Elections DA - Georgetown 2024

Elections DA – GDS 2024
*NEG*
1NC – Biden
Biden wins now but it’ll be close – a policy miscalculation like the aff could reverse momentum
Dorn, Forbes, 6/4/24
[Sara, “Trump-Biden 2024 Polls: Here’s Who’s Winning In The 6 States That Will Decide The Election”, https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2024/06/04/trump-biden-2024-polls-heres-whos-winning-in-the-6-states-that-will-decide-the-election/?sh=5122b093213a]
Biden and Trump are in a closely contested rematch, with Trump leading Biden by 0.7 points nationally in a head-to-head contest, according to the Real Clear Politics’ average. Voters are historically disengaged in this year’s election, according to some polls, including an April NBC survey showing the share of voters who say they have high interest in this year’s contest reached a 20-year low. It’s unclear whether Trump’s conviction last week in Manhattan will significantly impact voter sentiment, though a string of polls that overlapped with the guilty verdict show Biden leading, despite most surveys prior to Trump’s conviction showing him with a slight edge. More than half of all independent voters want Trump to drop his 2024 campaign after the Manhattan jury found him guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted Friday and Saturday that also found 49% of Americans want Trump to end his campaign. The results are largely the same as before his conviction, however. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential bid is another wildcard in the race, with some polls showing him drawing more votes from Biden and others showing him hurting Trump more.
Strengthening IP protections leads to higher costs and stronger monopolies
Qureshi, Brookings senior fellow, 18
[Zia, 7/11/18, “Intellectual property, not intellectual monopoly”, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/intellectual-property-not-intellectual-monopoly/]
Yet the main features of today’s IP regime were established for a very different economy. Patent rules, for example, reflect the long-held assumption that strong protection provides an essential incentive for businesses to pursue innovation. In fact, recent studies by Petra Moser and Heidi Williams, among others, find little evidence that patents boost innovation. On the contrary, because they lock in incumbents’ advantages and drive up the costs of new technology, such protections are associated with less new or follow-on innovation, weaker diffusion, and increased market concentration. This has contributed to growing monopoly power, slowing productivity growth, and rising inequality in many economies over the past couple of decades.
Patents also invite considerable lobbying and rent-seeking. A majority of patents are used not to produce commercial value, but to create defensive legal thickets that can keep potential competitors at bay. As the system expands, patent trolling and litigation soar. Lawsuits by patent trolls comprise more than three-fifths of all lawsuits for IP infringement in the U.S., and cost the economy an estimated $500 billion in 1990-2010.
Plan’s unpopular - voters oppose monopolies and reduced competition from IP protections
Orth, YouGov director of Survey Data Journalism, 23
[Taylor, YouGov, “Most Americans oppose monopolies and support antitrust laws”, https://today.yougov.com/economy/articles/47798-most-americans-oppose-monopolies-and-support-antitrust-laws]
This year, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has stepped up its enforcement of antitrust laws, bringing major lawsuits against companies including Amazon, Google, and Meta. Recent YouGov polling finds that most Americans support antitrust laws and believe that penalties for violating them should be increased. The vast majority hold negative views of monopolies, and while most believe there is at least some competition within U.S. industries, more than one-third believe it is not enough. Americans are far more likely to believe stricter antitrust enforcement would help the U.S. economy rather than hurt it — and the same holds for views on the effects of stricter enforcement on consumers, workers, and small businesses. Large companies, on the other hand, are more likely to be thought to be hurt by such laws rather than helped.
When asked broadly, most Americans (67%) say it is a bad thing for a single company to dominate a market; just 6% say it is good, 16% say neutral, and 11% aren't sure.
Small companies are generally viewed by Americans as superior to big companies when it comes to their ethics, their treatment of employees, the quality of their products, and their impact on the environment. When it comes to consumer prices, however, Americans say by a margin of two to one big companies charge less than small companies.
Trumpian foreign policy causes global nuke war
Beres 23 – Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue.
Louis René Beres, “If Trump Returns as President: An Existential Threat to the United States,” Modern Diplomacy, 3 March 2023, https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2023/03/03/if-trump-returns-as-president-an-existential-threat-to-the-united-states/#_ftn1.
