Tuesday Open Thread [4.14.15]

Hey look, the Utah Senate race is competitive. UTAH–SENATOR–Dan Jones and Associates: Sen. Mike Lee (R) 48, Fmr. Rep. Jim Matheson (D) 42

Nate Cohn: “Mr. Rubio’s struggle to break through is a powerful reminder that winning a presidential primary is not just about skill as a politician. It’s about positioning, and Mr. Rubio, at the moment, is in a much worse position than many assessments of his political talent would suggest. In basketball terms, he’s boxed out.”

“His central problem is that Jeb Bush has found considerable support from the party’s mainstream conservative and moderate donors in the so-called invisible primary — the behind-the-scenes competition for elite support that often decides the nomination… Mr. Bush’s pre-emptive bid to build elite support has denied Mr. Rubio the opportunity to consolidate the center-right wing of the party. Perhaps this wouldn’t be a big problem if Mr. Rubio were a favorite of the conservatives skeptical of Mr. Bush’s candidacy, but the field is full of candidates who are equally good or better fits for many conservative voters.”

He’s not running for President. He is running for Vice President.

“Obamacare’s first tax season includes all the elements needed to ignite a political firestorm. Yet with only days to go until the filing deadline, nothing’s burning,” according to Politico.

“Americans are reckoning for the first time with the most unpopular part of the law — the individual mandate — and having to prove they’ve had health insurance or to cough up a penalty. As they’ve done their taxes, many people have learned they owe money because they underestimated income when buying subsidized coverage in 2014. There’s been no real uproar, though.”

That’s because those who have signed up for insurance were consciously aware of the penalty. This is no surprise.

The uninsured rate continues to plummet. Thanks Obama.

Pew Research’s biannual poll on party identification reveals something that we all know: Independents are not Independent. When they ask independents whether they “lean” toward the Democrats or the Republicans. In the end, you can see there really are very few true independents. Most independents have distinct ideological preferences but still can’t bring themselves to fully associate with the party they gravitate toward (often, apparently, because the party isn’t pure enough for them, rather than because it’s too extreme for them). With leaners, 48 percent of respondents identify with the Democrats, and 39 with the Republicans, which means that the independents are split almost exactly down the middle (16 percent are indies who lean toward the Democrats, taking them up from 32 to 48, while 16 percent lean toward the GOP, taking them up from 23 to 39. Only 7 percent of the population are independents who truly claim not to lean one way or the other).