Good morning and Happy New Year! We hope you enjoyed your holidays. Best of luck with your resolutions. Don’t forget that the gym will be a lot less crowded next month, so there’s no harm in waiting.

 2024 

📅 A look at the year ahead

This week begins the long slide to Election Day 2024. Here’s a quick preview of major political dates this year:

• January 15: Iowa caucus (Republicans only)
  Why just vote when you can argue in a church gym for 3 hours? Because you live in Iowa, that's why. What’s important is that the Iowa caucus is the first contest in the Republican presidential race. The Democratic version (not all that important since Biden’s running for reelection) is different this year. They’re doing a much less weird mail-in vote on March 5.

• January 23: New Hampshire primary (both parties, but Biden isn’t competing)
  New Hampshire is very proud of the fact that it holds the “first in the nation” primary (this is technically true since Iowa holds a caucus). These first two states are the most important in presidential nomination races literally just because they’re first. To make a long story short: national Democrats want to bump NH off the #1 spot, NH Dems said no, Biden won’t be on the primary ballot there as a protest.

• February 29: Leap Day
  Happy sixth birthday to that guy you went to high school with! Pro calendar tip: leap years are always presidential election years.

• March 5: Super Tuesday
  Fourteen states will hold their presidential primaries on March 5. They do this every election. This day is called Super Tuesday (because who doesn’t love stupid nicknames?).

• July 15-18: Republican National Convention (RNC)
  Over four days, the Republican Party will vote on a bunch of party rules and officially nominate its candidates for president and VP.

• July 25-August 11: Summer Olympics in Paris
  The party conventions always have to dodge the Olympics.

• August 19-22: Democratic National Convention (DNC)
  See above but switch the parties.

• November 5: Election Day
  Although many states offer early voting starting in September, this is the big day. If nobody (looking at you, Florida) screws up, we’ll know the winner late in the evening. If not…who knows?

 2024 

🗳️ Trump vs. Maine

Now there are two. Maine has joined Colorado in kicking former President Donald Trump off their respective state primary ballots. Maine’s Secretary of State (she runs their elections), Shenna Bellows, said Trump is ineligible because she believes he incited the rioters at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

• The law she used is the same one Colorado used — the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

• That says, in part, that people who “engaged in insurrection” can’t hold office.

• It was originally written in the wake of the Civil War.

Republicans (in Maine and nationwide) slammed the move as undemocratic — and a few powerful Maine Democrats joined them. But Bellows said she has to enforce the law. Trump is, of course, appealing the decision. He’s currently waiting for the Supreme Court to respond to his appeal of the Colorado case.

 POLITICS 

🔴 Ohio Rep. Bill Johnson (R) will resign from Congress on January 21 to become president of Youngstown State University. Why is this news? Because it will leave Republicans with an itty bitty majority of just two seats. With a few seats vacant, 217 will be needed for control — Rs will have 219. No sweat, though. Congress doesn’t ever do much during election years anyway.

🔵 Enjoy useless presidential debates? We're not sure why you would, but boy have we got news for you. President Biden’s two long-shot primary challengers, author Marianne Williamson and Rep. Dean Phillips, will debate one another next week in New Hampshire.

🔴 Former President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign keeps racking up endorsements. This time, it’s the second most powerful House Republican — Majority Leader Steve Scalise. Do endorsements matter? FiveThirtyEight found them to be about as predictive as polls.

 BRIEFS 

• Israeli strike allegedly kills Hamas leader in neighboring Lebanon

• Claudine Gay resigns as president of Harvard amid plagiarism scandal

• U.S.-Qatar deal will keep huge military base in Middle East

• National debt hits $34 trillion for the first time ever (we did it!)

• Inside Hamas’ massive maze of tunnels in Gaza

 QUOTE 

 TRIVIA 

The Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries are important contests. But the winners don’t always go on to win their respective nominations, much less the White House.

Question: Who won the 2016 and 2020 Iowa caucuses for both parties? What about the New Hampshire primaries?

 WORLD 

🇩🇰 Denmark: The Queen of Denmark since 1972, Margrethe II, will abdicate the throne (aka: retire) on January 14. At that point, her son will become King Frederik X.

🇰🇷 South Korea: Korean opposition leader Lee Jae-myung was stabbed in the neck yesterday. Though the attacker used a 7-inch knife, his aim thankfully sucked, so the wound was small and not life-threatening. Lee lost the 2022 presidential election by 0.73% -- the smallest margin in South Korean history.

🇯🇵 Japan: A Japan Airlines flight crashed into a Japanese Coast Guard plane while landing at Tokyo's Haneda airport. All 379 people on board the commercial flight survived, but five of the six crewmembers on the military flight died.

🇯🇵 Japan (again): A magnitude 7.6 earthquake hit Japan's Ishikawa prefecture on Monday. At least 62 people were killed in the disaster. The epicenter on a remote peninsula proved difficult for rescue teams to access and winter weather makes it even worse. The Coast Guard plane that crashed at Tokyo's airport was responding to this disaster.

🇦🇷 Argentina: New President Javier Milei, announced his country will not join BRICS as his predecessor had planned. BRICS is an intergovernmental group seen as a rival to the G7. Among its 10 members are China, Russia, India, Brazil, and Iran.

 GLOSSARY 

carpetbag — verb

The dark art of moving to run for office in a place that would give you a better chance at winning. Mild carpetbagging involves moving from one side of a city to another. This version is often successful. Brazen carpetbagging might involve moving to a completely different state. This doesn't usually work (for obvious reasons).

Example: “Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert is carpetbagging clear across the state to a more conservative district in hopes of boosting her chance at reelection.”

 SNACKS 

🍿 Disney: The 1928 version of Mickey Mouse from “Steamboat Willie” entered the public domain (in the U.S.) this week. And, just two days in, a video game and two Mickey-themed horror films have been announced.

🎮 Woah: A 13-year-old kid just became the first human ever to officially beat “Tetris.” The game came out back in 1985 and to this point, only an AI had achieved the feat — getting so far into the game that it crashes.

📰 Read: ”How to Start (and Keep) a Healthy Habit”

 ANSWER 

Iowa 2016: Hillary Clinton (D) and Ted Cruz (R)
Iowa 2020: Pete Buttigieg (D) and Donald Trump (R)

New Hampshire 2016: Bernie Sanders (D) and Donald Trump (R)
New Hampshire 2020: Bernie Sanders (D) and Donald Trump (R)

We should note that Trump’s 2020 wins were noncompetitive seeing as how he was the incumbent president at the time.