Principals

☞ White House: The Biden campaign is making its first big on-air splash with a $25 million TV campaign to sell voters on the economy and President Biden’s record. The team’s first ad buys are in Hispanic and African American media, including a specific push for Hispanic voters in Florida.

☞ Senate: Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, who is deciding whether to seek another term in what could be a difficult primary, told the Wall Street Journal that breaking with his own party isn’t “like sitting alone in high school in the cafeteria.” He’s the only Republican who voted to convict Trump in both of his impeachment trials and pointedly did not endorse fellow Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah last year.

☞ House: Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s district is in the pathway of Tropical Storm Hilary. He encouraged residents to “stay safe and remain vigilant.” House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky. told Fox News he is prepared to go to court to gain access to bank records sought in his Biden family investigation.

☞ Outside the Beltway: Iowa’s “gold standard” poll is out this morning and it’s more of the same for the GOP field. Trump gets 42% in the NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll, followed by Ron DeSantis with 19% and Tim Scott at 9%. Don’t be surprised if there are some big swings later, though: Only 40% of likely Republican caucusgoers say their mind is made up.

Trump is (mostly) skipping this week’s debate

Donald Trump is now officially bowing out of the first GOP debate in Milwaukee later this week, but his team is planning a blitz of sorts to keep him in the mix.

The Trump campaign intends to have surrogates in the “Spin Room” after the debate, including Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Byron Donalds, Matt Gaetz, Carlos Gimenez and former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. Some of Trump’s most senior aides — Chris LaCivita, Jason Miller, and Steven Cheung — will also be in town, and have plans to attend the debate, two sources familiar with the planning told Semafor. (Exact details are still being sorted out.)

The other campaigns are hoping Trump pays a price for dodging the debates. A new poll shared exclusively with Semafor from Firehouse Strategies, a bipartisan public affairs firm, found that 66% of GOP voters want Trump to participate, including an even higher 77% of his supporters in the primary. And 71% also said it was important for candidates to sign a “loyalty pledge” to support the eventual nominee, a prerequisite to attend the debates that Trump has not completed.

That said, the same poll’s horse race numbers reinforced Trump’s public explanation for skipping out: He received support from 50% of Republican respondents, well ahead of second-place DeSantis’ 16%, and third-place Ramaswamy’s 9%.

— Shelby Talcott and Kadia Goba

Punchbowl News: The divide in the Republican Party over Ukraine assistance will be on display at Wednesday’s debate, which could offer clues as to how the next aid request to Congress will go.

Playbook: Vice President Kamala Harris says she faces more media scrutiny than past vice presidents. She also sees one of her roles as making sure there aren’t people “spreading bullshit in the Oval Office,” according to Ron Klain.

The Early 202: Even though Trump won’t be on the debate stage this week, how to deal with the former president will be on the top of other candidates’ minds — both those hoping to directly appeal to his voters and those planning to criticize him.

Axios: Speaking of debate strategy, DeSantis’ team is expecting the night to be a “dog-pile on Ron” from other candidates looking to knock him out — but say DeSantis intends to stay above the fray and focus on Biden.

What Biden will say in Hawaii

President Biden and first lady Jill Biden will interrupt their vacation in Lake Tahoe to fly to Maui today to meet with local officials, first responders, and survivors and get a firsthand look at the damage. Biden will name FEMA’s Robert Fenton, who previously served as the White House’s monkeypox response coordinator, as the long-term federal response coordinator for Maui.

• Biden has faced criticism from Republicans for being slow to comment extensively on the tragedy, and this trip will give him the opportunity to show the public that Hawaii is front of mind for him. “I do think that the president has a little bit of catching up to do here, but he can do it,” Bill Galston, chair of the Brookings Institution’s governance studies program and a former Clinton domestic policy aide, told Semafor.
• Biden will also try to assure Lahaina residents that they’ll have a voice in rebuilding the historic community, amid rising concerns that big developers could swoop in to take advantage of the destruction. “He’s going to be able to reassure the people of Maui that the federal government is there to support them, but we’re doing it in a way that’s going to allow them to rebuild the way they want to rebuild,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said Sunday on CNN.
• The federal government has sent FEMA crews as well as FBI, Defense Department, and Health and Human Services officials to Hawaii to help with the recovery efforts and identify the deceased.
• Over 1,000 people are still unaccounted for, according to Hawaii’s Democratic Gov. Josh Green, who said on CBS that it could take weeks to comb over the remaining 15% of land impacted by the fire that hasn’t yet been searched.
• FEMA will have to balance the wildfire recovery with Tropical Storm Hilary’s impact on California. The Biden administration has already made a request for supplemental disaster assistance as part of a $40 billion package that includes Ukraine aid, but more is expected to be needed for Maui.

