“A majority of Americans say a caravan of migrants now approaching the nation’s southern border poses at least a minor threat to the country,” according to the Monmouth University Poll.
“At the same time, 7-in-10 say that these migrants should be given the opportunity to enter the country if they meet certain requirements. Half are disinclined to believe that terrorists are traveling with the caravan, although 1-in-4 seem fairly certain that those claims are true.”
“John Barrow (D) picked up a surprising endorsement in his December 4 runoff bid for Georgia secretary of state: The third-place finisher who forced the race into overtime,” the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports.
“Libertarian J. Smythe DuVal threw his support behind Barrow, a former U.S. House member whom he said was able to ‘fix Georgia’s broken election system’ and save tax dollars through a ranked choice voting system that would eliminate separate runoff elections.”
Jonathan Chait: “The conservative movement has long dismissed the value of neutral expertise — environmental scientists, arms control analysts, budget forecasters, or any other meddlesome nerds who question the simple verities of right-wing politics — as biased. Conservative media is built on this insight, constructing an alternate information ecosystem, in which only conservative sources can be trusted.”
“Donald Trump, an avid consumer of conservative media, has taken this style to its next step. Trump insists he is the sole arbiter of truth. Anybody who questions Trump is by definition biased. By his circular logic, any attempt to question Trump is inherently false, since the act of challenging Trump reveals the source to be dishonest. Reporters can try to chase the lies down one by one, but they always lead back into this same logical cul-de-sac.”
“A group of Senate Democrats is suing to block Matt Whitaker from serving as acting attorney general on grounds that his placement in the post was unconstitutional,” the Daily Beast reports.
“The suit, which is being filed by Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and Mazie K. Hirono (D-HI) in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, is the latest and most aggressive salvo against the Whitaker appointment.”
Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) accepted a donation from Peter Sieve, a businessman in Washington state known for his white supremacist views, just days after a video published by Bayou Brief surfaced in which she says she would be “on the front row” if a supporter invited her to “a public hanging,” the Jackson Free Press reports.
The White House Correspondents’ Association announced that author Ron Chernow will be the featured speaker at next year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 27, Axios reports.
“Look, I hate to do it, but I will do it. I would give myself an A+. Is that enough? Can I go higher than that?”
— President Trump, in an interview with Fox News, when asked to grade his performance as president.
New York Times: “America’s farmers have been shut out of foreign markets, hit with retaliatory tariffs and lost lucrative contracts in the face of President Trump’s trade war. But a $12 billion bailout program Mr. Trump created to ‘make it up’ to farmers has done little to cushion the blow, with red tape and long waiting periods resulting in few payouts so far.”
“According to the Department of Agriculture, just $838 million has been paid out to farmers since the first $6 billion pot of money was made available in September. Another pool of up to $6 billion is expected to become available next month.”
FiveThirtyEight: “The 2018 election has become a tale of divided government: the House broke for Democrats, but the Senate held for Republicans — and what’s more, Republicans were even able to expand their majority in the Senate. The election has also become a tale of blue waves. But don’t those tales contradict one another? Not really. What the ‘split decision’ narrative sometimes misses is just how well Democrats performed in the Senate despite having to defend more seats than Republicans — and in territory that was largely more favorable to the GOP.”
“Much of this is overshadowed because Democrats did lose Senate seats… But if we look at a state’s partisan lean and the vote share margin in each Senate race, we see Democrats managed to outperform how their states leaned politically in almost every single race — including in the 10 states with a Democratic incumbent that President Trump won in 2016.”
However, First Read notes that Democratic performance in red states might have been their ceiling.
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Rick Hasen: “Democrats should stop with the rhetoric that the race was ‘stolen’… First, rhetoric about stolen elections feeds a growing cycle of mistrust and delegitimization of the election process… Saying Kemp tried to suppress Democratic votes and saying the election was stolen are two different things, and making charges of a stolen election when it cannot be proved undermines Democrats’ complaints about suppressive tactics.”
“Rather than questioning the election’s legitimacy or making uprovable claims of stolen elections, Democrats should focus their efforts into doing whatever is possible to prevent voter suppression and incompetence in the upcoming 2020 elections.”
NPR: “Election after election, pundits predict that Latinos will be a powerful voting bloc. And Latino voters consistently underperform those expectations by failing to turn out at the polls in big numbers.”
“But this year’s midterm results in Nevada, Arizona and other states suggest that Latino turnout is up dramatically — a development that could reshape the electoral landscape for 2020 and beyond.”
Florida Playbook: “A telltale sign of bad ballot design in Broward (where the Senate race was tucked below the instructions in the lower left-hand corner) was how Broward’s undervote rate in the Senate race was so much bigger than in any other Florida county. Unlike Miami-Dade to its north and Palm Beach to its south, Broward County had fewer votes for the top of the ticket Senate race than governor (as well as the three Florida Cabinet posts). Thousands of people just undervoted the race because they probably didn’t see it on the ballot.”
“If we assume the Senate race would have had as many total votes as the governor’s race in Broward and if Nelson’s and Gov. Scott’s vote-share remained the same, Nelson would have netted an additional 9,746 votes in the county. And that would have dropped Scott’s statewide lead of 10,033 to just 287 votes. Still, that’s a win for Scott.”
“Just four years ago, Marco Rubio was gearing up to run for president with an inclusive and sunny message designed to capture the imagination of a modernizing Republican Party — and maybe even the country,” the Washington Post reports.
“Those days, and that candidate, are long gone.”
“Like many Republicans, the second-term Florida senator has sounded more and more like President Trump since the 2016 election — striking a notably darker and foreboding tone while adopting some of Trump’s slash-and-burn political tactics and controversial positions.”
Washington Post: “It’s almost Thanksgiving: Which begs the question — will President Trump finally visit U.S. troops deployed to a combat zone? It’s been two years since Trump took office, and he has yet to make a trip to Afghanistan, Syria or Iraq.”
“Historically, presidential trips to visit U.S. troops in combat zones have been ‘a bipartisan practice going back to World War II.’ Bush 41 and Bush 43 both paid visits to troops overseas during the upcoming holiday.”
Washington Post: “As the final votes from the midterm elections rolled in last week, it became clear that President Trump’s near-constant campaign presence helped transform the American political map — effectively erasing lighter shades of red and blue.”
“The Trump effect now sets the stage for an intensely tribal 2020 showdown over his reelection, with a smaller and heavily rural Republican Party facing off against a growing Democratic coalition of suburban and urban residents in higher-income states.”
Brian Stelter: “If you thought the Trump administration would seek to settle CNN and Jim Acosta’s lawsuit out of court… think again.”
“After CNN won a temporary restraining order on Friday, forcing the White House to restore his press pass for 14 days, White House officials sent Acosta a letter stating that his pass is set to be suspended again once the restraining order expires.”
Mike Allen: “This is a high-risk confrontation for both sides. It turns out that press access to the White House is grounded very much in tradition rather than in plain-letter law. So a court fight could result in a precedent that curtails freedom to cover the most powerful official in the world from the literal front row.”
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.