“Every single 2016 presidential TV ad currently airing in a battleground state is either from Hillary Clinton’s campaign or the Democratic outside groups supporting her,” NBC News reports.
“The opposition, by contrast, hasn’t spent a dime in these same battlegrounds – whether it’s Donald Trump’s campaign or Republican-leaning Super PACs.”
“It’s a fantasy. Romney got 19 percent of nonwhites. Is Trump going to do better? I don’t think so. It’s a joke. It’s just talking. It has no grounding in reality.”
— Romney strategist Stuart Stevens, quoted by Politico, on Donald Trump’s chances.
“Hillary Clinton’s super PAC has begun spending $145 million on ads in eight states through November — and there’s a realistic path for her to win the White House even if she carries only one of them,” Politico reports.
“It’s a sign of how strongly tilted the Electoral College map is in Clinton’s favor, as she begins a general election campaign building upon the demographic and geographic coalition that President Obama rode to two electoral landslides. Donald Trump, in contrast, must dramatically reimagine and redraw the political landscape to capture the presidency.”
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House Speaker Paul Ryan “says it’s his responsibility to support Donald Trump, even if the presumptive Republican nominee’s bombast occasionally makes him uncomfortable,” Politico reports.
Said Ryan: “I feel like I have certain responsibilities, as not just Congressman Paul Ryan from the First District of Wisconsin, but as Speaker of the House. And imagine the Speaker of the House not supporting the duly elected nominee of our party, therefore creating a chasm in our party to split us in half, which basically helps deny us the White House, and strong majorities in Congress.”
“I bet if someone offered him $150 million to drop out, he would.”
— A former Donald Trump adviser, quoted by Politico.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) told the Virginian-Pilot that he doesn’t expect to be vetted as Hillary Clinton’s running mate.
Said Warner: “I’m not being vetted. I don’t expect to be vetted.”
Warner did, however, say of his colleague Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA): “There’s nobody with better integrity and trustfulness… Secretary Clinton and the country would do well by him.
Donald Trump “says he isn’t worried about delegates organizing against him at the Republican National Convention next month — but he spent a large part of his rally in Las Vegas on Saturday afternoon insisting that it won’t happen,” Politico reports.
He insisted that the story “is all made up by the press. It’s a hoax.”
Trump added: “Who are they going to pick? I beat everybody. I beat the hell out of them. And we’re going to beat Hillary. And it’d be helpful if the Republicans could help us a little bit.”
Washington Post: “There is no recent reliable public polling in Arizona, but Democratic and Republican strategists said private research shows the presidential race as a toss-up.”
Asked whether Hillary Clinton has a path to victory, GOP strategist Charles Coughlin conceded: “I believe it’s there if she wanted to do it. Everybody always says, ‘This is the election when Latinos turn out,’ and it’s never happened. But I can actually see that happening this time.”
Politico reports that Donald Trump’s “own toxicity is making the job of finding a vice presidential nominee that much easier, because the short list is so short.”
“Multiple high-level Republican sources said it is topped by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, with Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions a distant third and Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin also in the mix.”
The Hill: Trump veepstakes in overdrive
“The Democrats are in a perplexing position. On the one hand, they’re trying to appeal to the gay community, but, on the other hand, they’re trying to also appeal to the Muslim community, which, if it had its way, would kill every homosexual in the United States of America.”
— Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), in an interview on WAPI.
“Democrats hope, and Republicans fear, that Donald Trump is tilting the Senate battleground map away from the GOP in 2016. But the biggest wild card in the race for Senate control is Marco Rubio,” Politico reports.
Dan Balz: “The GOP’s Senate majority is at risk. Republicans hope they can insulate vulnerable Senate incumbents from the Trump effect, but that’s no easy task. Only a clean break with the presumptive nominee will give those senators the freedom to campaign on their own.”
For members: The Consensus Senate Forecast
Dan Balz: “The hole that Donald Trump has dug for himself keeps getting deeper. On nearly every front, his position continues to deteriorate. Unless he reverses course, Republicans are heading toward a wrenching week at their convention in Cleveland next month and potentially worse in November.”
“National polls alone provide an incomplete picture of the current state of the presidential race, but the shifts over the past few weeks should make Republicans beyond nervous. What looked like a tight contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton in late May has morphed into a Trump deficit that cannot be wished away.”
Donald Trump “argued again that the mass shooting in Orlando, could have been less deadly had people in the gay nightclub been able to shoot back,” The Hill reports.
Said Trump: “If we had people with the bullets going in the opposite direction — right smack between the eyes of this maniac. If some of those wonderful people had guns strapped right here, right to their waist or right to their ankle, and this son of a bitch comes out and starts shooting, and one of the people in that room happened to have it and goes boom, boom, you know what? That would have been a beautiful, beautiful sight, folks, that would have been a beautiful, beautiful sight.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders “is winding down his presidential run by pushing for changes to Democratic Party rules that could assist an insurgent campaign like his own in the next presidential election,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The Vermont lawmaker is eager to influence the party’s platform… But the Sanders campaign also wants the party to adopt a range of changes to how it governs itself. While party platforms are typically forgotten soon after they are approved, the party rules will affect how the next presidential contest is run.”
“Specifically, he wants to get rid of superdelegates, the party leaders and elected officials who get to vote for whomever they like for the party’s nomination. He wants all presidential primaries to be open to independent voters, and not just to registered Democrats, and for the party to encourage candidates to reject support in primaries from super PACs, the outside political groups that can raise and spend unlimited sums of money.”
U.S. Housing Secretary Julián Castro said he is not being vetted to be Hillary Clinton’s running mate, the San Antonio Express News reports.
The former San Antonio mayor did not say who he thought would be a good pick for Clinton’s vice president telling reporters, “I’m not going to answer that,” and, when asked whether he’d gotten any phone calls from Clinton, he said “no, not at all.”
Associated Press: “The unconventional approach reflects Trump’s disdain for traditional Republican campaign practices and inclination to implement businesslike decision-making. It also carries substantial risk.”
“If, for instance, Trump is lagging Clinton badly in polls come early fall, there is nothing to stop the RNC from cutting its losses and focusing instead on saving Republican control of the Senate or other competitive contests also on the ballot this November.”
Also interesting: “The RNC in recent days hired Trump’s former political director, Rick Wiley, just weeks after he was fired by the campaign. The move took some of Trump’s senior team by surprise, despite the RNC’s insistence that it had the campaign’s blessing.”
“With congressional leaders once again at a stalemate over how to respond to a mass shooting, the Senate’s most moderate Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, is developing a compromise measure that would prevent some terrorism suspects from purchasing weapons, while sidestepping partisan flash points that have doomed similar legislation in the past and threaten to do so again next week,” the New York Times reports.
“The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, has already scheduled votes for Monday on four proposals — two sponsored by Republicans and two by Democrats — but all four are expected to fail in a nearly identical replay of votes last December after the attack in San Bernardino, Calif.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) “was warmly received during a visit to Hillary Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, where she gave a pep talk to staff,” NBC News has learned.
Said Warren: “Don’t screw this up.”
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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