“A lifelong Republican’s decision to change party affiliations following the Capitol riot has evolved into a run for U.S. Senate,” the Raleigh News & Observer reports.
Said Kimrey Rhinehardt: “I felt like I had no political home. I think I’m on a mission to create one. Not just for me but people who feel the same that I do.”
Associated Press: “While much of the material is coming from domestic sources such as Spanish-speaking social media ‘influencers,’ it increasingly originates on online sites in Latin America, those studying it closely say.”
“Misinformation originally promoted in English is translated in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua and elsewhere, then reaches Hispanic voters in the U.S. via communications from their relatives in those countries. That is often shared via private WhatsApp and Facebook chats and text chains.”
Geoffrey Skelley: “Name recognition, or whether voters and the public writ large have heard of a candidate, is one of the most important ingredients in a presidential nomination contest. We’ve found that since the mid-1990s, the eventual nominee for each party was already pretty well known early in the election cycle (at least 80 percent of voters, on average, had heard of them more than a year out from the general election). That means interviews, articles citing them as presidential hopefuls — ahem, like this one — and coverage of hypothetical polls about the 2024 race all matter.”
“But at the same time, there’s such a thing as unwanted media attention (just ask Hillary Clinton about her emails). That’s why most candidates want to maintain a veil of uncertainty on whether they’re actually running. It keeps them in the driver’s seat. The media is interested in you, raising your national profile, but you’re not held to the same standard as an actual candidate.”
In 25 years of running Political Wire, no computer has ever served me better than the latest MacBook Air.
It’s the rare machine that’s powerful enough to handle my entire workflow yet light enough to take everywhere — and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
It's on sale now for an astonishing 21% off.
Huffington Post: “Democrats in the Senate narrowly passed a mammoth coronavirus aid package Saturday morning that is likely to become a landmark for progressive legislation.”
“In fact, the legislation includes so many notable, big-ticket provisions that it’s gaining almost no attention for another notable feature: rescuing the pensions of more than a million workers and retirees.”
Washington Post: “While other groups have also been wary about the shots, for instance, communities of color, polling shows that hesitancy has started to wane while GOP resistance to the vaccines remains relatively high. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll released last month found that 28 percent of Republicans said they would “definitely not” get vaccinated, and another 18 percent said they would ‘wait and see’ before getting a shot.”
“As a result, millions of Republicans could remain unvaccinated, a potential roadblock to efforts to achieve the high levels of immunity needed to stop the virus in the United States — an irony that isn’t lost on Trump officials who worked to end the pandemic.”
Jonathan Bernstein: “Another conclusion that some pundits reached over the weekend was that Biden has been, once again, underrated. That may be correct, but it also is another example of how journalists treat legislating (and everything else in Washington) as primarily about the presidency.”
“To be sure, by all accounts the White House did take a lead role in putting together this relief package, which is a return to the way things were normally done before the presidency of Donald Trump. But Congress passed the relief bill, and it’s tempting to overlook just how easy it would have been for things to go wrong, especially in the House. Speaker Nancy Pelosi makes it all look inevitable, but it most definitely is not — as anyone who remembers the frequent internal party fights under Republican Speakers Paul Ryan or John Boehner or, for that matter, Democrat Tom Foley.”
President Biden will deliver a prime-time address on Thursday to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the covid “shutdown” and to talk about the role “Americans will play in beating the virus,” the Washington Post reports.
Josh Rogin: “In the spring of 2020, inside the U.S. government, some officials began to see and collect evidence of a different, perhaps more troubling theory—that the outbreak had a connection to one of the laboratories in Wuhan, among them the WIV, a world leading center of research on bat coronaviruses.”
“To some inside the government, the name of the laboratory was familiar. Its research on bat viruses had already drawn the attention of U.S. diplomats and officials at the Beijing Embassy in late 2017, prompting them to alert Washington that the lab’s own scientists had reported ‘a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.'”
“But their cables back to Washington were ignored.”
NBC News: “Bernie Sanders, Josh Hawley, and Amazon don’t often find themselves on the same side of an issue.”
“But years of stagnant wages that have failed to keep up with living costs and the political realignment spurred by Donald Trump are bringing together more than just Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont; Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri; and Amazon, one of America’s biggest businesses.”
