Brian Beutler:
Elizabeth Warren’s emergence as Hillary Clinton’s most effective surrogate has apparently unnerved Democratic donors on Wall Street, who are threatening to withhold campaign cash if Clinton selects Warren as her running mate. “If Clinton picked the Massachusetts senator, her whole base on Wall Street would leave her,” one top Democratic donor told Politico. “They would literally just say, ‘We have no qualms with you moving left, we understand all the things you’ve had to do because of Bernie Sanders, but if you are going there with Warren, we just can’t trust you, you’ve killed it.’”
Clinton will either select a Wall Street-friendly running mate or she won’t, but these donors are acting as if she’s running for her old Senate seat from New York rather than the presidency. If the fact that the Clinton campaign is coasting with about $40 million cash on hand—while her opponent, Donald Trump, struggles to stay afloat with less than $2 million—doesn’t take the teeth out of this threat, then the fact that the alternative to a Clinton-Warren ticket would be President Donald Trumpcertainly should.
Clinton wouldn’t be taking too much for granted by ignoring Wall Street’s panicky, thin-skinned, anti-Warren offensive. But the relative strength of her own campaign—her field operation, her lead in the polls, her fundraising apparatus—will put Clinton’s vice presidential choice in klieg lights for different reasons.
Who she picks will be who she wants, not who she feels pressured into.
Geoffrey Skelley:
One striking aspect of the Democratic primary race was the stark role-reversal in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance compared with her narrow loss to Barack Obama in 2008’s Democratic nomination battle. Whereas she ran against Obama in 2008, she positioned herself as his successor at every turn during her race against insurgent Bernie Sanders in 2016. It’s very easy to see the effect of this in a county-level map of the change in her performance from eight years ago to this cycle, as shown by the coloring in Map 1 below (a choropleth map). (We recommend clicking on the map for a much larger version.)
Hey, I wonder how race played into this? In 2008, she ran against a black guy and in 2016, she supports and is supported by the black guy. So look at Appalachia.
Charles P. Pierce:
It has been noted all over the Intertoobz that the $1.2 million the campaign has for cash-on-hand is a.) less than that on hand for the Ben Carson campaign, which has been as dormant as its candidate for quite some time, b.) less than one would need to run a decent congressional campaign, and c.) less than he would need to buy a decent-sized house in Vancouver, h/t to Bruce Arthur for that last one. (Nicholas Confessore of The New York Times tweeted out the point that the Trump campaign has less COH than does the campaign of Dean Skelos, the former majority leader of the New York state senate, and Skelos is headed for the hoosegow for a spell.)
But the devil is in the details, and a very funny devil it is. The campaign spent $208,000 on its signature Make America Great hats, which may well go down as the Trump campaign's only lasting contribution to the political history of the Republic. Laugh, clown, laugh.
(Also, note to people covering this campaign. He, Trump is not the first guy to benefit from the phenomenon of voters who believe he is above corruption because he's rich. Up in the Commonwealth—God save it!—people voted for generation after generation of wealthy WASPs for that very reason.)
Monkey Cage Blog:
Last week, Sen. Chris Murphy made a small splash by filibustering on the Senate floor until, he said, Republicans agreed to allow a vote on a modest gun control measure. When the nation has debates like this, commentators often focus either on what was meant by the Second Amendment, or on who supports and who opposes such regulations, examining public opinion divisions along partisan, geographical, or other lines.
My research has identified a different factor, however, that affects public opinion about gun control, and it plays a bigger role than observers often appreciate. That factor is race.
Ah, race. Again.
Josh Marshall:
Aside from being stone broke, I want to note another problem Trump has made for himself.
Trump has coyly announced a "speech regarding the election" tomorrow in New York. On Twitter he says it will be about "the failed policies and bad judgment of Crooked Hillary Clinton." This was the speech that was preempted by the 'I'm awesome; we're all gonna die' speech he gave the day after the massacre in Orlando. It will presumably be a massive anti-Hillary oppo dump presented in the form of a speech.
Here's the problem.
Trump's biggest liability at this point is the public's congealing perception that Trump is an emotionally unstable, erratic liar who may voice certain genuine popular grievances but is just not a safe person to make president. That means that Trump's biggest priority is to show that he's normal, sane, balanced - someone remotely suitable to be president.
That's a tough bill if you're also trying to dramatically shake up the race or make news.
NY Times:
Hillary Clinton’s speech attacking Donald Trump’s economic proposals on Tuesday mentioned a new analysis that says his ideas — if enacted in full — would bring about a “lengthy recession” by the end of his first term.
That report, released on Monday by Moody’s Analytics, a subsidiary of the credit rating and research agency Moody’s Corporation, explores the consequences of the policies Mr. Trump has proposed in speeches, interviews and on his website. Those policies would, under almost any scenario, result in an economy that is “more isolated and diminished,” the authors concluded.