— Morgan Chalfant

In Georgia, Republicans imagine a 2024 race without Donald Trump

ATLANTA, Ga. — It was Erick Erickson’s party, and Donald Trump was not invited.

Most of the Republicans who’ll head to Wednesday’s debate in Milwaukee made it to The Gathering, an annual conservative conference in Atlanta organized by the Georgia radio host and former Red State editor. Erickson, who barred Trump from “the stage I paid for” eight years ago after he made misogynist comments about Megyn Kelly, didn’t bother negotiating with Trump’s team.

“We needed to hear from all the candidates, and we didn’t need to hear about President Trump,” Erickson said after his last interview wrapped. “We know what they’re going to say. We know what he’s going to say.”

It took some work — Erickson had to steer the conversation away from the former president’s indictments at one point — but he managed to make good on his promise to focus on other topics.

So what did they have to say? The Trump-free field promised to win “economic independence from China” (Vivek Ramaswamy), fire Fed chair Jerome Powell (Mike Pence), kill drug traffickers “stone cold dead” (Ron DeSantis), and “clean out all the political appointees” undermining conservative goals in the federal bureaucracy (Tim Scott).

There wasn’t much disagreement on policy, though Chris Christie said any Republican who wouldn’t confront entitlement spending was being dishonest with voters, and that he was “not giving away Taiwan to China” — a reference to a recent interview where Ramaswamy said America’s interest in Taiwan ended when “we have achieved semiconductor independence.”

To read more, including Shelby and David’s View, click here.

Hunter Biden’s legal limbo

This weekend saw a flurry of deeply reported stories recapping how the Hunter Biden plea deal came together and then collapsed. We’re going to do our best to save you 10,000 words: Politico focused on how Biden’s defense team sought to make the case to prosecutors that any charges would appear politically motivated by bringing up Trump’s public demands to investigate Hunter. They even threatened to call President Biden to testify in their defense as a fact witness in a trial. The New York Times reported that David Weiss, the U.S. attorney overseeing the case who has since been named special counsel, initially leaned against pressing charges, but grew more aggressive in plea discussions as I.R.S. whistleblowers and House Republicans publicly criticized his work (although one senior law enforcement official denied the two developments were connected). Separately, the Washington Post dug into Weiss’ career in Delaware and his little-known relationship with the late Beau Biden. The two collaborated when Weiss was the acting U.S. attorney in Delaware and Biden was the state’s attorney general.

— Benjy Sarlin

Pay to play?

Vivek Ramaswamy has said privately that Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy told him to buy more ads if he wanted better coverage on the network, sources told Semafor’s Max Tani and Shelby Talcott. Newsmax denied any “quid pro quo,” but it’s notable that near-unknown businessman Perry Johnson has received some favorable attention for his own presidential campaign while paying for ads.

The most and least safe cities, according to Americans

Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York rank lowest in a new Gallup survey of cities that Americans perceive as the safest to live in across the U.S. Only 26% of respondents rated Detroit as safe — about the same percentage that said so the last time the survey was taken in 2006. Twenty-seven percent said so of Chicago (the site of the 2024 Democratic National Convention), which has seen a 20-point drop in the percentage of Americans calling the city safe since 2006. Detroit and Chicago have some of the highest homicide rates, though both cities have recently reported declines in violent crime, while New York has relatively low murder rates despite a well-publicized pandemic spike in crime that may be subsiding. Dallas ranked as the safest city in the poll, despite police reporting an increase in violent crime in the city at the start of the year. Washington, D.C. is in the middle of the pack and seen as much safer than it was in 2006 even as the city endures a major increase in murders. The poll is not exhaustive and does not include some cities with high murder rates like St. Louis and Baltimore.

— Morgan Chalfant

Stories that are being largely ignored by either left-leaning or right-leaning outlets, according to data from our partners at Ground News.

WHAT THE LEFT ISN’T READING: Biden is renting a vacation home in Lake Tahoe from Tom Steyer, the billionaire Democrat climate activist who unsuccessfully ran for president in 2020.

WHAT THE RIGHT ISN’T READING: The Justice Department classified the suicide of Jeffrey Smith following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol as a death in the line of duty, meaning his wife is eligible for a new federal benefits program.

Chuck Grassley is a Republican senator from Iowa.

• The nonfiction hitmaker Michael Lewis has made a career of minting ordinary heroes. Then he introduces them to his speaking agent.
• Alan Shaw had been CEO of Norfolk Southern for just nine months when a train derailed and dumped toxic chemicals in Ohio. He talked to Liz Hoffman for the latest installment of Semafor Business’s new interview series.
• TikTok has become a launching pad for new musicians around the world. Now it’s getting into streaming, with ambitious plans to rival Spotify and Apple Music — while also working with them.