“The politics of the minimum wage have been scrambled, dividing the business community and making strange bedfellows out of populists on the right and the left.”
David Leonhardt: “It’s one of the biggest mysteries about Covid-19: Why has the death toll been relatively low across much of Africa and Asia?”
“The virus has killed a fraction of as many people on those continents — despite their relative lack of resources — as it has in Europe or the U.S.”
In an announcement that instantly shook up Missouri’s political landscape, U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt said Monday morning he would not run for reelection in 2022, the St. Louis Post Dispatch reports.
Jonathan Chait: “Ironically, it is the misleading nature of pro-filibuster propaganda that has enabled Manchin to co-opt its themes. Filibuster advocates present the device as a requirement to allow ‘debate,’ likening it to a kind of free-speech right for senators.”
“In fact, the modern filibuster inhibits rather than enables debate. So Manchin can propound on the need to allow consideration of bills, and permit Republicans to speak on them extensively, because those are not the actual goals of filibuster supporters. The real purpose of the mechanism is to impose a 60-vote requirement (one that has already been eliminated for executive-branch appointments, fiscal policy, and judges).”
Reuters: “The U.S. House of Representatives is set to vote on Wednesday on a pair of bills to expand background checks before gun purchases, two years after a similar House effort failed to make it through the Senate.”
Julian Zelizer notes that in March 2020, every Senate Democrat voted for President Trump’s pandemic relief bill. And in December 2020, nearly every Senate Democrat voted for Trump’s second relief bill.
In March 2021, no Senate Republicans voted for President Joe Biden’s relief package.
The Supreme Court on Monday denied a bid by former President Trump to nullify his electoral loss in Wisconsin, rejecting the former president’s final pending appeal over the results of the 2020 election, The Hill reports.
“Democrats passed an unapologetically progressive stimulus bill through the Senate this weekend, one that Sen. Bernie Sanders has called ‘the most significant piece of legislation to benefit working families in the modern history of this country,'” Vox reports.
“This bill would not be on the brink of becoming law if Democrats did not have a governing trifecta in the White House, the Senate, and the House. And that trifecta in turn would not have been possible were it not for the defection into the Democratic column of a particular, and perhaps surprising, demographic: suburban whites with college degrees.”
“These voters, once a reliably Republican constituency, switched in large numbers in 2018, handing Democrats decisive House seats in places like California’s Orange County. In 2020, they helped elevate Joe Biden to the White House by turning out for him in places like Pennsylvania’s Montgomery County.”
A must-read from Jelani Cobb:
“Despite the United States’ reputation as the most stable democracy in the world, most of the political parties born in this country, including major ones, have ceased to exist. The Republican Party itself was built on the ruins of the Whigs, a party that broke apart in the tempests leading to the Civil War. Considering that history, it’s worth asking whether the party of Lincoln, now the party of Trump, is engaged in conflicts so intense that it will go the way of the Whigs.”
Washington Post: The “magic” Donald Trump brought to Republican politics is not a mystery.
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.
“There are a lot of blogs and news sites claiming to understand politics, but only a few actually do. Political Wire is one of them.”
— Chuck Todd, host of “Meet the Press”
“Concise. Relevant. To the point. Political Wire is the first site I check when I’m looking for the latest political nugget. That pretty much says it all.”
— Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the Rothenberg Political Report
“Political Wire is one of only four or five sites that I check every day and sometimes several times a day, for the latest political news and developments.”
— Charlie Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report
“The big news, delicious tidbits, pearls of wisdom — nicely packaged, constantly updated… What political junkie could ask for more?”
— Larry Sabato, Center for Politics, University of Virginia
“Political Wire is a great, great site.”
— Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”
“Taegan Goddard has a knack for digging out political gems that too often get passed over by the mainstream press, and for delivering the latest electoral developments in a sharp, no frills style that makes his Political Wire an addictive blog habit you don’t want to kick.”
— Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post
“Political Wire is one of the absolute must-read sites in the blogosphere.”
— Glenn Reynolds, founder of Instapundit
“I rely on Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire for straight, fair political news, he gets right to the point. It’s an eagerly anticipated part of my news reading.”
— Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.