Keep in mind that polling in both IA and NH are tricky, and that at least in IA we have J. Ann Selzer. That gold standard DMR/Selzer IA poll for Rs is out later today and for Ds is out tomorrow.
Still, there’s clearly movement in Bernie’s favor in IA with Quinnipiac (Bernie +5) and ARG (Bernie +3), and even PPP (Hillary +6) has movement in Bernie’s favor.
In NH, it’s Sanders +3 with ARG, +14 with Monmouth (note that Monmouth had Hillary +3 in Oct, so that’s quite a turnaround).
Nationally, its Hillary +15 with NBC/Survey Monkey and +39(!) with a bizarre Gravis poll that’s good for laughs only. The new CBS/NYT poll from last evening has Clinton +7, a gain for Bernie. But note this from that poll:
Yet more than 7 in 10 Democratic voters — including most supporters of Mr. Sanders — still believe Mrs. Clinton will ultimately win the party’s nomination.
Some of these polls are undoubtedly wrong but which ones? Either Bernie leads by a little or a lot in NH and by a little or not at all in IA. Either new voters will show or they won’t. (The one with more voters that show up and vote on Election Day wins, and you’re welcome for that trenchant analysis!) More on the GOP later.
But note this: Hillary is not being outworked or outspent. Her campaign is professional and competent. If she loses IA and/or NH, it’s because voters in those states rejected her in favor of Bernie. Fair and square. And if it should happen, and if I had to pick why, I’d say it’s because banksters didn’t go to jail when they should have. (See The Big Short for why I say that).
All the other states will have their say, though. No guarantees what happens next.
Ed Kilgore:
So it's the Sanders Surge, right? Well, maybe; some hype about his polling revival in Iowa and New Hampshire was definitely going to emerge from Team Bernie, which needed a fresh fix to fuel its Enthusiasm Machine, and from Republicans, for whom any bad news about Hillary Clinton was likely to inspire snake-dancing through the studios of Fox News. But even Clinton's campaign could find something positive in the new numbers: a big change in the expectations game lowering her bar for success in the first two states.
What we really need to know is whether the Sanders Surge, such as it is, extends beyond New Hampshire to those states where Clinton's big advantages among minority voters gave her what appeared to be a firewall, even if she lost both of the first two states.
Kasie Hunt:
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley impressed some Democrats and moderate Republicans with her Republican response to the State of the Union Tuesday night - but there's already backlash brewing on the conservative right.
"Trump should deport Nikki Haley," conservative commentator Ann Coulter tweeted part way through Haley's speech. She later added: "Nikki Haley says 'welcoming properly vetted legal immigrants, regardless of religion.' Translation: let in all the Muslims."
Radio host Laura Ingraham also tweeted about Haley's speech, writing, "[Former Obama official] Van Jones just praised Nikki Haley speech. Enough said."
Brian Beutler:
Why aren’t Hillary and Bernie pushing the public option?
Paul Waldman breaks down the convoluted fight Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are waging over single payer insurance. The short version is that from what we know of Sanders’ earlier preferences, he’d like to consolidate federally subsidized insurance and create a Canadian-style single payer system, administered at the state level.
Clinton says Sanders’s plan would not only be too expensive (contestable), but would empower conservative states to erode their citizens’ health coverage (also contestable). This is to say nothing of the political feasibility question, which she has not yet broached.
But to the extent that most Democrats (presumably including Clinton) think single-payer is a good idea in theory, the spat is a reminder of how odd it is neither of them has made issue of the public option. The fight over the public option dominated the intra-Democratic ideological fight over Obamacare, and many progressives were embittered when it fell out of the final legislation. But the idea had multi-pronged appeal, and addresses all of the issues at the heart of the Clinton/Sanders dispute.
Benjy Sarlin (covering the GOP) and Alex Seitz-Wald (covering the Dems) switch assignments for a week and rate what they see:
What was your quick impression of every candidate you covered?
Benjy: Hillary Clinton: Confident and polished. She had a very programmatic speech, ticking off concrete proposals on things like tax credits for caregivers or spending $2 billion a year on Alzheimer’s research.
Bernie Sanders: Relentlessly focused on his core issues of inequality and money in politics. At the same time, he also made a substantial electability argument at his events in which he read polls showing him leading Republicans by wider margins than Clinton.
Bill Clinton: Not a candidate, but there is no one like him in politics. He mixes heartfelt anecdotes with the wonkiest policy talk of anyone running. One moment he’s talking about how he met his wife (he was “ogling” her at the Yale library and she introduced herself), and the next he’s giving an in-depth explanation of how this year’s health care enrollees are younger and how the age mix will level off premiums next year.
