There is a good chance that Donald Trump’s polling lead in the 2024 presidential election is more fragile than it looks.

The most immediate problem for him is the fact that he’s on trial in a criminal case. Even if Trump isn’t convicted, the trial keeps him away from the trail.

There is also the issue of the campaign itself, which is a smaller affair than his 2020 effort, with fewer resources. “The situation has alarmed GOP officials in key states, like Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, who have yet to receive promised funding, staff or even briefings on the new plans since the Trump team took control of the Republican National Committee in March,” The Washington Post reports.

Trump could very well hold his lead through the summer and into the fall but still fail to turn stated preferences into actual votes. What looks solid in the numbers could turn out to be ephemeral in the final tallies.

It’s much too early to say whether the polls are right or wrong. What we can say, however, is that the former president and his allies are already laying the foundation for an effort to contest — or even try to overturn — the results of the November election if voters don’t return Trump to the White House.

For Trump, a man who seems to live in the eternal present, “stop the steal” never actually ended. He maintains, as he did Nov. 3, 2020, that he won the presidential election that put Joe Biden in the White House. Last month, he told an audience in Wisconsin, “We won this state by a lot.” (He lost it by 20,682 votes.) He told Time magazine, in a recent interview, that he “wouldn’t feel good” about hiring anyone who believed that Biden was the legitimate winner of the last presidential election. Asked if he would accept the results of the 2024 election, Trump said that he would, “if everything’s honest.”

Of course, for Trump, if he doesn’t win, then it isn’t honest.

But it isn’t just Trump priming Republican voters to reject the results of the November election if Biden prevails. His allies are doing the same.

Sen. JD Vance of Ohio told CNN on Sunday that in a “free and fair election,” he and every other Republican “will enthusiastically accept the results.” Meaning that if Trump does not win, then the election will not have been free and fair. Vance, who is so eager to serve as running mate to Trump that he made a pilgrimage Monday to the Manhattan courthouse where the former president is on trial for paying hush money to cover up his affair with a porn actor, has also said that if he were vice president in 2020, he would have told states to submit alternate slates of electors.

Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., has said that she will accept the results if they are “constitutional,” and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has said that he will accept them if “there’s no massive cheating.”

Now what, for this crowd, would constitute an unfair, unfree, unconstitutional election in which the results were shaped by “massive cheating”?

Recall that after the 2016 presidential election, Trump blamed a wave of illegal voting for his popular-vote defeat. “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” he said on Twitter.

Illegal voting was a useful boogeyman for a president-elect who ran on the fantasy that the United States had been besieged by illegal immigrants. It remains a useful boogeyman as the former president revs up his supporters with spittle-flecked attacks on immigrants, who he says are “poisoning the blood of our country.” If one set of Trump allies is spreading the notion of an unfair election, another set is building out what that might mean by placing the specter of illegal voting by migrants and immigrants living in the country without legal permission at the center of their rhetorical agenda.

“We all know intuitively that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not been something that is easily provable,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said last week at a news conference he called to support a new bill that would ban immigrants living in the country without legal permission from voting in federal elections. This is already illegal under existing federal law, but Johnson insisted on the measure as necessary prevention in the face of uncertain information.

Johnson, who voted in 2021 to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, was joined at the news conference by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, two so-called constitutional conservatives who initially urged the White House to try to contest and overturn the 2020 results in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6. “We owe it to ourselves, to each other, most importantly to the American people, to make sure that those making decisions on behalf of our government and who’s going to serve in government in elective office are indeed empowered to make those decisions,” Lee said, validating the fiction that recent U.S. elections have been shaped, even stolen, by rampant illegal voting.

Also present was Stephen Miller, the MAGA apparatchik behind some of the former president’s most viciously anti-immigrant rhetoric, who railed against noncitizen voting in characteristically apocalyptic fashion. “Democracy in America is under attack,” he said of the “wide-open border and obstruction of any effort to verify the citizenship of who votes in our elections.”

With all of this, we are getting a first look, of sorts, at the next “stop the steal.” Yes, Trump could win the November election outright, in which case, there is no need for an elaborate conspiracy to explain the results. The election, as Vance said, will have been “free and fair.”

But let’s say Biden recovers lost ground. Let’s say he wins the Electoral College with narrow victories in key swing states as he did in 2020. Let’s say that a few of those margins are exceptionally slim — a few thousand votes here, a few thousand votes there. We know what will come next. Trump will cry out “illegal voting,” and most of the Republican Party will follow suit. They’ll say that Democrats encouraged it with “open borders” and demand that states overturn the results. And Trump, notably, has not ruled out the use of violence to get what he wants.

If the Republican Party could, for a moment, break itself from Trump’s influence, it would see that there’s a much easier explanation here: that Trump, for all of his bombast, is not actually an electoral juggernaut and that the solution to this problem is just to put him out to pasture.

Most of the time, when their standard-bearers can’t close the deal with the voting public, U.S. political parties move on. Not so with this Republican Party. It can neither move on from Trump nor accept that he’s a divisive and unpopular figure for a large part of the American public.

