Wednesday Open Thread [10.7.2015]

NATIONAL——PRESIDENT——REPUBLICAN PRIMARY——PPP——Trump 27, Carson 17, Rubio 13, Bush 10, Cruz 7, Fiorina 6, Huckabee 4, Kasich 4, Chrsitie 2, Paul 2, Santorum 2, Graham 1, Jindal 1, Pataki 1, Gilmore 0

Although he’s still in first place by a wide margin the news isn’t all good for Trump. He’s had a 14 point drop in his net favorability rating over the last month from +26 at 56/30 to now just +12 at 50/38. And he’s lost ground in head to head match ups with the other leading GOP contenders. The only one he leads is Bush by 20 points at 56/36, although even that is down from his 25 point advantage at 59/34 last time. Last month he led Rubio (50/42) and Fiorina (48/41) in head to heads, now he trails them 50/43 and 47/45 respectively. And what was already a 49/43 deficit to Carson one on one has now grown to 52/41. But perhaps the worst blow for Trump may be that GOP voters don’t think he’s as rich as he says is. Only 30% believe his net worth is over even 5 billion dollars to 55% who think it’s below that threshold. For the most part people aren’t buying his 10 billion dollar claim.

NATIONAL——PRESIDENT——DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY——PPP——Clinton 42, Sanders 24, Biden 20, Webb 2, Chafee 1, O’Malley 1.

Among Biden voters, 44% say Clinton would be their second choice to only 21% who say Sanders would be. If Biden doesn’t get in and you reallocate his backers to their second choice, Clinton leads Sanders 51 to 28. [..]

We also tested a fantasy field in which all of the names that have been thrown out there as possible Clinton challengers in recent months were included. Clinton gets 37% to 20% for Biden, 19% for Sanders, 11% for Elizabeth Warren, 4% for Al Gore, 2% each for Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, and 1% for Martin O’Malley. When you throw Warren, Gore, Dukakis, and Kerry into the mix Clinton still holds on to 83% of the people who support her in the actual field of candidates, compared to 80% for Biden, and 69% for Sanders.

We also tested Clinton head to head against Biden, Sanders, Gore, Warren, and Kerry. Biden comes the closest- in a head to head against Clinton he trails only 51/38. No one else can come within 20 points of Clinton when it comes to a one on one contest. Sanders trails 54/34, Warren 58/28, Gore 67/22, and Kerry 69/17. That’s not to say Democratic voters don’t like these other faces. Gore has a 62/21 favorability rating, Kerry a 57/20 one, and Warren comes in at 51/18. But for the most part Democrats are content with nominating Clinton next year and aren’t looking for some new face (beyond possibly Biden) to enter the race so they can flock to them.

Who are the fools suggesting that John Kerry and Mike Dukakis get into the race. I understand Warren and Gore, but Kerry and Dukakis?

FLORIDA——PRESIDENT——REPUBLICAN PRIMARY——Quinnipiac——Trump 28, Carson 16, Rubio 14, Bush 12, Fiorina 7, Cruz 6, Kasich 2, Paul 2, Huckabee 1, Christie 1, Jindal 0, Santorum 0, Graham 0

FLORIDA——PRESIDENT——DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY——Quinnipiac——Clinton 43, Biden 19, Sanders 19, O’Malley 0, Chafee 0, Webb 0, Lessig 0

OHIO——PRESIDENT——REPUBLICAN PRIMARY——Quinnipiac——Trump 23, Carson 18, Kasich 13, Cruz 11, Fiorina 10, Rubio 7, Bush 4, Paul 3, Huckabee 2, Christie 1, Santorum 0, Graham 0

OHIO——PRESIDENT——DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY——Quinnipiac——Clinton 40, Biden 21, Sanders 19, Lessig 1, O’Malley 0, Webb 0, Chafee 0

PENNSYLVANIA——PRESIDENT——REPUBLICAN PRIMARY——Quinnipiac——Trump 23, Carson 17, Rubio 12, Fiorina 8, Cruz 6, Christie 5, Huckabee 4, Bush 4, Kasich 3, Santorum 2, Paul 1, Jindal 1, Pataki 1, Graham 0

PENNSYLVANIA——PRESIDENT——DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY——Quinnipiac——Clinton 36, Biden 25, Sanders 19, O’Malley 1, Webb 1, Lessig 1, Chafee 0

FLORIDA——PRESIDENT——CLINTON V. GOP——Quinnipiac——

Clinton 46, Trump 41
Bush 44, Clinton 43
Clinton 44, Fiorina 42
Rubio 45, Clinton 44
Clinton 45, Carson 43

FLORIDA——PRESIDENT——BIDEN V. GOP——Quinnipiac——

Biden 52, Trump 38
Biden 46, Bush 42
Biden 49, Fiorina 38
Biden 46, Rubio 43

Nate Cohn: “Vice President Joe Biden has less support in the polls than Bernie Sanders and hasn’t raised a single dollar for a presidential campaign. Yet if Mr. Biden does decide to seek the presidency, he will pose a greater challenge to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.”

I agree. Sanders draws big crowds, and he polls well in New Hampshire, a state he might win. But Sanders is polling behind Biden in every later contest (see above). Biden seems to have the better electability argument on his side, at least in Florida (see above).

The Washington Post on the next phase of Trump’s “campaign”: “Trump laid out for the first time in detail the elements of what will be the second chapter of his 2016 bid, signaling an evolution toward a somewhat more traditional campaign. Trump is preparing his first television ads with a media firm that is new to politics. Melania, his wife, and Ivanka, his daughter, are planning public appearances highlighting women’s health issues to help close Trump’s empathy gap with female voters.”

