Peter Wehner:
It’s still early – more than four months before the first vote is cast – but the Republican Party is showing signs it is intent on kicking away a very winnable election in 2016.
It’s doing so by presenting a picture of the party to the American people that is intolerant, bigoted and nativist...
The message being sent to voters is this: The Republican Party is led by people who are profoundly uncomfortable with the changing (and inevitable) demographic nature of our nation. The GOP is longing to return to the past and is fearful of the future. It is a party that is characterized by resentments and grievances, by distress and dismay, by the belief that America is irredeemably corrupt and past the point of no return. “The American dream is dead,” in the emphatic words of Mr. Trump.
This is all quite troubling to those of us who are Republicans and find these attitudes repellant.
NY Times:
Perhaps conscious of the empty seats in the back of the room, he repeatedly commented on the size of the audience and said he had added the event to his schedule with little notice.
But, more troubling for a candidate who is heavily reliant on television coverage, there were only a handful of TV cameras in the back of the room, and the national cable stations spent little time on the event. MSNBC carried it for less than four minutes, CNN around six minutes and Fox did not carry the speech at all.
Chris Cillizza:
Wehner, whose honesty and insight about his party and its prospects I've praised before in this space, nails a sentiment I've heard expressed by countless Republicans in the summer of Trump. The concern is that a candidate like Trump is running a campaign based on the 1980 electorate, not the 2016 one.
Sure, appealing to white voters with a message that things aren't as good as they used to be -- the boiled-down appeal that Trump represents -- might work in a Republican primary. But, there is NO mystery or debate that the changing demographic face of the country makes an appeal to the "old ways" an almost-certain electoral loser.
The above is a good part of why I don't believe Donald Trump will win. But more of that below the fold.
Andrew Prokop:
Political scientists think "the party" will stop Trump. They shouldn't be so sure.
If there's one thing wonkish political pundits think they know about presidential primaries, it's that party insiders will doom these candidates' chances. It is "the party elites who traditionally decide nominations," the Upshot's Nate Cohn writes. "Everything we know about presidential nominations screams that Trump has no chance of winning," political scientist Jonathan Bernstein argues at Bloomberg View. I myself have made the case that Trump's weakness among party elites will lead to his defeat. We've all believed that the party will somehow, in some way, end up stopping these outsiders.
But the idea that the GOP's elites, rather than its voters, control the process seems absurd to many of the party's consultants
Here's the opposing view, as well stated as you will find it.
Digby:
So Trump is playing Fox and CNN off of each other and getting so much free airtime in the process he has no need to run any ads. But with the ratings bonanza he’s creating, these news networks have no complaints about that. It is a very mutually beneficial arrangement.
Philip Bump:
Donald Trump seems to be a little cranky now that the polls don’t look so great
Maybe it started with the blowback over Trump's failure to call out a guy who called President Obama a Muslim during an event in New Hampshire. That happened on Thursday. On Friday, Trump skipped a scheduled event, citing a "significant business transaction." New York magazine quotes a source who says that there probably wasn't any such transaction: "He is just not doing well right now," the source said, "and was afraid of going down there and making another mistake."
He is, in fact, doing pretty well right now — just not as well as he had been. In a CNN/ORC poll released over the weekend, Trump's support fell significantly from CNN's last poll, conducted right before the second Republican debate.
Newsone.com:
Now in 2015, the young voting bloc has not changed much and neither have the issues of importance to them, which is why the Republican Party is failing to draw in the millennial voters it needs to be successful in the 2016 general election, according to The Brookings Institution.
Despite hauling in a record number of older viewers for its last GOP debate on CNN, the Brookings Institution said millennials were likely to view the event as a free-for-all “where cultures and generations clash.” The campaign rhetoric also flies in the face of this generation’s beliefs and views.
Here are six top reasons millennials are not tuning in to 2016 presidential candidates:
Starts with Black Lives Matter.
Dan Diamond:
Everyone’s taking the wrong message from the interview Martin Shkreli, the 32-year-old CEO who increased the price of a drug to treat infections in HIV patients by 5,000%, gave last night.
People think he’s cutting the price, and the American public won. It’s more the other way around. Shkreli survived the firestorm, and he comes out ahead.
Shkreli went on ABC news to say that his company, Turing Pharma, would decrease the $750-per-pill price of Daraprim to be “more affordable” after the public outcry. But he also said something else: that it will be priced at a level that “is able to allow the company to make a profit, but a very small profit, and we think these changes will be welcomed.”
So what happens? Turing, previously a small company with no products, goes from being a company with no revenue to one with enough money to make it profitable. That probably includes not only the cost of manufacturing Daraprim, but also of marketing it, of dealing with insurance companies on the higher price, and of doing the research and development on new compounds for toxoplasmosis that Shkreli says Turing is doing.
Looked at it this way, Shkreli won.
NY Times:
Long before Volkswagen admitted to cheating on emissions tests for millions of cars worldwide, the automobile industry, Volkswagen included, had a well-known record of sidestepping regulation and even duping regulators.
For decades, car companies found ways to rig mileage and emissions testing data. In Europe, some automakers have taped up test cars’ doors and grilles to bolster their aerodynamics. Others have used “superlubricants” to reduce friction in the car’s engine to a degree that would be impossible in real-world driving conditions.
Automakers have even been known to make test vehicles lighter by removing the back seats.
You'd have to be a lunatic to think being a businessman qualifies you for president. Oh, wait...
Dave Weigel:
And more and more conservatives have settled on the Trump line — that the questions about Obama's citizenship were so slimy that they obviously came from the Clinton camp. "The whole birther thing was started by the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008 against Barack Obama," Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) confidently told Yahoo News this summer.
The problem: This is simply not true. Clinton's campaign, one of the most thoroughly dissected in modern history, never raised questions about the future president's citizenship. The idea that it did is based largely on a series of disconnected actions by supporters of Clinton, mostly in the months between Obama's reaction to the Jeremiah Wright story and the Democratic National Convention. I know, because I spent/wasted quite a lot of time covering this stuff.
Ben Geman:
Here’s What Hillary Clinton Wants Instead of the Keystone Pipeline
Clinton says she’s focused on boosting climate-change collaboration with Canada and Mexico, and modernizing energy infrastructure.