There are many reasons to fear Donald J. Trump’s return to the White House, but one remains especially worrisome. It stems from the former president’s conspicuous ignorance of international law and US foreign policy. Among assorted particulars of this debility, a previously failed Trump posture – “America First” – would likely prove more injurious the second-time around.[1]
Prima facie, its restoration, thoughtless in the most literal sense, would dignify a numbingly vacant US president’s indifference to science, logic, history and law.[2]
Could it get any worse?
Could anything be more absurd?
Here is a basic answer: Following escalating aggressions by Russia in Ukraine and potentially destabilizing aggressions by China and North Korea in Asia,[3] America needs a leader who can read and think meaningfully. The American White House is not a proper place for foreign policy pretenders, especially a former president who already displayed a pernicious fusion of historical indifference and intellectual incompetence.
There are also relevant specifics. Any future presidential retrogressions to “America First” would stem from misapplied US cultural underpinnings. These backward steps, absurd steps, would reflect variously intersecting declensions of “mass-man.”[4] Though Donald Trump remains a celebrated leader of the American “mass,” not just a member, he has never actually risen above the capacities of his chorus. Rather, amid the constant rancor and noisy defilement, he has remained one of mass man’s most fervid exponents.
From time immemorial, international relations have been rooted in Realpolitik[5] or power politics.[6] Though such traditional patterns of thinking are normally accepted as “realistic,” they actually undermine world law and global order. It follows that any sitting US president should finally acknowledge the lethal limitations of our planet’s global threat system,[7] and recognize, as inevitable corollary, that US power ought never be founded upon delusions of national primacy.
“America First” has a pleasing resonance with the Many, with those who like to chant in crowds. But this narrow political resonance does not extend to the Few, to those who would prefer to think as conscious individuals.[8] About the “Few,” German-Swiss philosopher Thomas Mann attributes the downfall of civilizations to gradual absorptions of the educated classes by the Mass, to the “simplification of all functions of political, social, economic and spiritual life.”[9] If nothing else, America’s Trump era was a humiliating period of deliberate and falsifying simplifications. Is it anything less than preposterous to actually seek its return?
Americans require intellect-based answers, not an endless barrage of silly clichés and partisan rancor. In turn, such answers will call for dialectical (mind challenging) thinking.[10] Analytically, in these calculations, the United States should always be considered as one significant part of the larger world system, the world system configuration created by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.[11]
Though more or less ignored by global leaders, the “Westphalian” system of international law[12] (a system of institutionalized global anarchy) is destined to fail. Moreover, together with the accelerating spread of nuclear weapons technologies and infrastructures, any such failure would prove remorseless, unprecedented (sui generis would say the logicians) and irremediable.[13] At another level, it would signal the potentially insufferable triumph of anti-reason.[14]
There are also relevant nuances. Grievous world system failure could take place in hard to fathom increments, or with great suddenness, as an unanticipated nuclear “bolt from the blue.” On such bewilderingly unpredictable matters, any US policy resurrection of Donald Trump’s “America First” would prove starkly injurious.
Conceptually, it’s not complicated. In these indispensable calculations, history deserves a much more manifest pride of place. False bravado and belligerent nationalism have never succeeded in any decipherable ways or for longer than brief intervals. Indeed, from an historical standpoint, no observation could be more obvious.
Plausibly, in a Trump-resurrected future, unsteady expressions of national security policy would be exacerbated by multiple system failures. At times, these failures could be mutually reinforcing or “synergistic.”[15] At other times, they could involve “force-multiplying” weapons of mass destruction. In any case, they could be brought about by the defiling restoration of an absurd presidency.
Rejecting the banalities of “America First” and its derivative foreign policy deformations, a capable US president should think along clarifying lines of subject-matter interrelatedness. It is preposterous to deny that “America First” would fail US national security obligations. Moreover, any such failure, even one that did not produce catastrophic war or terror, would be degrading to United States.
