Politico: “Nearly 60% of Democratic insiders in the first four nominating states say the businessman — who has mostly avoided tapping his vast personal fortune to fund his campaign — would be the easiest of the leading GOP candidates to defeat in the general election.”
“Roughly two out of three picked Rubio from a list of five leading GOP contenders — including Trump, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush — as the most formidable GOP hopeful due to his biography and political skill.”
“I’m gonna get people jobs and I’m going to protect people. And that’s why whenever there’s a tragedy, everything goes up, my numbers go way up because we have no strength in this country. We have weak, sad politicians.”
— Donald Trump, quoted by CNN.
“Openly welcoming a preordained veto, Republicans drove legislation to Senate passage Thursday aimed at crippling two of their favorite targets: President Barack Obama’s health care law and Planned Parenthood,” the AP reports.
“With a House rubber stamp expected in days, the bill would be the first to reach Obama’s desk demolishing his 2010 health care overhaul, one of his proudest domestic achievements, and halting federal payments to Planned Parenthood. Congress has voted dozens of times to repeal or weaken the health law and several times against Planned Parenthood’s funding, but until now Democrats thwarted Republicans from shipping the legislation to the White House.”
“After struggling for weeks to articulate his views on foreign policy, presidential candidate Ben Carson didn’t take any chances when addressing the Republican Jewish Coalition,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The retired neurosurgeon read his 30-minute speech from notes, looking down at his lectern and not at the audience. He repeatedly botched the pronunciation of Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, making it sound instead like the chickpea dish hummus — all while impugning President Obama’s understanding of the Middle East… He kept speaking through the few moments of applause and spoke – as many reporters present noted on Twitter – as if he were a nervous adolescent delivering a middle-school book report.”
“If Marco Rubio is the establishment candidate, look at how far we’ve come. This is someone who ran as an outsider, who ran as a conservative, someone who was a Jim DeMint–endorsed, Club for Growth–endorsed candidate who forced a sitting governor to switch parties.”
— Wesley Goodman, former head of the Conservative Action Project, quoted by National Review.
After yet another mass shooting, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) called the NRA the “quasi-militant wing of the Republican Party,” Politico reports.
Said Reid: “Those who choose to do the NRA’s bidding will be held accountable by our constituents. Something has to be done. We must take a stand. The American people are desperately looking for help, some help, any help. It will never be possible to prevent every shooting. We know that. But we have a responsibility to try. There are certain things we can do.”
Wonk Wire: Reaction to mass shootings: Republicans pray, Democrats call for action
Gov. Chris Christie slammed Sen. Marco Rubio in an interview with Yahoo News for having “no experience governing.”
Said Christie: “He’s had five years in the United States Senate, and for a good amount of that time he’s been running for president. So I don’t know.”
“A closely divided Supreme Court on Wednesday temporarily blocked Hawaii from counting votes in an election open only to descendants of its indigenous people, who were selecting delegates to an assembly that would propose greater self-government for Native Hawaiians, the Wall Street Journal reports.
: “Bottom line, the national polls are very poor predictors of primary/caucus results. While the state polls are better, they are still faced with the very difficult task of basing their predictions on what is at best an artful guess as to which individuals in the samples will actually vote.”
“The current polls almost surely do not provide a good read on the winners of the early February contests in Iowa and New Hampshire. Rather than relying on these polls to handicap the races, an eclectic multi-factor approach is necessary. That analysis needs to take into account history, candidate strengths and weaknesses, money, ground games, likely turnout, intensity of support, and interest in the election, among other factors.”
A new Public Policy Polling survey in New Hampshire finds Donald Trump’s lead pretty much unchanged at 27%, followed by Ted Cruz at 13%, Marco Rubio at 11%, Chris Christie at 10%, Ben Carson at 9%, John Kasich at 8%, Carly Fiorina at 6% and Jeb Bush at 5%.
“CNN will not give $5 million to charity to ensure Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump appears on the Republican debate set to air on the Time Warner-owned cable-news outlet on December 15,” Variety reports.
Said CNN chief Jeff Zucker: “We do not pay candidates to appear.”
“Mitch McConnell is close to pulling off a feat that at first seemed impossible: Coax Ted Cruz and antagonistic conservative groups to back his strategy to repeal Obamacare,” Politico reports.
“For weeks, Cruz, a 2016 GOP presidential candidate and chief McConnell nemesis, and conservative Sens. Mike Lee and Marco Rubio threatened to vote against a House-passed bill dismantling the health care law… Now, nearly a dozen GOP sources say Cruz and Rubio are almost certain to support the bill that kills significant portions of Obamacare, though they hadn’t yet made their position official.”
“McConnell marshaled a secret weapon that ultimately would work in his favor: Anti-abortion groups.”
Just published: Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know about How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates by Elaine Kamarck.
An updated guide to understanding the modern nominating system and some of its arcana.
Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “The calendar will help to determine whether there’s a truly prominent third-party candidate on the ballot. Filing deadlines for independent presidential candidates vary by state, but a majority fall in August. That is after the conventions — 38 states’ deadlines are after the RNC ends on July 21 — but not so far after them that a spurned candidate could easily turn around and get on many state ballots. A candidate who wants to get on every ballot will have to start much earlier than that: For instance, the deadline for an independent to get on the ballot in Texas, the second-biggest state, is May 9.”
“So maybe it would be helpful to the Republicans if Trump hangs around in the primary — so long as he doesn’t win the nomination — just long enough for a national third-party bid to be out of reach.”
“The pattern that I see is a man who seems to only feel big when he’s trying to make other people look small and I think it makes Donald Trump look the smallest of all.”
— Carly Fiorina, in an interview on Morning Joe, on Donald Trump.
Overlooked from yesterday: A new national Quinnipiac poll finds that 73% of Republican voters say Donald Trump would have a good chance of winning the general election.
That’s compared with 63% who say the same about Marco Rubio, 59% who say it about Ted Cruz and 55% who say it about Ben Carson.
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.