Conservative Yuval Levin analyzes the GOP stump speeches:
On the right, the people who are impressed with Trump and the people who are horrified by him talk past each other because the former group mostly emphasizes his diagnoses and the latter his prescriptions. His fans like the way he calls out the blindness or weakness of America’s political class and that he points out the absurdity of some elite sensitivities. They like his emphasis on the nation — “a country is a country” — and his willingness to say that the status quo isn’t working. Many also clearly like his willingness to blame some of these problems on immigration and immigrants, and on the stupidity of our elected leaders, particularly in relation to foreign leaders. This last is not a new theme for Trump; he has been pressing the point for decades.
His critics, meanwhile, myself included, tend to focus on the solutions Trump is offering, most of which are not solutions in the traditional sense but just further ways to unsettle elite opinion. So if you press a Trump supporter on the merits or plausibility or decency of a specific Trump proposal, the response is usually that at least Trump is willing to talk about the issue while others are afraid to. Many of his fans like the fact that he’s not politically correct, in our contemporary sense of the term: He’s willing (even eager) to offend. Many of his critics are appalled that he is not politically correct in an older sense, closer to Founding Father James Wilson’s late-18th-century notion of “not politically correct”: He seems to have little sense of the principles underlying our political system and of the purpose and limits of government action.
I like the formulation of preferring to hear about the diagnosis (Trump voters) vs the prescription (everyone else).
Greg Sargent:
Levin argues that the Democratic candidates are still proposing policies that “require an enormous amount of trust in government,” and as such, aren’t yet engaging this crisis of confidence in our institutions. But the latter half of this isn’t quite right: the Dem candidates have their own diagnosis of this crisis, and it is pitched to a view of the country among Democratic voters that is very different from the prevailing view among Republicans. The Dem analysis, to put it simply, is that the rules of the market and the rules of our political competition are rigged in favor of the rich and powerful, in ways that pre-distribute economic gains upwards and frustrate governmental action to address it.
Hillary Clinton does not embrace this analysis quite as directly as Bernie Sanders does.
Teresa Ghilarducci:
The financial picture for Social Security isn’t as dire as some describe: Without any modifications to its funding, Social Security will generate enough revenue to pay for three-quarters of promised benefits.
The main reason it’ll fall short, though—the reason that that remaining one-quarter of benefits hasn’t yet materialized—is that the method of funding for Social Security was calibrated to an America with much less inequality than the nation currently has.
Since the late ‘70s, most of the growth in workers’ earnings has gone to the people who have made the most money. To be precise, the wages of the top 1 percent of workers have grown 138 percent since 1979, while the wages for the bottom 90 percent grew only 15 percent during that period.
If all of that income growth were taxed evenly, Social Security would have no shortfall. But it’s not taxed evenly: Any dollar that an American earns beyond $118,500 is, under current laws, not subject to Social Security taxes. In other words, someone who makes $118,500 this year is going to pay the same amount in Social Security taxes as someone who makes $4 million this year.
This is a WaPo op-ed:
Ted Cruz is not eligible to be president
I’ll take ‘most unpopular Senator in Washington’ for $200, Alex. And the interpretation is easy and does not require a degree in Constitutional law. Of course Cruz is eligible, but he’s such an asshole, we’ll say he’s not. And here’s how it works:
Michael Cohen:
If you want to understand how Donald Trump has become the front-runner in the Republican presidential contest, one place to start is Canada. Not the country, mind you, but the issue of whether Ted Cruz, who was born in the nation to our north, is eligible to run for president.
As the US Constitution makes clear, only “natural born citizens” of the United States are eligible to hold the nation’s highest office. While it’s true that Cruz was born in Canada, his mother was an American citizen at the time, and the generally accepted legal view is that if you’re born to an American — even on foreign soil — you’re considered a natural born citizen. Until a few weeks ago, this was largely considered a settled matter.
Then Trump started talking about it…
According to Trump, “it’s not a settled matter,” and he is now urging Cruz to get a “declaratory judgment” on the matter so it wouldn’t come up later. “If Ted is the nominee, he will be sued by the Democrats,” says Trump. “They got to work it out. . . . [Y]ou have to have the courts come up with a ruling or you have a candidate who just cannot run. . . . [Y]ou can’t have that cloud over your head.”
This is, as the kids might say, an A+ troll.
Christopher Flavelle:
Good news for climate advocates: Researchers have new clues about what's stopping the public from caring more about global warming.
Bad news for climate advocates: They're part of the problem.
The December issue of the Journal of Environmental Psychology focuses on how to encourage "pro-environmental behavior." In example after example, researchers show how governments, politicians and companies have framed climate change and its solutions in ways that seem intuitive but often fail -- and can even make things worse.
This makes sense; it’s exactly what happens with vaccine discussions.