The final CNN poll in New Hampshire finds Bernie Sanders leading with 29%, followed by Pete Buttigieg at 22%, Joe Biden at 11%, Elizabeth Warren at 10% and Amy Klobuchar at 7%.
Key takeaway: “Only about half of likely primary voters in New Hampshire say they have definitely decided for whom they will vote, meaning that despite the stability in the numbers throughout the six-day tracking period, there remains room for preferences to shift.”
“You are my donors… Unlike some of my opponents, we don’t take money from the CEOs of pharmaceutical companies or from Wall Street goons… We don’t want their money, we don’t need them.”
— Sen. Bernie Sanders, quoted by ABC News.
“Amazon is seeking to depose President Trump, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and former Defense Secretary James Mattis over a $10 billion Pentagon cloud contract awarded to Microsoft,” CNBC reports.
From an Amazon statement: “President Trump has repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to use his position as President and Commander in Chief to interfere with government functions – including federal procurements – to advance his personal agenda. The preservation of public confidence in the nation’s procurement process requires discovery and supplementation of the administrative record, particularly in light of President Trump’s order to ‘screw Amazon.’ The question is whether the President of the United States should be allowed to use the budget of the DoD to pursue his own personal and political ends.”
If you’ve ever worked on a campaign, you know how fast someone can dig up your phone number, old address, and half your family tree. Now imagine that same “oppo research” power in the hands of scammers.
One Redditor described a nightmare call: “Someone contacted me, my ex, his girlfriend, my brother, my cousin, and my parents. He knew everyone’s names — even where I work.”
That’s not a lucky guess. That’s a data trail.
Every job you’ve held, every move you’ve made, every database you forgot existed — it’s all archived and sold by data brokers and genealogy sites. And unless you actively wipe it, it stays in circulation indefinitely.
Incogni does the cleanup for you — identifying where your personal data is exposed, forcing its removal, and continuing to scrub new leaks over time. It’s like having your own digital compliance team… but for your private life.
If they can’t find you, they can’t scam you. Political Wire readers get 55% off an annual plan with code POLITICALWIRE.
“Sheldon Adelson, an ardent pro-Israel conservative, is expected to donate at least $100m to boost Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election efforts and Republican congressional candidates this fall,” The Guardian reports.
Joe Biden insisted he can still win the Democratic presidential nomination in a contentious CBS News interview.
Said Biden: “Nothing’s going to happen until we get down to a place and around the country where there’s much more diversity. And, you know, you’re always behind the eight ball when you’re running in New Hampshire and you have two people from the neighboring states.”
New York Times: “As disastrous as the 2020 Iowa caucuses have appeared to the public, the failure runs deeper and wider than has previously been known, according to dozens of interviews with those involved. It was a total system breakdown that casts doubt on how a critical contest on the American political calendar has been managed for years.”
“Until now, the main public villain in the Iowa caucus fiasco has been the reporting app, created by a company called Shadow Inc., along with a ‘coding issue’ in a back-end results reporting system that state party officials blamed for the chaos. But the crackup resulted from cascading failures going back months.”
White House adviser Kellyanne Conway hinted that additional officials could be forced out of their roles following the ousters last week of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and Ambassador Gordon Sondland — both high-profile witnesses in the impeachment investigation of President Trump, Politico reports.
Michael Bloomberg’s latest campaign ad features footage of several former presidents along with President Trump, but it does not show the candidate actually paying for the ad.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s hand-picked successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, has abruptly announced her intention to quit as party leader, Bloomberg reports.
Germany’s ruling party, the Christian Democratic Union, has been scandalized after some of its local politicians in the state of Thuringia voted with the far-right Alternative for Germany party to install a regional leader. Kramp-Karrenbauer had given clear orders not to collaborate with the AfD at any level.
“Four members of China’s military have been indicted by the U.S. government on charges of hacking into the credit-reporting agency Equifax Inc. and plundering sensitive data on nearly 150 million Americans,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“A federal grand jury in Atlanta returned a nine-count indictment last week that accused members of China’s People’s Liberation Army of conspiring to steal reams of data as part of a sophisticated hacking operation that exploited a major vulnerability in the software used by Equifax’s online dispute portal.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign plans to ask for a “partial recanvass” of the results of last week’s Iowa caucuses, the AP reports.
“A recanvass is not a recount, but a check of the vote count against paper records to ensure the counts were reported accurately.”
First Read: “In 2016, Bernie Sanders won a whopping 73 percent of these independent voters. But in our NBC News/Marist poll we released on Friday, Sanders was getting just 22 percent of them — compared with Buttigieg at 25 percent and Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren at 10 percent apiece.”
“What’s going on here? Well, because there isn’t a competitive GOP primary this year, you not only have pro-Bernie indies, you also have the GOP-leaning independents who backed John Kasich and Jeb Bush in 2016.”
“If Buttigieg is going to pull off the upset on Tuesday against Sanders — or at least make it close — it will be due to those independents. Ditto if Amy Klobuchar continues her momentum, especially after Friday night’s debate.”
Jonathan Swan: “Mike Bloomberg’s campaign feels corporate. It’s calm, orderly and punctual. His audiences clap politely, and you can’t walk two steps without running into a paid staffer with talking points. Nobody whoops or yells. Nothing is left to chance. No expense is spared. The candidate is self-consciously low-key.”
“After being immersed in Donald Trump’s freewheeling White House and campaign for more than four years, I found the day I spent flying around with Bloomberg’s campaign last week in California to be a foreign experience.”
“The scale of Bloomberg’s staff buildup and national advertising spend is unprecedented in modern American politics. His operation is coming to resemble his own personal political party.”
“He got 44.8% in 2018. He suffered the worst electoral defeat in the House ever… but yet, the media is going, ‘Oh, he’s so strong, he’s so powerful, he’s so this.’ No he’s not!”
— James Carville, in an interview on MSNBC, on President Trump.
“President Trump has told top foreign policy advisers that he does not want another summit with Kim Jong Un before the presidential election in November,” CNN reports.
“Trump’s last meeting with the North Korean dictator took place almost exactly a year ago, and both leaders walked away empty-handed. Since then diplomacy — aimed at achieving the denuclearization of North Korea — has floundered, and as Trump focuses on his re-election campaign his appetite to engage on the issue has waned.”
“Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is asking that every agency inspector general investigate retaliation against whistleblowers who report presidential misconduct, after the firing of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman from the National Security Council,” Politico reports.
“Donald Trump’s campaign call for all Muslims to be barred from entering the United States has morphed over the past three years into a complex web of travel and immigration restrictions placed, to varying degrees, on 7% of the world’s population,” Axios reports.
“While most eyes were on impeachment and Iowa, President Trump recently extended restrictions to six additional countries — widening the ban and ignoring the massive outcry it has created.
Rachel Bitecofer: “Ultimately, it may be Bloomberg, not Biden that subverts Buttigieg’s already historic bid for the Democratic nomination. Bloomberg, like Buttigieg, has a complicated relationship with voters of color. But unlike Buttigieg, he has experience and a campaign war chest the likes of which we’ve never seen. At the end of the day, what voters are looking for the most in their nominee is reassurance that their long national nightmare will end and that is the message Bloomberg is selling. And he has all the money in the world to bankroll the effort.”
David Drucker: “With Biden’s poor showing in Iowa and his New Hampshire support diminishing, Bloomberg is beginning to intrigue Democratic officials.”
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.