Though I’m not altogether sure why, Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that he’s still weighing the possibility of a Democratic primary challenge against President Joe Biden, adding that he’d like to see others in the party “jump in” to the race. Phillips, a relatively low-profile three-term congressman, has not yet said what it is about the incumbent’s record that he doesn’t like. Since the dawn of the modern primary system, every incumbent president who faced a competitive primary challenge went on to lose the general election.