Reason-Rupe:
Of those registered to vote, 76 percent of millennials say they plan to vote in the 2014 midterm elections. Fifty-three percent of registered millennials tell Reason-Rupe they plan to vote for the Democratic congressional candidate in their district this November, while 29 percent intend to vote for the Republican. For Democrats that’s a sharp decline from the 64 percent of millennials who say they voted for President Barack Obama in 2012.
Things look better for Democrats in 2016, however. When asked to select their top choice for president in 2016, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was the top choice of 39 percent of registered millennial voters, followed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (8 percent), Vice President Joe Biden (6 percent) and the top Republican, Rep. Paul Ryan (6 percent). Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Sen. Rand Paul were each the top choice of 5 percent of registered millennial voters.
A majority of millennials, 52 percent, identify themselves as independents when first asked. Just 16 percent self-identify as Republicans, while 32 percent say they’re Democrats. Including those leaning towards a party, 43 percent of millennials identify as Democrats, 35 percent as independents, and only 23 percent classify themselves as Republicans.
57% of Millennials want "a society where wealth is distributed according to achievement". So, the other 43% want...?
http://t.co/...
— @RichardvReeves
Ross Douthat: Okay, okay, Obamacare isn't that bad. maybe. Eventually. We'll see.
Jonathan Bernstein:
Solid news about Obamacare keeps coming. It’s almost as if the myths about the law -- the idea that it was a failure and about to collapse -- were junk.
The Affordable Care Act was designed to achieve two goals, according to its advocates: it was supposed to increase the number of people with health insurance, and to cut health-care costs.
Increasingly, the former looks like a solid achievement, and there are increasing signs the latter is being accomplished, too, though it isn't clear the ACA deserves the credit.
Nate Cohn:
The partisan polls pose a serious challenge to polling aggregators and election modelers. Traditionally, even a simple polling average tends to match the election results. But if the partisan polls are biased, and Democratic and Republican polls do not balance each other out, then the averages might be biased. A more detailed look at the issues in the five states with vulnerable Democratic incumbents follows.
More politics and policy below the fold.
Clarion-Ledger has Mississippi Republican Party Chairman Joe Nosef's new statement:
"This out of state group 'True the Vote' continues in its attempts to make a mockery of our legal system. While their legal filings literally make no claim at all against the MSGOP, their public statements indicate otherwise in an effort to mislead Mississippi voters. Their first 'demand' was for the MSGOP to order action by people who don't even work for us. Next, they claimed we were not granting proper access to records that we don't have. And they have now accused us of destroying this same evidence which we still don't have and instead is in the possession of 82 different circuit clerks. We will not only defend ourselves but will seek sanctions against every single plaintiff because of this frivolous litigation brought against the MSGOP."
Mike Lupica:
Gov. Chris Christie refusing to meet with Sandy Hook victim's parents shows he has no guts
Here, though, is Christie’s most passionate — and perhaps pathetic — belief: That he can still be President of the United States.
Dueling views of foreign policy:
Clemens Wergin:
Is Obama’s Foreign Policy Too European?
Michael A. Cohen:
Obama’s Understated Foreign Policy Gain
Greg Sargent:
There may be something to the idea that Obama is on defense, in the sense that the press is far more focused on the question of why the President won’t visit the border than it is on why Republicans won’t fund the expedited removals they themselves say they want. At the same time, though, a larger truth is captured by the notion that the national face of the GOP opposition on immigration is scoring because he’s getting in “timely shots” on Obama, which is “what Republican voters want.”
The question is whether that’s a sustainable posture.
Ed Kilgore, referring to a
Jonathan Chait piece about Paul Ryan:
I would just add the point I’ve tried to make whenever this subject of Rand’s “influence” comes up: it’s really, really difficult to partially appropriate Ayn Rand’s thinking. Rand herself hated such efforts, and devoted some of her most venomous rhetoric to “second-handers” who tried to amalgamate her comprehensive philosophy of Objectivism with conservatism or “libertarianism” or particularly Christianity. And this uncompromising attitude was without question most evident in Atlas Shrugged, which, as the famous negative review of the book for National Review by Whittaker Chambers suggested, is impossible to ignore:
Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.