Daily Archives
47 posts · Monday
“I would like to have a much softer tone. I feel to a certain extent I have no choice, but maybe I do and maybe I could have been softer from that standpoint.”
— President Trump, quoted by Reuters, when asked if he regretted anything about his first two years in office.
“A staggering 36 million voters cast their ballots ahead of Election Day this year, setting the stage for much-higher-than-usual turnout for a midterm — and, potentially, big surprises on Tuesday night,” Politico reports.
“Republican enthusiasm for President Donald Trump and Democrats’ itch to repudiate him at the ballot box have driven people to the polls far faster than in 2014, when 27.2 million people voted early.”
For members: If There’s a Surprise Tomorrow Night…
Vanity Fair: “The bigger threat for Trump than losing control of Congress is Robert Mueller’s looming report. Sources say Trump advisers are girding themselves for Mueller to deliver the results of his investigation to the Justice Department as early as Wednesday, although it’s more likely he’ll wait till later this month. Sources say besides the president, the ones with the most exposure are Roger Stone and Donald Trump Jr.”
Said one former White House official: “I’m very worried about Don Jr.”
“The possible exposure would be that Mueller would demonstrate that Don Jr. perjured himself to investigators when he said he didn’t tell his father beforehand about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting to gather ‘dirt’ on Hillary Clinton.”
“One potential sign of how seriously Trumpworld is treating the Mueller threat has been the near total silence of Rudy Giuliani. A constant presence on cable news over the summer, Giuliani hasn’t been on television in weeks.”
“Major television networks and Facebook have taken the unusual step of rejecting an inflammatory ad by President Trump’s political team that effectively closes a fiercely fought midterm campaign with a message portraying immigrants as a violent threat,” the New York Times reports.
“The 30-second political spot, which mirrors the president’s apocalyptic warnings about a caravan of asylum seekers in Mexico, was widely denounced as racist and misleading after Mr. Trump shared a longer version of it last week.”
“NBC and Facebook, both of which had run the ad over the weekend, reversed course after a backlash on Monday and announced that the commercial would be removed, saying it fell short of their in-house advertising standards. CNN had refused to air the ad from the start, calling it ‘racist.’ Even Fox News, which has made warnings about the migrant caravan a staple of its prime time coverage of the midterms, felt compelled to distance itself from the ad.”
President Trump pre-emptively spread around blame for the results of Tuesday’s midterms elections, accusing CNN of peddling “fake suppression polls” and floating the prospect of widespread fraudulent voting, Politico reports.
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) said that he hopes Republicans will “have a 7-2 court” after the midterm elections, adding that if the party is lucky Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor “will elope to Cuba,” the Washington Post reports.
“Hitting the campaign trail on the eve of the nation’s pivotal midterm elections, President Trump told supporters that Democrats would gut his agenda if they win control of the House and Senate,” USA Today reports.
Said Trump: “Everything we have created and achieved is at stake on Election Day.”
President Trump claimed he is not concerned about House Democrats obtaining and releasing his tax returns if they win the House majority in Tuesday’s midterm elections, Roll Call reports.
Said Trump: “I don’t care. They can do whatever they want, and I can do whatever I want.”
Jennifer Duffy: “One interesting phenomenon in Senate elections is that the races in the Toss Up column never break down the middle; one party wins a majority of them.”
“Going back 10 cycles to 1998, the lowest percentage of Toss Up seats one party won was in 2002 when Republicans won 67 percent (6 of 9 races). In 2004, 2006 and 2014, one party took 89 percent of the contests in Toss Up. In 2004, Republicans won 8 of 9 races, but in 2006, Democrats took 8 of 9 races. In 2014, Republicans won 8 of 9 contests. That there were nine races in Toss Up in all three years and there are nine this year is purely a coincidence.”
“I’ve been telling my neighbors for two years that this is not who we are. The overtly fascist rhetoric. The demonizing, vilifying, verminizing—if that’s a verb—of the other. I keep telling people that’s not who we are. But if in these midterms, with this first opportunity to correct our mistake, people vote for ‘this,’ then maybe that’s who we’ve become.”
— Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D), paraphrasing another candidate to Esquire.
ProPublica found that Georgia officials were busily fixing problems with its voter registration just hours after the office of Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the Republican candidate for governor, had insisted the system was secure.
“Security experts frown on making such seemingly ad hoc changes close to major events, such as an election, because they can create unforeseen problems when made so quickly.”
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke “continued to engage in discussions involving his family foundation’s property in summer 2017 despite the fact that he had pledged to recuse himself from such matters for a year,” according to documents obtained by the Washington Post.
Washington Post: “For more than 200 years, Congress operated largely as the country’s founders envisioned — forging compromises on the biggest issues of the day while asserting its authority to declare war, spend taxpayer money and keep the presidency in check.”
“Today, on the eve of a closely fought election that will determine who runs Capitol Hill, that model is effectively dead.”
“It has been replaced by a weakened legislative branch in which debate is strictly curtailed, party leaders dictate the agenda, most elected representatives rarely get a say, and government shutdowns are a regular threat because of chronic failures to agree on budgets.”
Wall Street Journal: “Donors who identify their occupation as ‘retired’ gave 52% of the $326 million they contributed through Oct. 17 to Democrats, compared with 48% to Republicans… That is a reversal of their split four years ago—and it’s a record amount of midterm money from retirees.”
“This is the first midterms since the group began keeping donor industry data in 1990 in which retirees favor Democrats over Republicans.”
Roger Angell: “What we can all do at this moment is vote—get up, brush our teeth, go to the polling place, and get in line. I was never in combat as a soldier, but now I am. Those of you who haven’t quite been getting to your polling place lately, who want better candidates or a clearer system of making yourself heard, or who just aren’t in the habit, need to get it done, this time around. If you stay home, count yourself among the hundreds of thousands now being disenfranchised by the relentless parade of restrictions that Republicans everywhere are imposing and enforcing. If you don’t vote, they have won, and you are a captive, one of their prizes.”
“When you do go to vote on Tuesday, take a friend, a nephew, a neighbor, or a partner, and be patient when in line. Just up ahead of you, the old guy in a sailing cap, leaning on his cane and accompanied by his wife, is me, again not minding the wait, and again enthralled by the moment and its meaning.”
Josh Kraushaar: “This is one of the few Senate races where there hasn’t been much quality public polling, leaving analysts to rely on shoe-leather reporting and red-state political fundamentals.”
“Political operatives on both sides agree that Tester is narrowly ahead, but with enough undecided voters to make it uncomfortably close. In his two successful Senate races, Tester won just 49 percent of the vote. With so much partisan polarization — and many red-state Democratic senators losing ground in the final weeks — it’s not hard to see how Tester could fall short.”
The Atlantic: “Publicly disgraced, out of money, and facing both jail time and a suddenly-surging challenger—what was an indicted congressman to do?”
“Eventually, Hunter seemed to arrive at his answer: try to eke out a win by waging one of the most brazenly anti-Muslim smear campaigns in recent history.”
“In the final weeks of the election, Hunter has aired ominous ads warning that his Democratic opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, is ‘working to infiltrate Congress’ with the support of the Muslim Brotherhood. He has circulated campaign literature claiming the Democrat is a ‘national security threat’ who might reveal secret U.S. troop movements to enemies abroad if elected. While Hunter himself floats conspiracy theories from the stump about a wave of ‘radical Muslims’ running for office in America, his campaign is working overtime to cast Campa-Najjar as a nefarious figure reared and raised by terrorists.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.