“Trump is also publishing a book and planning to roll out policies on reforming the Veterans Administration and on trade and China’s currency manipulations. And he is deepening his political organization far beyond the early states, with top advisers vowing that his fight for the nomination will go all the way to the floor of the Republican National Convention.”

Up until now, the media whores have basically underwritten Trump’s campaign. He has basically spent no money (well, 2 million, but that’s a pittance compared to his poll standing and coverage). The media has prompted him up.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) “got an early start to the 2016 presidential campaign in March by being the first of what would become a vast field to announce his candidacy. Now, he has turned that starting advantage into a sprawling ground game,” the New York Times reports.

“For every county in the first four voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, the Cruz campaign has locked down county chairs in charge of not just lending their names to the campaign, but of spearheading outreach and organizing efforts.”

I have said it many times, but Ted Cruz will be your 2016 Republican nominee.

Hillary continues being scrappy. I love it. She told Time that she sent a copy of her 2014 book Hard Choices to all of her Republican rivals, saying she’s responding to their critiques about her record.

Said Clinton: “You know, I hear the Republicans talking from time to time in their debates and elsewhere and they say things like, ‘Oh, I don’t know what she accomplished as Secretary of State. She didn’t accomplish anything.’ I listened to that for a while. And then I thought maybe they just don’t know, so I have now sent each of them a copy of my book, Hard Choices, about what we did during those four years.” She added: “There are so many of them they could start a book club.”

“Republicans mangle the English language at twice the rate of Democrats,” USA Today reports.

“According to a new study by the grammar-checking app Grammarly, supporters commenting on Democratic candidates’ Facebook pages made an average of 4.2 mistakes per 100 words compared to 8.7 mistakes for supporters of Republican candidates. The Democratic supporters also showed a larger vocabulary, using on average 300 unique words per 1,000 words, while Republicans used only 245.”

“The trend is starker when broken out by candidate: The five Democratic candidates — Lincoln Chafee, Jim Webb, Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley and Hillary Clinton — all get better Facebook grammar scores (in that order) than every Republican except Carly Fiorina, whose supporters posted the best grammar scores of any GOP candidate, tying her with Clinton.”

No shit. It’s because we are more intelligent than Republicans. We value learning, curiosity, and science. Republicans do not.

So allegedly Joe Biden was the source for the Maureen Dowd column. I am going to provide a thought exercise for you. Imagine the press reaction to that story if Hillary Clinton did what Joe allegedly did.

Jennifer Senior has a must read column at New York Magazine on the Paradox of the First African American President.

There is a photo by Pete Souza, the White House’s canny and peripatetic photographer, that surfaces from time to time online. The setting is Marine One, and it features a modest cast of five. Valerie Jarrett, dressed in a suit of blazing pink, is staring at her cell phone. Barack Obama, twisted around in his seat, is listening to a conversation between his then–body guy, Reggie Love, and Patrick Gaspard, one of his then–top advisers. Obama’s former deputy press secretary, Bill Burton, is looking on too, with just the mildest hint of a grin on his face.

In many ways, it’s a banal shot — just another photo for the White House Instagram feed, showing the president and his aides busily attending to matters of state. Stare at it a second longer, though, and a subtle distinction comes into focus: Everyone onboard is black. “We joked that it was Soul Plane,” says Burton. “And we’ve often joked about it since — that it was the first time in history only black people were on that helicopter.”

Souza snapped that shot on August 9, 2010, but it didn’t make any prominent appearances in the mainstream press until mid-2012, when it appeared in The New York Times Magazine. The following summer, July 2013, the president had a group of civil-rights leaders come visit him in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, and the optics, as they like to say in politics, were similar: An all-star cast of minorities (African-American and Latino this time) gathered in a historic place to which the barriers to entry were once insuperably high.

But this was not a meeting the participants laughed about afterward. When Obama opened up the floor, everyone spoke about what they’d witnessed in the 2012 election: how states that limited voter-registration drives and early-voting initiatives had left many African-Americans off the rolls; how strict new laws concerning IDs had prevented many minorities from voting and created hours-long lines at the polls. The answer was clear: legislation to restore the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court had just overturned a key provision of the landmark civil-rights legislation the month before.

But Obama’s response was equally clear: Nothing could be done. Not in this political climate, not under these circumstances. Congress would never allow it.

The group was stunned. As they’d stumped for Obama, one of the many talking points they’d used to turn out the black vote was the threat of disenfranchisement, the possibility that the Voting Rights Act was in jeopardy. Yet here was Obama telling them that a bill addressing this vital issue didn’t stand a chance.

These proximal events — the publication of a historic photo in a major news outlet, a demoralizing discussion about the prospects of amending our voting laws — may seem unrelated. But to many who’ve watched this White House for the last six and three-quarter years, particularly with an eye toward race, the two events are finely intertwined. They would more likely say: One cannot have that photo without a massive reaction to that photo. In a country whose basic genetic blueprint includes the same crooked mutations that made slavery and Jim Crow possible, it is not possible to have a black president surrounded by black aides on Marine One without paying a price. And the price that Obama has had to pay — and, more important, that African-Americans have had to pay — is one of caution, moderation, and at times compromised policies: The first black president could do only so much, and say only so much, on behalf of other African-Americans. That is the bittersweet irony of the first black presidency.

Read it all.