“If Mr. Trump gets precisely what he’s proposed, then the U.S. economy will suffer meaningfully,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “It will result in a lot of lost jobs, higher unemployment, higher interest rates, lower stock prices.”
Mr. Zandi, the report’s lead author, is a registered Democrat who has donated to Mrs. Clinton. But he has worked the other side of the political aisle, too: In 2008, he advised the presidential campaign of Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona.
Benjy Sarlin with a fantastic in depth piece on the Trump voter (who I referred to, with some reason as a Jim Webb Democrat):
A year after Donald Trump launched his presidential bid, and against all expectations, the business mogul is the presumptive GOP nominee. Who supported him? How did he take over a Republican Party whose leaders almost uniformly opposed him? And will the GOP ever be the same? NBC News crunched polling and election data and conducted dozens of interviews with supporters, critics and party leaders of all stripes for a series of stories explaining the phenomenon that defined 2016. In chapter one, we look at Trump’s voters: Where they live, what they want, and how their deep unease with a changing America fueled a political revolution.
Monkey Cage Blog:
In 2012, national polls in October suggested the presidential race was a virtual tie. The Real Clear Politics polling average gave Barack Obama a slight 0.7 point lead over Mitt Romney, but he actually won by almost 4 points. Of the final 11 national polls released in 2012, as reported on Real Clear Politics, 7 were a tie or had Romney ahead, while only 4 had Obama ahead.
Why were so many of the polls wrong? In part, because they failed to capture how minorities would vote. Unfortunately, some pollsters may be making the same mistakes in 2016 — and thereby underestimating Hillary Clinton’s lead in the polls.
Vox:
Shifting the argument to guns is a strategic win
In that context, focusing the political argument on gun regulation rather than Omar Mateen’s admiration for ISIS or questions around Muslim immigration to the United States is a strategic win. Democrats may not win many votes with thin gruel, poll-tested gun control proposals, but they aren’t going to lose any.
Last fall, by contrast, the American political system found itself gripped with vague fears about Syrian refugees that led to state-level refugee bans and congressional legislation that scared vulnerable Democrats as part of a larger cultural trend toward Islamophobia.
That’s perilous political terrain for Democrats, and the basic facts of the Mateen case suggested the possibility that the conversation would shift back into that mode.
A couple of popular-but-doomed and not-very-important gun control bills that the NRA and the Republican Party will filibuster to death, by contrast, is very safe ground for Democrats. Something they can talk about until the next thing comes up and the news cycle shifts.
Jonathan Chait:
Trump dominated the Republican primary because he mastered one weird trick. The trick was to constantly spout wild and offensive comments, frequently targeted at women or people of other races or nationalities, generating a constant stream of news coverage focused on Trump’s latest outrage. Since most Republican voters really like outrageous comments, especially when they’re directed at women and people of other races or nationalities, this technique worked well enough to overcome Trump’s massive strategic and organizational liabilities as a candidate. But since most voters in the electorate as a whole feel differently, Trump’s outrageousness is now compounding rather than hiding his technical incompetence.
These are amazingly in-depth tweet storms from NY Times Rukmini Callamachi on the concept of the Orlando shooter’s complex motivations.
Univision:
Man who claims he had sexual relations with Orlando gunman tells Univision it was "revenge," not terrorism
Mateen was "very sweet" and liked to be "cuddled," the man told Univision. He says he was stunned when he learned he was the shooter.
Dana Milbank:
He has virtually no campaign apparatus, has sacked his campaign manager and has one-tenth Clinton’s staff. Yet he managed to spend more than $1 million in payments in May to Trump companies and in travel reimbursements to his family members.
Republicans are panicky, for good reason. We have seen this movie before. It’s called the Trump Taj Mahal Atlantic City.
In that, the first of his enterprises’ four bankruptcies, he convinced regulators he could raise plenty of money to complete the $1 billion project, claiming his golden name meant he wouldn’t have to rely on high-interest junk bonds, as other developers did. But then he issued junk bonds. Gamblers didn’t show up and spend the money he needed. Costs got out of control. Six months after the Taj opened in April 1990, it was in default, and nine months after that it went bankrupt, followed by two other Trump casinos.
The former head of the casino regulatory authority told The Post’s Robert O’Harrow Jr. that Trump had built a “Potemkin village.” Atlantic City never quite recovered, but Trump came out fine. He told O’Harrow: “I got out great.”
Now Trump is doing to the Republican Party what he did to Atlantic City.
Substitute voters for gamblers, “contributors” for bankers and the Republican Party for gambling regulators, and the arc has been eerily similar. Call it the Taj Technique.
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