NBC:
Clinton's gains over the past two weeks in the tracking poll are coming from increases in support among moderates, men and white voters. She narrowed Trump's margin among men and white voters from double digits in last week's poll to single digits this week. Clinton picked up 7 points among moderate voters this week and now leads Trump 58 percent to 33 percent among them.
Trump's margin among male voters dropped from 14 points last week to 9 points this week and he now leads Clinton 51 percent to 42 percent. His 13-point margin among white voters last week also shrank to 9 points this week. White voters now favor Trump to Clinton 50 percent to 41 percent.
Reuters also has a double digit lead (11 points for likely voters) for Clinton.
Andrew Prokop:
For some time, political observers have wondered — or feared — whether a major terror attack on American soil could sweep Donald Trump into the White House.
And now, in the wake of the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando — andTrump’s speech in response to it, which was filled with anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant rhetoric — the question of what effect terror could have on the presidential campaign seems more urgent than ever.
"Clinton wants to allow radical Islamic terrorists to pour into our country," Trump said in his Monday speech. "If we don't get tough and if we don't get smart, and fast, we're not going to have our country anymore."
Yet commentators have tended to disagree about how the aftermath of an attack is likely to play out. On the one hand, political scientist Norm Ornstein suggested to me that attacks could greatly improve Trump's poor prospects of winning, and Politico’s Blake Hounshell tweeted in March that "America may be one major terrorist attack away from Donald Trump as president."
On the other, Trump is an erratic celebrity with no foreign policy experience, and the public could well instead turn to Hillary Clinton, as Jamelle Bouie, Greg Sargent, and Ross Douthat have argued.
So over the past few months, I've spoken with several top political scientists who have done research on this question, and reviewed their work to see what implications heightened fears of terror tend to have on voters.
Lucia Graves:
Barack Obama didn’t need to give a speech on the Orlando shooting Tuesday, having already addressed it in solemn voice the day before. But following a meeting with his national security team on the state of our country’s fight against Islamic State, he found he had something important to say.
He was haunted by an ugliness – not overseas, but right here in America – that’s beginning to rear its head once again. It’s a darkness embodied not just in the horrific attack in Orlando on Sunday, which left 50 dead and 53 wounded, but more by how we as a society respond, and even who we become in its aftermath.
WaPo:
Top Republicans joined with President Obama and other Democrats Tuesday in sharply condemning Donald Trump’s reaction to the nightclub massacre in Orlando, decrying his anti-Muslim rhetoric and his questioning of Obama’s allegiances as divisive and out of step with America’s values.
Trump — who just a week ago signaled an intent to snap his campaign into a more measured tone for the general election — showed no sign of backing down from his suggestions that Obama was somehow connected to or sympathetic with terrorists, telling the Associated Press that the president “continues to prioritize our enemy” over Americans.
In separate appearances, both Obama and his potential successor, likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, blasted Trump’s proposal to ban foreign Muslims from the United States as dangerous and contrary to the nation’s traditions.
I wrote this a year ago after Charleston, but it applies to Orlando just as well.
Ryan Cooper:
But when it comes to preventing this type of mass murder, these personal details are important in what they signal about the level of organization behind this attack. This was pretty clearly one person without any real institutional backing. Whatever the Islamic State's opportunistic claims of responsibility, it was one guy with weapons, ammunition, and body armor obtained legally.
Compare that to 9/11, where a highly organized team, trained in foreign camps and funded by a secret organization, exploited a security loophole in both airport checkpoints and the cultural expectation for how hijackings were supposed to work.
Considered so, it's obvious that two different kinds of attacks require a different response. After 9/11, federal authorities needed to upgrade airport security, passengers had to change how they thought about hijackings, and the government had to take some sort of action against al Qaeda. Some of those actions were completed before the end of the day, others were attempted but bungled, and others were a disastrous failure, but that a wise response would have included some of each of these things is indisputable.
A single person driven to commit an act of mass violence, even if he was radicalized by ISIS propaganda, presents a very different sort of problem. No use of force overseas can stop someone from developing radical views — Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by a drone strike almost five years ago, but it's impossible to scrub his videos from the internet. No change in security protocols can stop the formation of crowds.
