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Good morning,
Thanks for reading The Backstory, a composite of the best new work at Puck.
It was another extraordinary, truly historic week here at Puck: Peter Hamby unearthed a ground-shifting Biden poll; John Heilemann captured the subterranean politics of the president’s darkest hour; Abby Livingston revealed Biden’s emerging horror on Capitol Hill; Julia Ioffe explained how this is all playing out among the G20 crowd; Rachel Strugatz reported on a $1 billion valuation trap; Lauren Sherman sorted through a Pinault re-org; Eriq Gardner and John Ourand parsed the NFL’s $15 billion nightmare; Marion Maneker discovered a Picasso surprise; and Dylan Byers got to the bottom of the latest Washington media scandal.
Check out these stories, and others, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.
Programming note: Next week, on July 10 in D.C., Peter Hamby will host an exclusive panel conversation focused on shifting voter dynamics ahead of the ’24 election—based on data revealed through Puck’s polling partnership with Echelon Insights—with a special emphasis on the outsize impact of women voters over the age of 50. Peter will be joined by Kristen Soltis Anderson from Echelon Insights, Margie Omero from GBAO, and Nancy LeaMond from AARP. To attend, click here to sign up for Puck, and email Fritz@puck.news for registration information.
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FASHION:
Lauren Sherman delves into the underexplored Kering succession scenarios.
and
Rachel Strugatz details the post-$1 billion valuation blues at a beauty stalwart.
ART MARKET:
Marion Maneker previews a Picasso surprise, a Basquiat boom, and a dark new economic theory of the market.
WALL STREET:
Bill Cohan conveys the renewed enthusiasm over Shari Redstone’s reunion with Skydance and RedBird.
HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni illuminates the town’s biggest free agency move of the year.
and…
Jonathan Handel has the skinny on Hollywood’s latest labor challenge.
SILICON VALLEY:
Eriq Gardner ponders TikTok’s complex relationship with the film industry.
MEDIA:
Eriq and John Ourand dig into Roger Goodell’s $15 billion legal mess.
and…
Dylan Byers explores the post-debate anger inside the Brady room.
WASHINGTON:
John Heilemann analyzes the post-debate Democratic Party kremlinology, and Julia Ioffe captures the global perspective.
and…
Abby Livingston picks up the fury on the Hill.
and…
Peter Hamby reveals the polling data that prompted the maelstrom.
PODCASTS:
Matt and Ourand wade into the NFL’s legal headache on The Town.
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Heilemann chats through the debate-gate aftermath with David Axelrod and Mike Murphy on Impolitic.
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Tara and Axios’s Alex Thompson assess the political fallout among Biden’s praetorian guard on Somebody’s Gotta Win.
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Lauren and Ssense’s Steff Yotka offer Chanel appointment hypotheses on Fashion People.
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Peter and Dylan discuss the post-debate media blame game on The Powers That Be. |
| On Tuesday morning, I was heading back to Puck’s luminous office near the Odeon, in Lower Manhattan, when a DM hit from my partner Peter Hamby. Peter and I had been exchanging notes at a frenzied pace since Joe Biden’s disastrous debate the previous Thursday evening. Five days later, the blast radius was still widening. Democrats of all classes—voters, electeds, consultants, donors, megadonors, mega-megadonors—were not only aghast at the aging president’s performance but also at his inner circle’s vexing, almost inexplicable ability to exacerbate the mess.
Previous administrations would have tried to quell the furor by making their principal available on every Sunday show, or 60 Minutes. Instead, save for a campaign appearance in North Carolina on the day after the debate—during which a far more vital Biden read from the teleprompter—the president was nowhere to be seen. He had absconded to Camp David with his family for what was initially described as a previously scheduled get-together and later revealed to be a photo session with Annie Leibovitz. On Monday evening, our partner John Heilemann had published a brilliant piece, Biden’s Darkest Hour, that laid out the evolving scholarship within the top ranks of the party. In short, Biden may have been able to survive the first 72 hours after the nightmare in Atlanta. But his political fate would hinge on the polls that surfaced in the following fortnight.
As I was making a right onto Greenwich Street, Peter texted that he had just gotten his mitts on one of those very polls. In particular, he’d unearthed a confidential memo that was circulating among party insiders. The document was put together after the debate by OpenLabs, a progressive nonprofit that conducts polling and message-testing for a number of Democratic groups, including the Democratic National Committee and the 501(c)4 nonprofit associated with Future Forward, the preferred Super PAC for Biden’s reelection campaign. The memo contained a poll that found that 40 percent of the Biden voters in 2020 now believed the president should end his campaign—a significant shift. On a more granular level, the poll showed him losing in battleground states, and dipping behind other hypothetical Democratic replacements at the top of the ticket. Kamala Harris, Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, and Pete Buttigieg all polled ahead of the president in key battleground states. This, indeed, was one of the polls that Heilemann had been foreshadowing.
Peter got jamming on the data. A few hours later, Puck published his groundbreaking story, which was picked up everywhere from the Times to Axios. It was an incredible piece, which elegantly summed up the consequences of this historical moment that we’re all wading through. “The most worrisome angle to all this is that Trump is now within striking distance in a variety of states that weren’t considered campaign battlegrounds last week,” Peter wrote. “Biden is now only winning by a fraction of a point in Virginia, Maine, Minnesota, and New Mexico—and he’s now only winning Colorado by around 2 points.”
In many ways, the Trump years were defined by a parallel conversation. On the surface, the sycophants and ministers were all forced to butt-smooch in familiar ways—even the more civilized types, who seemingly didn’t need to stoop to that level. Behind the scenes, of course, they would gripe to their peers and the media in an attempt to convey the surreality of working for the guy. A similar dual conversation is now taking place on the left, with everyone saying all the right things publicly while their legs kick under the water.
Indeed, the Biden pressure campaign is one of the most significant stories of our time, or any, and you can count on Puck to bring you the true inside story. Heilemann will be back with the latest reporting and analysis on the topic tomorrow evening. Peter will have an update of the evolving Harris situation on Monday. In many ways, ever since we began this business a few years ago, Puck has endeavored to be a biography of our age, one day at a time. That’s never been more true than now.
Have a great weekend,
Jon |