Some of this, it’s true, comes from the fact that much of the party is caught in the snare of the former president’s cult of personality. But some of it runs much deeper. The Republican Party never moved on from Richard Nixon’s “silent majority,” from the notion that it alone represents the supposedly authentic people of the United States. Democrats, no matter how many votes they get or how many elections they win, cannot, in this view, legitimately claim to represent the nation.

From the Tea Party to Mitt Romney’s “47%” to Trump’s make-believe tales of fraud and illegal voting, Republicans treat Democratic voters and Democratic majorities as not quite right — not quite real, not quite American. No matter how many votes they earn or how many elections they win, Democrats cannot, in this view, legitimately claim to represent the nation.

BOISE – Idaho placed no higher than 36th nationally for three metrics gauging teacher and paraprofessional pay during the 2022-23 school year, according to recently released National Education Association rankings. 

The rankings are dated — and they don’t account for recent state investments in teacher pay. But they provide a retrospective snapshot that illustrates how Idaho stacked up against neighboring states as local schools have struggled to recruit and retain teachers. 

Last school year, Idaho ranked 36th nationally for starting teacher pay, a marked improvement from 48th place a decade ago. But it still lagged behind most neighboring states on benchmark salaries in addition to average teacher compensation and paraprofessional pay. 

NEA, the national teachers’ union, annually compiles salary data for the prior school year. The group releases the data in the spring — when school districts are negotiating teacher contracts. 

Nationally, “modest gains” were made in teacher pay, the union said in a news release. The average salary across the U.S. last school year was $69,544, up 4.1% from 2021-22. NEA President Becky Pringle credited unions for demanding “more for their students, more professional respect and more pay.” 

On average, Idaho school districts paid teachers $56,365 last school year. That was a 4% increase from 2021-22, and it moved up the state two spots in the rankings. Idaho’s $41,179 baseline salary last school year also lagged behind the $44,530 national average.

The Idaho State Board of Education’s annual Educator Pipeline Report, last released in December, pointed to bordering states’ salaries as a possible factor hurting Idaho’s teacher retention. In Washington, for instance, teachers last year earned $20,439 more on average, according to the NEA rankings.

Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming all paid higher benchmark and average teacher salaries than Idaho last school year. Montana, which was last among those states in the other categories, outpaced Idaho on paraprofessional pay. 

Here’s how Idaho stacked up against neighboring states during the 2022-23 school year, along with each state’s national ranking. The rankings included all 50 states plus Washington, D.C. 

Starting teacher pay: 

3. Washington $55,631

10. Utah $49,555

14. Wyoming $48,622

22. Nevada $43,695

32. Oregon $42,050

36. Idaho $41,179

51. Montana $34,476

Average teacher pay:

6. Washington $86,804

13. Oregon $72,476

23. Utah $63,481

26. Wyoming $61,797

27. Nevada $61,719

40. Idaho $56,365

42. Montana $55,909

Paraprofessional pay:

11. Washington $37,334

12. Nevada $36,900

16. Utah $34,893

21. Oregon $33,838

26. Wyoming $31,963

28. Montana $31,642

50. Idaho $26,628 

Idaho school districts rely on state funding to pay teachers and staff, although the salaries are set locally.

Madison Hardy, Gov. Brad Little’s spokeswoman, said the NEA rankings are based on data collected before Little’s “Idaho First” plan increased state funding per teacher by $6,359 during the 2023 legislative session. The investment lifted Idaho’s average teacher pay 9.1% to $61,516 this school year. And the average starting teacher pay across all districts is now $45,680.

“Gov. Little is proud of the huge increases Idaho has championed for teacher take-home pay across the board, including starting teacher pay, and he will continue to push for investments in Idaho teachers to benefit students and families,” Hardy said by email.

Little has previously said the raises put the state in the top 10 nationally for starting teacher pay. Idaho Education News revealed why that claim was misleading, in part because it relied on even more outdated NEA rankings. Next year’s rankings will show how the state compares post-Idaho First salary hikes.

Meanwhile, the latest rankings represent an improvement over Idaho’s “rock-bottom” place in the recent past, said Idaho Education Association President Layne McInelly. The teachers’ union leader lauded the governor and Legislature’s effort to increase teacher pay, but said Idaho still ranks “far lower than IEA members and other Idaho educators deserve.”

“All educators deserve pay, benefits and a work environment reflecting the importance of their work on behalf of Idaho students and families, their personal investment in their discipline and their professional expertise — just as we would expect any professional to be paid their worth,” McInelly said by email.

BILLINGS — The accomplishments of nearly a dozen Build Montana graduates were celebrated during a ceremony at COP Construction in Billings on Friday.

“All my friends are at school right now and I’m working machines and stuff,” said Abby Barlagee, a program graduate.

Build Montana provides high school students with opportunities to network with trade industry professionals, get hands with materials, and receive certifications prior to apprenticeships. It’s a partnership among the Montana Contractors Association, the Montana Equipment Dealers’ Association, and the MCA Education Foundation.

“I’m excited that I get to go straight into an industry that I know that I like,” said Merrick Choriki, a graduate who will head to ThinkBIG with Caterpillar Inc. after graduating high school.

Many of the recent graduates said they were looking forward to the money in their respective trades, including several with starting salaries of $60,000 per year.

“It is good money, but honestly, I don’t really think about that. I think it’s just kind of fun,” said Barlagee.