War on the Rocks, representing 121 signatories:
We the undersigned, members of the Republican national security community, represent a broad spectrum of opinion on America’s role in the world and what is necessary to keep us safe and prosperous. We have disagreed with one another on many issues, including the Iraq war and intervention in Syria. But we are united in our opposition to a Donald Trump presidency.
Why the above CW? Trump’s surrogates are silent, non-existent or fleeing from reporters.
Igor Bobic:
Things have gotten so awkward for some Republicans on Capitol Hill that they’d prefer to plead ignorance about their presumptive presidential nominee, real estate mogul Donald Trump, rather than answer questions about his no-holds-barred attacks on Muslims.
Though many Republicans distanced themselves Tuesday from Trump’s remarks, some lawmakers preferred instead to beg off inquiries from reporters, claiming they had simply not heard Trump’s speech the day prior in which he doubled down on his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States.
Politico:
Though he regularly bashes the media as dishonest, scum and the “absolute worst,” Donald Trump disproportionately benefited from the Fourth Estate’s coverage over the past year of the presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, drew the most negative coverage of any other candidate as she engaged in a longer than expected battle against Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination for more than a year.
That’s according to a report from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy out this week, showing that the reality TV star turned presumptive Republican nominee made up for his slow start in the polls with a boost from positive media coverage. The report analyzed coverage from eight traditional print and broadcast outlets, including CBS, Fox, the Los Angeles Times, NBC, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post…
The Democratic side of the race received significantly less attention from the media, particularly during the early phase of the campaign in which Clinton jumped out to large polling leads over the likes of Sanders, Martin O'Malley, Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee. In terms of “good news” vs. “bad news,” Sanders was the beneficiary of the most favorable coverage during what the report calls “the invisible primary.”
Bernie had the best coverage, again illustrating why his ‘did better in polls’ was as much talking point as data point. It also illustrates that unfavs aren’t the be-all of everything, often driven by media, but not the factor that wins or loses elections.
It’s never too late. Check out this sentence from WaPo:
In a speech laden with falsehoods and exaggeration, Trump was antagonistic and pugnacious, in stark contrast with his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, who also spoke Monday about combating terrorism. Trump denounced President Obama and Clinton for “deadly ignorance” and warned that they were endangering lives with weakness and indecision
James Hohmann:
THE BIG IDEA: Donald Trump is trying to paint Hillary Clinton as soft on national security. That will be a hard sell.
-- Seizing on the Orlando attack, the presumptive Republican nominee gave a speech yesterday that mentioned Clinton 19 times. He uttered the words “terror,” “terrorism” or “terrorist” just five times. “Ask yourself,” Trump said, “who is really the friend of women and the LGBT community, Donald Trump with his actions, or Hillary Clinton with her words? Clinton wants to allow radical Islamic terrorists to pour into our country — they enslave women and murder gays.” He even said “the burden is on Hillary” to explain why his proposed ban on Muslims is a bad idea.
-- These rhetorical attacks are much less likely to stick because Clinton has spent more than a decade defining herself as tough and strong on national security. It is one of the biggest advantages that comes from being such a known commodity and scrutinized public figure.
-- At the State Department, Hillary was consistently more willing to use military force than Barack Obama. She wanted to send more troops into Afghanistan than the president did, supported leaving a residual force behind in Iraq before the rise of the Islamic State, pushed for more aggressive intervention in Libya and backed proposals to arm the Syrian rebels.
NY Times:
“Everybody says, ‘Look, he’s so civilized, he [Trump] eats with a knife and fork,’” said Mike Murphy, a former top adviser to Jeb Bush. “And then an hour later, he takes the fork and stabs somebody in the eye with it.”
NY Times:
A coalition of prominent social conservatives is banding together in an effort to nudge the Republican platform further to the right at the party’s convention next month.
The organizations involved include those that have been front and center in the culture wars over abortion and same-sex marriage like the Family Research Council Action, the March for Life and Concerned Women for America.
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and a platform committee delegate from Louisiana, said that while he expects the Republican Party to “remain committed to the core values of life, marriage, family and religious freedom,” there are new questions that need to be addressed because they have arisen in the four years since the platform was last revised. The 2012 platform, many Republicans believe, was one of the most conservative on record.
Good. The platform will sink with the candidate.