“The visionary,” teases Italian film director Federico Fellini, “is the only realist.” But there can be nothing “visionary” about “America First.” Whether in its previous Trump-defined iteration or in a future modified version, this stitched together amalgam of a former president’s clichés would be absurd. Should such a lack of vision find its way back into the American White House in 2024, its multiple and recycled harms could fatally undermine whatever might still remain of American Reason.[16]
At some point, especially if strengthened and expanded by manipulative resurrections of “America First,” world system failures could become both tangibly dire and irreversible. In the final analysis, it will not help the United States or any other country to tinker “thoughtlessly”[17] at the ragged edges of our “Westphalian” world legal order. At that decisive turning point, any US presidential reaffirmations of “America First” could significantly hasten the onset of a regional or worldwide nuclear war.
Uniqueness
Biden Wins
Biden wins – Trump verdict changed everything
Sabur, The Telegraph, 6/3/24
[Rozina, “Who will win the US election? Our experts’ predictions change after Trump is found guilty”, https://www.yahoo.com/news/win-us-election-experts-predictions-164400603.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAACJ4yTp8EZP9kVc9sIPV8PVZn5OQPBmV3HjmIXD5YULULaRlEeG7lPaYpzbl899lZFJaaYBo3K9kRmqWmKHe_Olhi069IsQYXgdcxoPidQY1tegMN-lw0oKStfvcYaOJeBhAc4qUEzywy3XjUorDmz7JDXXXusIlINQwq1SQDpP8]
For the first time in the course of the US election, Joe Biden appears to have the edge over Donald Trump, according to The Telegraph’s experts.
The Telegraph is asking five experts to regularly predict who will win one of the tightest US elections in recent history.
National polls show Joe Biden and Trump are separated by the finest of margins in a bitter campaign.
Following developments from the US, our experts will periodically plot their likely winner on a sliding scale, each time explaining their decision.
This week’s updated predictions come after Trump was convicted in a criminal trial in New York over hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
Donald Trump’s team is in spin mode, and will tell anyone who will listen that the former president’s historic conviction can only be a good thing for his campaign. His base is fired up. Donors are flocking to him.
His fundraising website crashed from the online traffic hours after the verdict. It is not just the public that the Trump team is trying to convince, but the Republican Party apparatus.
In a memo, Trump’s pollsters argued voters’ views of the trial are already “baked into the cake” and a conviction won’t “significantly change” the Republican candidate’s advantage in their target states.
In fact, said Tony Fabrizio and Travis Tunis, Trump’s lead will only fall by a net of two percentage points.
Ultimately, they argue, voters care more about which candidate is going to improve their personal fortune than an eight-year-old hush money case. That may be true, but if this race is as tight as expected, Trump is fighting for every vote he can get, and his conviction can only be seen as a setback.
Nationally, the polls remain nail-bitingly close as they have done for months. In a normal election, a criminal conviction could help break this stalemate, but a key poll, released on the day of the verdict, suggests this is unlikely.
Just one in ten Republicans say a guilty verdict would see them abandon Trump. One in four would be more likely to back him, such is the way of intensely polarised politics.
And most importantly, unaligned voters actually say the verdict would make them more likely to back Trump than less likely; 15 per cent to 11 per cent, with three-quarters swaying neither way.
Of course, at the time of release, this poll was a hypothetical. Whether the reality will sway voters differently will play out in the coming days.
The situation is unprecedented: normally we judge elections on the economy, incumbency and the occasional war, but this battle is now entirely about personality.
Hitherto, Trump’s trials have failed to dent his lead in swing states – but voters have always said that an actual conviction might change their mind. Today, two thirds of Americans insist a “guilty” verdict remains unimportant to them – but the tightness of this election means that the 17 per cent who are thinking about dumping the Republican ticket is statistically significant.
In short, it has just become much harder for Trump to win. The prospect of a prison sentence, which could be handed down on July 11, makes matters worse. The Republican will have to explain how he might govern from a cell; his VP pick now becomes even more important. The debate on June 27 will be unmissable.
