A new Texas Lyceum Poll finds Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) leading challenger to O’Rourke (D) by a hair, 41% to 39% among likely voters.
That’s well within the survey’s margin of error of 4.67 percentage points.
A new Quinnipiac poll finds Cruz leading by six points, 49% to 43%.
“Arms control experts confirm to NBC News that both satellite photos and U.S. intelligence show North Korea is continuing to produce ballistic missiles and work on its missile program, even after the historic June summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The experts point specifically to a July 7 satellite photo that shows activity consistent with missile production.”
President Trump called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to “stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now, before it continues to stain our country any further.”
He added: “Bob Mueller is totally conflicted, and his 17 Angry Democrats that are doing his dirty work are a disgrace to USA!”
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In an attempt to defend voter ID laws, President Trump “wrongly claimed that shoppers need to show photo identification to buy groceries,” the AP reports.
Said Trump: “If you go out and you want to buy groceries, you need a picture on a card, you need ID. You go out and you want to buy anything, you need ID and you need your picture.”
“The White House is considering a second sharp reduction in the number of refugees who can be resettled in the United States, picking up where President Trump left off in 2017 in scaling back a program intended to offer protection to the world’s most vulnerable people,” the New York Times reports.
“This time, the effort is meeting with less resistance from inside the Trump administration because of the success that Stephen Miller, the president’s senior policy adviser and an architect of his anti-immigration agenda, has had in installing allies in key positions who are ready to sign off on deep cuts.”
Former Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) hinted in an interview with WCCO-TV that he could run for public office again.
Said Franken: “I don’t know. I haven’t ruled it out, and I haven’t ruled it in.”
“A former girlfriend of Illinois state Rep. Nick Sauer (R) has filed an official complaint accusing the first-term Republican of creating a fake Instagram account and populating it with nude photos of her to lure men into ‘graphic’ discussions,” Politico reports.
Speaker Paul Ryan “was surprised and proud to find out he has Jewish roots,” the AP reports.
“The Wisconsin Republican discovered his family history while filming a segment for the upcoming season of the PBS series ‘Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates Jr.’”
This is so well done.
Los Angeles Times: “Harris won’t say whether she’s running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. But nearly everyone thinks she will.”
“Her first — and perhaps greatest – challenge is introducing herself to American voters outside of California who know little about the 53-year-old beyond early comparisons to President Obama. And Harris needs to move fast. Her political rivals – in the GOP and within her own party – are already trying to put their own, less flattering stamp on Harris.”
”The branding effort portrays her as a Beltway outsider, a progressive with a compelling personal story and a tough former prosecutor who won’t shy from President Trump’s attacks.”
President Trump “will travel to Ohio on Saturday to campaign for Republican special election candidate Troy Balderson, according to a senior party official — a move that comes amid rising GOP fears about the race,” Politico reports.
“A Republican loss, coming after special election defeats in Pennsylvania and Alabama, would be deeply deflating for the conservative base and party donors, and provide more evidence that a wave is building against them heading into the midterms.”
A new Politico/Morning Consult poll finds Joe Biden leading Donald Trump in a possible presidential race, 44% to 37%.
Trump has said that Biden is his “dream candidate” to face in 2020.
Tampa Bay Times: “Declaring himself the most popular Republican in the history of America, President Trump revved up thousands of fans Tuesday night at a rowdy Tampa Bay campaign rally to help gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis and, above all, celebrate Donald Trump.”
Of note: “One new element of this Trump was the widespread presence of people wearing T-shirts or carrying signs touting the fringe ‘QAnon’ conspiracy theorist. Among other things QAnon promotes is the notion that leading political and Hollywood elites are involved in a pedophilia ring and that leaders of the federal government’s ‘deep state’ have tried to kill President Trump.”
Wall Street Journal: “Trump administration advisers are debating measures that might bring Chinese negotiators to the table. Some are pushing the president to apply tariffs as high as 25% on $200 billion of Chinese imports, up from an original proposal for 10%.”
“The White House won’t make a final decision until at least late August on those tariffs, which are likely to target consumer goods and food as well as machinery components. Advisers are justifying the steeper tariffs, in part, to make up for the rapid depreciation of the yuan in recent months. Since May 30, the yuan has fallen 6% against the dollar.”
Gabriel Sherman: “The appearances have attracted the wrong kind of notice. ‘Trump thinks he’s saying too much,’ one Republican close to the White House told me. Another Trumpworld figure elucidated: ‘Trump likes that Rudy is a fighter. He knows there’s a give and take. The give is Rudy is going to fight for him. The take is that you’re going to get some crazy, too.’”
”The crazy on show in the last few days has given ammunition to his West Wing critics. Two of his most vocal detractors are Chief of Staff John Kelly and White House counsel Don McGahn. ‘Kelly has been trying to get rid of Rudy for two months,” one outside adviser to the White House told me. ‘And Don McGahn hates Rudy with intensity of 1,000 burning suns.’”
“President Trump’s tight grip on the Republican Party is being openly challenged by the powerful network of ideological conservatives linked to billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, splaying out long-simmering tensions over the party’s future just months before the midterm elections,” the Washington Post reports.
”The Koch network pointedly declined to endorse Trump as a presidential candidate in 2016. But this latest feud — following last weekend’s gathering at which Koch-affiliated officials sought to distance their operation from Trump — has exposed the rift between a president pushing his party toward populism, and establishment Republicans espousing the long-standing policy of free trade.”
Playbook: “The Koch network is getting a lot of ink for standing up to Trump and saying it won’t dole out big campaign checks in certain races this cycle. But, it’s not like they are going to support a bunch of Democrats and really put any effort into changing the political makeup of Congress.”
“Steve Schmidt’s public break from the GOP and quiet departure from his corporate PR gig earlier this summer are fueling speculation in Republican circles that that he’ll advise a presidential bid by his longtime client, former Starbucks chief Howard Schultz, or another Democratic candidate in 2020,” Politico reports.
“Questions about Schmidt’s future began to swirl in June when he announced his departure from the GOP in a series of tweets embracing the Democratic Party. It was a rare act of defiance in a party that has mostly fallen in line behind President Donald Trump — one that has many Republicans talking about what exactly Schmidt plans to do next.”
A new HarrisX poll found that 62% of Americans believe that the FBI was biased in its handling of the high-profile investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server while she served as secretary of State.
A similar percentage of Americans, 59%, said they believed the FBI also suffered from bias in the Trump probe, but more believed the president was hurt by that bias.
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.
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