President Trump tweeted that former special counsel Robert Mueller must stick to his report’s findings when he testifies to Congress later this month.
Said Trump: “Robert Mueller is being asked to testify yet again. He said he could only stick to the Report, & that is what he would and must do. After so much testimony & total transparency, this Witch Hunt must now end. No more Do Overs. No Collusion, No Obstruction. The Great Hoax is dead!”
A new Suffolk University/USA Today Poll in Iowa finds Joe Biden continues to lead the Democratic field with 24%, followed by Kamala Harris at 16%, Elizabeth Warren at 13% and Bernie Sanders at 9%.
Key takeaway: “Harris saw her support more than double compared to the June poll, to 16% from 7%. She was also chosen as the second choice of 17% — a telling measure of the potential breadth of a candidate’s support. When first and second choices were combined, Biden only narrowly edged Harris, 35% to 33%.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders raised $18 million in the past three months, the New York Times reports.
Sanders’s total was less than the $24.8 million that Mayor Pete Buttigieg collected in the quarter, an eye-popping sum that the Buttigieg campaign revealed on Monday.
FiveThirtyEight: “Now that this year’s Supreme Court term is over, we know that Kavanaugh is shaping up to be a solidly conservative justice — he barely beat out Roberts as the court’s new median and voted most frequently with Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. And although Roberts did step several times into the role of ‘swing’ justice, he wasn’t the only conservative justice who joined the liberals over the course of the term.”
“Although he wasn’t in the middle ideologically, Justice Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s other nominee, was actually the most likely to join the liberals in closely decided cases. In fact, each of the conservative justices joined the liberals in a 5-4 or 5-3 decision at least once. With a newly cemented conservative majority on the court, the days of a single ‘swing’ justice may be over.”
Paul Krugman: “I’ve been reading a recent Rockefeller Institute report on states’ federal ‘balance of payments’ — the difference for each state between what the federal government spends in that state and what it gets back in revenue.”
“The pattern is familiar: Richer states subsidize poorer states. And the reasons are clear: Rich states pay much more per person in federal taxes, while actually getting a bit less in federal spending, because Medicaid and other ‘means-tested’ programs go disproportionately to those with low incomes. But the magnitudes are startling.”
“Take the case of Kentucky. In 2017, the state received $40 billion more from the federal government than it paid in taxes. That’s about one-fifth of the state’s G.D.P.; if Kentucky were a country, we’d say that it was receiving foreign aid on an almost inconceivable scale.”
“The prospect of a Democratic presidential debate focused on climate change just took a step closer to becoming reality. But such a single-issue face-off is still far from being a done deal,” the Washington Post reports.
“Leaders of the Democratic National Committee have advanced a proposal to host a climate-specific debate after weeks of protests from environmental activists and even some White House hopefuls. The DNC will decide on whether to allow such a debate at its next meeting in August.”
For more on this, check out the Climate Debate briefing.
“We’re sitting here and in one week the President of the United States has had a credible rape charge against him and that didn’t make the front page of The New York Times when it first came out. In a typical week five or six things like that happen. Offenses to democracy, offenses to the truth and it’s all done cynically. Remember that word we all used to use at the beginning? ‘We have to be very careful of normalizing Donald Trump?’ Well, mission accomplished.”
— New Yorker editor David Remnick, on the Axe Files with David Axelrod podcast.
“President Trump’s re-election campaign and the Republican National Committee on Tuesday said they had raised $105 million in the second quarter of this year, dwarfing what President Barack Obama raised in the equivalent period during his re-election campaign,” the New York Times reports.
“The campaign and the R.N.C. said they had a combined $100 million in cash on hand, and that they had raised more money online in the second quarter than in the first half of 2018. The staggering total figure can be plowed into television and digital advertising, get-out-the-vote efforts and other activities related to the 2020 election.”
Amy Chozick: “One of the upsides to running in 2020 is that nothing much is a shocker anymore. Porn stars and Russian hackers? The president of the United States, in a span of a couple of days, picking fights with Meghan Markle and Bette Midler? Maybe I am being overly optimistic, but I see something liberating—particularly for female candidates—in Trump’s subverting of traditional political norms… because women presidents aren’t the norm either.”
“Thanks to Trump and a news cycle that is suffering from acute attention-deficit disorder (Avenatti who?), women candidates, perhaps, don’t have to worry so much about being perfect, about biting their tongue and saying what they think voters want to hear.”
Gallup: “While 70% of U.S. adults overall say they are proud to be Americans, this includes fewer than half (45%) who are ‘extremely’ proud, marking the second consecutive year that this reading is below the majority level. Democrats continue to lag far behind Republicans in expressing extreme pride in the U.S.”
“Robert Mueller will appear grudgingly before House committees this month, but the former special prosecutor’s testimony is the best chance Democrats have to revive their stymied probes of President Donald Trump,” Bloomberg reports.
“Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s resistance to a politically risky impeachment inquiry leaves six committees pursuing Trump-related inquiries without a clear mission. And a White House order that current and former officials refuse to testify, or limit their testimony, has deprived Democrats of big-name witnesses.”
“So House Democrats are banking on the made-for-TV spectacle of Mueller testifying on July 17 at a morning session of the Judiciary Committee and an afternoon meeting of the Intelligence Committee.”
A must-read: American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump by Tim Alberta.
Politico: “Hickenlooper announced late Monday the hiring of a new campaign manager, M.E. Smith, who managed Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey’s reelection in 2018. Smith also served as deputy campaign manager for Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, now a fellow 2020 competitor, and held the same role for Hickenlooper’s reelection for governor in 2014.”
“His spokeswoman, Lauren Hitt, later confirmed that she would be leaving the campaign, joining former campaign manager Brad Komar.”
Politico: “Advertising Analytics, a political ad-tracking firm, expects the total cost of TV and digital ads for the next election to hit over $6 billion — a 57 percent increase over the total in last year’s hotly contested and expensive midterm elections, driven by a huge jump in digital video advertising.”
“Over one-quarter of the $6 billion total, $1.6 billion, will be spent on digital video platforms, primarily Facebook and Google, while broadcast and cable TV stations will take in a whopping $4.4 billion — more than twice as much as Democrats and Republicans spent on TV in the last presidential elections.”
“President Trump entered his meeting with President Xi Jinping over the weekend promising to take a tough approach on trade negotiations and pressure his Chinese counterpart into a sweeping deal,” the Washington Post reports.
“But the meeting did not produce an agreement — and Trump’s stance seemed to only soften as he announced he was relaxing limits on Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei and delaying new tariffs on Chinese goods in hopes of restarting trade talks with Beijing.”
“Trump’s meetings with Xi and other leaders at the Group of 20 economic summit suggest that despite his promise to use negotiating savvy and personal relationships to extract concessions from rivals or uncooperative allies, he often leaves one-on-one sessions with fellow world leaders without firm agreements in hand.”
Nate Cohn: “The transition away from live interview telephone polling is well underway, and online polls now make up the principal source of data on national public opinion.”
“But the alternatives to traditional polling are not fully mature, and the absence of a clear set of standards for online polling research has opened the floodgates to unproven surveys of uncertain quality.”
“Many of the new pollsters have become familiar enough that journalists and readers have started to cite them with confidence. It’s not yet clear they all deserve it.”
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.