Kyle Kondick/Crystal Ball:
The House Tilts Toward the Democrats
Big-picture factors help minority party, but battle far from over; 17 ratings changes in favor of Democrats
— Democrats are now a little better than 50-50 to win the House. This is the first time this cycle we’ve gone beyond 50-50 odds on a House turnover.
— We’re making 17 House ratings changes this week, all in favor of the Democrats.
— One of those comes in OH-12, where the last nationally-watched special House election is taking place in a couple of weeks.
Stuart Rothenberg/Roll Call:
Surveys Say: Polling Still Points to Rough November for Republicans
From Fox News to NBC News & the Wall Street Journal, GOP numbers
Unfortunately for Republicans, the combination of national and state polling continues to show the party’s vulnerability as November approaches….
A handful of state and district polls over the last month also showed surprising Democratic strength in the West Virginia Senate race, the Tennessee Senate contest, California’s 48th District, North Carolina’s 9th District and even West Virginia’s 3rd District.
Clearly, the political landscape remains dangerous for the GOP, though Democrats can’t yet claim victory. This cake is not yet baked.
So far, there is no evidence of wholesale defections from Trump among those who voted for him in 2016.
The president has generally played to his base, and most true-blue Trump loyalists are so invested in him that they would not even consider voting Democratic in the fall.
But Trump has done nothing to improve his standing with voters who supported Hillary Clinton and progressive Democrats who couldn’t make themselves vote for Clinton.
James Hohmann/WaPo:
The Daily 202: Why U.S. v. Nixon matters — now more than ever
Today is the 44th anniversary of the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in United States v. Nixon.
The landmark ruling on July 24, 1974, compelled Richard Nixon to turn over the tapes he’d recorded of Oval Office meetings so that the special prosecutor could use them during the criminal prosecutions of former White House aides. That led to the release of the smoking gun tape that proved the president was intimately involved in the coverup of the Watergate break-in. He resigned 16 days later.
President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, disclosed as part of a document dump over the weekend that he argued during a 1999 panel discussion that the case might have been wrongly decided.
That ought to be disqualifying.
Jennifer Rubin/WaPo:
Look out, Republicans. Democratic voters are angry and energized.
Republicans’ prospects for holding on to the House majority, already dim, have gotten bleaker of late. Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball notes: “We’re making 17 House ratings changes this week, all in favor of the Democrats. … One of those comes in OH-12, where the last nationally-watched special House election is taking place in a couple of weeks.” The report looks at the larger trend:
E.J.Dionne/WaPo:
We knew who Trump was
The most frustrating aspect of the backlash against President Trump’s servility to Russian President Vladimir Putin is that nothing that happened last week in Helsinki should have surprised us.
What has changed is that so many who insisted in 2016 that Trump was not as bad as he looked, that he was a pragmatist at heart, and that we should take him “seriously but not literally” have been forced to face the truth.
Christine Todd Whitman/LA Times:
Calling my fellow Republicans: Trump is clearly unfit to remain in office
President Trump’s disgraceful performance in Helsinki, Finland, and in the days since is an indication that he is not fit to remain in office. Trump’s 2016 “America First” platform might be more aptly named “Russia First” after the disaster that occurred last week.
Trump’s turn toward Russia is indefensible. I am a lifelong Republican. I have campaigned and won as a member of the party, and I have served more than one Republican president. My Republican colleagues — once rightfully critical of President Obama’s engagement strategy with Russian leader Vladimir Putin — have to end their willful ignorance of the damage Trump is doing both domestically and internationally. We must put aside the GOP label, as hard as that may be, and demonstrate the leadership our country needs by calling on the president to step down.
Politico:
House GOP leaders are reneging on a vow to hold an immigration vote before the August recess, a move that puts House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy in a particularly awkward spot as he seeks to become the next speaker.
In June, McCarthy (R-Calif.) personally promised several rank-and-file members a vote on a new guest-worker program for farmers, an offer backed by Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). The assurance was critical at the time: It persuaded Reps. Dennis Ross (R-Fla.) and Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) not to sign on to an effort — which Republican leaders were desperately trying to stop — to force a vote on legislation creating a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, the immigrants brought to the country illegally as children. The so-called discharge petition ultimately fell two signatures short.
But now, Republican leaders have no plans to take up the guest-worker program before the summer break, according to four sources in leadership. Ryan does not want to hold a vote that’s certain to fail, they said —though proponents of the guest-worker bill said McCarthy’s original promise to hold a vote was unconditional.
John Stoehr:
Before we lose our minds entirely, let’s try to remember that approval among partisans used to be something no one took seriously. No one. Why? Because they’re your people. Of course, they approve of what you’re doing! Anyway, even when your people like you, that doesn’t help when faced with an election favoring the out-party. Seth Masket pointed out this morning that George W. Bush and Barack Obama were hella-popular among partisans in 2006 and 2010, and look how much good it did them.
Morning Consult:
Democrats’ Anger May Retake the House
Negative emotions, particularly anger, tend to spur voter participation, experts say
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49% of Democrats are angry about the midterms, compared with 28% of GOP voters.
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Democrats were almost twice as likely as Republicans (44 percent vs. 24 percent) to choose a negative emotion to describe their feelings.
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Democrats have also grown wearier over the direction of their party.
“Anger is an emotion that is strongly correlated with participation” in elections, Vincent Hutchings, a University of Michigan political science professor, said in an interview this month. Hutchings co-authored a 2011 study that found that anger is more likely to lead to political participation than emotions such as anxiety or enthusiasm. The study pulled 24 years’ worth of data from the American National Election Studies, a randomized experiment of 411 people and a survey of 452 Americans who voted in 2008.
Aaron David Miller and Richard Sokolsky/USA Today:
Donald Trump in Helsinki was terrifying. Cancel the Washington sequel.
Vanity and personal vulnerability are driving Trump’s Russia policy, not sound strategy. And that’s very bad for America and anyone who cares about the nation’s security at home and abroad.