A new Bloomberg poll finds Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump by six points in the presidential race, 50% to 44%.
Key finding: “The findings suggest damage has been done to one of Trump’s main calling cards, his business expertise, with 61% of likely voters saying they’re less impressed with the Republican nominee’s business acumen than when the campaign started.”
“Of all the tribulations facing Donald J. Trump, perhaps none is stirring as much anxiety inside his campaign as the precipitous decline of support from Republican women, an electoral cornerstone for the party’s past nominees that is starting to crumble,” the New York Times reports.
“In a striking series of defections, high-profile Republican women are abandoning decades of party loyalty and vowing to oppose Mr. Trump, calling him emotionally unfit for the presidency and a menace to national security.”
“A new batch of State Department emails released Tuesday showed the close and sometimes overlapping interests between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department when Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state,” the New York Times reports.
“The documents raised new questions about whether the charitable foundation worked to reward its donors with access and influence at the State Department, a charge that Mrs. Clinton has faced in the past and has always denied.”
“The Republican National Committee has seen a spate of departures in recent months related to its embrace of Donald Trump, whom some former staffers felt uncomfortable supporting,” Politico reports.
“In total, at least 11 staffers have left the RNC since March, although not all of the departures were related to Trump.”
A former Secret Service agent tells Time that Donald Trump’s comments about “Second Amendment people” could be considered a “veiled threat” against Hillary Clinton.
Said the official: “Look, this guy is coming pretty close to the edge here.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) won his primary defeating long shot challenger Paul Nehlen (R), the AP reports.
Here are the latest state polls of the presidential race:
Florida: Clinton 46%, Trump 45% (Quinnipiac)
Iowa: Clinton 41%, Trump 37% (NBC/WSJ/Marist)
Kansas: Trump 44%, Clinton 39% (SurveyUSA)
Missouri: Trump 44%, Clinton 42% (Remington)
North Carolina: Clinton 43%, Trump 41% (Public Policy Polling)
Ohio: Clinton 49%, Trump 45% (Quinnipiac)
Ohio: Clinton 43%, Trump 38% (NBC/WSJ/Marist)
Pennsylvania: Clinton 52%, Trump 42% (Quinnipiac)
Pennsylvania: Clinton 48%, Trump 37% (NBC/WSJ/Marist)
Former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) said he’s thinking of supporting Donald Trump for president, Jewish Week reports.
He’s still undecided but added there are “a lot of us, I think, who can’t feel quite comfortable either way yet.”
“Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the second amendment. And if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks. Although the second amendment folks, maybe there is…”
— Donald Trump, quoted by NBC News.
Newt Gingrich was asked about Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times:
BARBARO: Does he have the mental fitness, the kind of psychological suitability to the office of the presidency?
GINGRICH: [pause] Yeah, and my answer would be, sure.
BARBARO: Sure?
GINGRICH: Sure. I mean, he is at least as reliable as Andrew Jackson, who was one of the most decisive presidents in American history. Nobody would have predicted Abraham Lincoln’s capabilities before he became president and most people didn’t believe him while he was president.
BARBARO: Can you be more forceful than “sure?”
GINGRICH: [pause] I think that Trump has a willingness to break up a system which is decaying. I think the kind of personality that is prepared to be outside the total establishment and have the self confidence to take on the establishment of both parties is a personality which will by definition not be normal. It will not be a good, corporate managerial, go-along-and-get-along kind of guy, and that’s what you guys mean by temperament.
“Carly Fiorina’s quiet outreach to state party chairs in recent days has top Republicans speculating that she’s laying the groundwork for a Republican National Committee chairmanship bid,” Politico reports.
“Fiorina’s advisers have reached out to more than a dozen state parties telling them that the former GOP presidential hopeful is prepared to help in “any way,” offering up her personal phone number, and informing them that she would like to connect with their respective state party chairperson.”
Donald Trump said that he will commit to three debates this fall with Hillary Clinton, but may try to re-negotiate the terms that have been agreed upon by a bipartisan commission, Time reports.
Said Trump: “I renegotiated the debates in the primaries, remember? They were making a fortune on them and they had us in for three and a half hours and I said that’s ridiculous. I’m sure they’ll be open to any suggestions I have, because I think they’ll be very fair suggestions. But I haven’t seen the conditions yet. They’re actually presented to me tonight.”
Charlie Cook: “But even with the natural advantages that any Democrat should have in this election, Hillary Clinton is extremely vulnerable and this race should be winnable for the GOP. Using the RealClearPolitics averages of the major national polls, 41 percent of voters have a favorable opinion of Clinton, while 54 percent have a negative view. Those awful poll numbers can more than cancel out the Electoral College and demographic advantages that just any Democrat would have. If this election is simply a referendum on Clinton, she loses.”
“The fact is that if Republicans had nominated a potted plant or some other form of political placebo, they might well have beaten her. A fairly innocuous Republican like John Kasich would likely beat Clinton like a rented mule. But Trump’s negatives—in the RealClearPolitics averages, 35 percent see him favorably, 58 percent unfavorably—along with his habit of digging his hole even deeper mean that what should be a very winnable race for Republicans instead has become one dependent upon a cataclysmic event, perhaps an act of God, in order to win. That is never an enviable position to be in. Right now, it is looking more like a referendum on Trump.”
Trump ally and former strategist Roger Stone told a questioner at a recent Republican conference that he has been in contact with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, which released stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee.
Said Stone: “I actually have communicated with Assange. I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation but there’s no telling what the October surprise may be.”
CNN media reporter Brian Stelter said that Fox News once had a woman spy on him:
About ten years ago I had a crush on a woman at Fox News. She was a low level staffer. I was in college at the time. So I was going out on what I thought were dates. Chris, I thought these were dates. These were not dates. She was actually reporting back to Fox News about me. She was reporting back about what I thought of her and about CNN and MSNBC and Fox. Because I was a reporter on the beat, they were actually spying on me that way. Now I didn’t think that was a big deal at the time. I thought it was the way Fox operates. Fox is a political organization. But now we know they were actually sending out private investigators. They were tailing other reporters.
This is a rather remarkable mash up of questions asked of Hillary Clinton over the years.
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.