On a side note, the fact that Biden cannot overnight translate this conviction into a guaranteed landslide re-election is a damning indictment of the Democratic Party, giving the GOP hope. They didn’t have this trouble with Richard Nixon (who wasn’t even found guilty). Robert Kennedy Jnr is scrambling to get into the debate – and he could still enjoy a Ross Perot “none of the above” surge in the polls.
A jury of a dozen American citizens have found Donald Trump guilty on all 34 counts, making the presumptive Republican nominee a convicted felon.
The verdict was swift and unambigious, and, if prior polling is to be believed, will prove extremely harmful to Trump’s re-election chances.
But there are some caveats: many Americans (Republicans and all-important Independents and undecided) find the timing and substance of the trial suspicious. Trump is likely to appeal the ruling.
There are reports that $40 million dollars in donations flooded to the Trump campaign before the site either crashed or was taken down.
Biden and his aides will be anxiously waiting for snap polling, well aware the real judgment against the former president will come in November.
The early polls suggest that Trump’s convictions will have little major effect on the result, and have seen money flowing in from both major and small-dollar donors.
But the former president is already battling with scepticism towards his campaign from some Republicans who voted for Nikki Haley in the primaries earlier this year, and some analyses suggest those votes could be crucial.
Ms Haley’s supporters are much more likely to say they would not vote for Trump if he was convicted of a crime.
My prediction is that this trial will see a drop in enthusiasm from some registered Republicans – and that could hit turnout in November.
Here is how our experts’ predictions have changed over the past three months.
Biden is headed towards a win – conviction changed the calculus and momentum
Saric, Axios, 5/31/24
[Ivana, “What polls say about Trump’s conviction and the 2024 presidential race”, https://www.axios.com/2024/05/31/trump-guilty-verdict-president-election-polls]
Zoom out: However, polls have also shown voters shifting toward Biden in matchups before and after a hypothetical conviction.
A Marquette Law School poll released last week asked half its sample of voters how they'd vote if Trump was acquitted, and found Trump beat Biden by 6 points.
The other half of the sample was asked how they'd vote if Trump was found guilty, and found Biden beat Trump by 4 points.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released last month found that Biden gained two points in a Trump matchup in which Trump was convicted of a crime, but gained six points if Trump was serving prison time as a result.
State of play: Polling from before the conviction found that Trump led Biden in five out of six key swing states, with the gains largely attributable to Trump's headway with young, Black and Hispanic voters.
Trump's dependence on these voters from outside his traditional MAGA base could make him particularly vulnerable in this moment, the New York Times reported.
These Trump supporters who come from traditionally Democratic constituencies are especially likely to revert to voting Democrat in the event of a conviction, per the Times.
Zoom in: A New York Times/Siena College poll of six battleground states in October found that about 7% of Trump's supporters said they'd vote for Biden if Trump were found guilty.
The same poll found that 21% of young Trump supporters said they'd back Biden in the case of a guilty verdict. Only 2% of Trump's 65-and-older supporter said the same, per the Times.
Among Black voters who support Trump, 27% said they'd flip to Biden in the event of a conviction, while only 5% of Trump's white supporters said the same.
Biden Wins – AT Polls
Biden wins – few policy blunders secure reelection but the plan upends that
Klawans, The Week, 5/22/24
[Justin, “Who will win the 2024 presidential election?”, https://theweek.com/politics/who-will-win-2024-presidential-election]
While the polls may tell one story, political analysts, pundits and experts can tell another. Many who study politics seem to think that despite Trump leading in most polls throughout the majority of the campaign season, it will ultimately be Biden who will secure a second term in office.
Biden is "seen as a moderate figure who has not transformed a politically polarized country," Fox News' Juan Williams said for The Hill, and this "has contributed to his low approval numbers in 2023." However, Biden's low poll numbers "will be out the door in a one-on-one, 2024 rematch with Trump," Williams said.
"The Democrats have the power to make this year's race into a referendum on Trump rather than Biden," Williams said. "With the stock market up, unemployment down, wages rising, inflation slowing and the U.S. standing tall against Russia and China, Biden has a record to persuade swing voters."
Biden could also win reelection because "the strength of the president's record is only 

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