I love the hot takes about how Trump is a favorite for re-election. That’s where “horse race” coverage veers off the rails. While there are no guarantees (see 2016), there’s no Comey, no secret Russian help on the horizon.
Analysts like to spend one minute talking about how bad the Mueller investigation info that’s currently public is bad for Trump but in the next breath pretend the Mueller report doesn’t exist for 2020 analysis.
Analyze Trump’s re-elect properly. It could certainly happen, but he is not in good shape for it.
Harry Enten/CNN:
Trump has boxed himself in on the shutdown with nowhere to go
New polling indicates that President Donald Trump does not have a winning option to get out of this partial government shutdown, and his position is deteriorating.
Let's start with the most important fact when it comes to gaming out the shutdown: the President is becoming more unpopular. His net approval rating (approval rating -- disapproval rating) in an
average of polls before the shutdown was -10 points. It's now down to -14 points. That may not seem like a big drop but remember this is a president who has had among the
most stable approval ratings on record.
Now, one move the President could decide to take to help his own standing is to push harder on the shutdown. Yet, the longer the shutdown goes, and the harder Trump has pushed his position, the more Americans are blaming him for it.
Pro tip: claiming ‘there are no independents’ , as many of us do, is not helpful when the people you claim don’t exist (call them what you want) vote you out. Here’s what they say about party ID and political leanings.y the way, Gallup has Trump at 37% approval.
It isn’t just Trump who will be having re-election nightmares. Mitch McConnell is bringing the Senate to the same place House Republicans were in (see Senate Republicans stand with McConnell on the sidelines of shutdown fight, WaPo). They’re saying ‘we agree with you, now make us do it’. Or maybe ‘stop us before we hurt the country more’. And if you think it can’t happen, see November 2018.
Meanwhile this is how it should work: Republicans Break Ranks Over Move to Lift Sanctions on Russian Oligarch’s Firms (NY Times)
The problem solver caucus will go. Shrug. Pelosi is right.
James Downie/WaPo (my bold):
No wonder Trump is in such a foul mood
The usual fallback here for those determined to find good news in bad polls for the president is “at least his base is holding.” And yes, Republican support for the border wall has “jumped 16 points in the past year, from 71 percent to 87 percent” in the Post-ABC poll. But Trump’s digging in on the border wall hasn’t actually improved his support among Republicans, just their support for the wall itself. Meanwhile, in the CNN poll, Trump’s decline “comes primarily among whites without college degrees, 45% of whom approve and 47% disapprove, marking the first time his approval rating with this group has been underwater in CNN polling since February 2018.” Those voters were crucial to Trump’s victories in Midwest states in 2016; without them, his path to 270 electoral votes narrows further.
Many people who say they want the wall don’t really. They just want to show partisan support for Trump. That’s limited and shrinking.
Speaking of 2020, this from FiveThirtyEight:
Why Harris And O’Rourke May Have More Upside Than Sanders And Biden
Last week, we introduced a method for evaluating Democratic presidential contenders, which focused on their ability to build a coalition among key constituencies within the party. In particular, our method claims there are five essential groups of Democratic voters, which we describe as:
- Party Loyalists, who are mostly older, lifelong Democrats who care about experience and electability.
- The Left.
- Millennials and Friends, who are young, cosmopolitan and social-media-savvy.
- Black voters.
- And Hispanic voters, who for some purposes can be grouped together with Asian voters.
The goal is for candidates to form a coalition consisting of at least three of the five groups.
Check out how some of the large field fit into the rankings.
Margaret Sullivan/WaPo:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is freaking out the news media. And it’s working for her.
Over the weekend, for example, she drew fire after she criticized CBS News’s spirited (if tone-deaf) announcement of its 2020 campaign team. A graphic showed 12 reporters and producers, not a single one of whom was black.
She tweeted: “This WH admin has made having a functional understanding of race in America one of the most important core competencies for a political journalist to have, yet @CBSNews hasn’t assigned a *single* black journalist to cover the 2020 election.”
“Unacceptable in 2019,” she concluded. “Try again.”
Josh Kraushaar, politics editor at the National Journal, took his shot: “Another thing AOC has in common with Trump: media scold.” And, besides, he posited, the CBS group looked diverse to him, “with the exception of lacking an African-American.”
Her comeback was scathing: “Do you understand how fundamental the black experience is to American politics? And to American history? One race isn’t substitutable for another. It doesn’t work like that. It’s not about ‘quotas.’ It’s about understanding the country you’re living in.”
By the time the dust settled, CBS News was promising that the initial announcement was only the beginning of their still-growing team.
Do you think that expanded team will include some black journalists? I’ll happily take that bet.
This from Axios looks at twitter interactions. The story is about Alexanda Ocasio-Cortez but look at the underrated Kamela Harris:
The main takeaways:
- Among 2020 Democratic hopefuls, Sen. Kamala Harris (combining her Senate and personal accounts) had the highest Twitter engagement at 4.6 million interactions over the last 30 days — but that's still way behind Ocasio-Cortez.
- Even former President Barack Obama was far behind Ocasio-Cortez, at 4.4 million interactions (but she's a lot more active on Twitter).
Charles P. Pierce/Esquire:
Every Republican Turning on Steve King Was Grown in the Same Terrarium
Republicans are ignoring the real facts about King.
So Kevin McCarthy, the Minority Leader of the House, moved on King, which gives us another chance to toss an elbow at former Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from the state of Wisconsin. Ryan was perfectly fine with having an outright white-supremacist in his caucus for more than a decade because Ryan never found the political gumption to bring the wild kingdom there under control.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Trump is doing immense damage. He has a hidden helper.
As the shutdown drags into its fourth week, causing cascading impacts around the country, The Post reports that pressure is now likely to intensify on the Senate majority leader to allow votes on measures reopening the government. Three Senate Republicans have already called for a reopening, and as one GOP strategist puts it, a few more coming out “changes the calculus” for McConnell.
Meanwhile, thanks to new reporting over the weekend, the basic question of whether Trump has at pivotal moments acted in Russia’s interests, to the detriment of U.S. interests — is being thrust to the forefront with new urgency.
This should cause us to revisit the role that McConnell played during the campaign in preventing members of Congress from showing a united public front against Russian sabotage of the election.
Rick Hasan/Slate:
The House Democrats’ Colossal Election Reform Bill Could Save American Democracy
There’s a lot packed into the introductory version of the bill, much of it a wish list for voting rights advocates and election reformers. The summary put out by the office of Rep. John Sarbanes, one of the lead proponents of the bill, goes on for 22 pages. Among the provisions affecting voting and voting rights are those requiring online voter registration, automatic voter registration, and same-day registration for voting in federal elections; a requirement to use independent redistricting commissions to draw congressional districts in each state; limitations on voter purges; an end to felon disenfranchisement for federal elections; protection against intimidation and false information surrounding elections; improved access to voting by persons with disabilities; a set of improved cybersecurity standards around voting and voting systems, including a requirement that all voting systems produce a paper trail for auditing and checking results; and a ban on a state’s chief election officer engaging in political activities connected to federal offices.
Hear, hear.
See this coming? Me neither.