“At the beginning of this week, the Trump campaign announced – to great fanfare – that it was launching a $10 million ad buy from Aug. 30 through Sept. 6,” NBC News reports.
“The problem: Two days later, half of that ad buy still hasn’t been purchased.”
“Priorities USA, Hillary Clinton’s top super PAC, will begin airing $6 million worth of ads targeting Latino and African-American voters,” CNN reports.
“The super PAC has joined with The Latino Victory Project, El Super Pac Voto Latino and People for the American Way’s Latinos Vote! to air more than $3 million worth of Spanish language TV and radio ads in Florida and Nevada, the groups announced on Wednesday.”
Police say a woman walked into Rep. Danny Davis’ (D-IL) office on Chicago’s West Side, drank out of a bottle of hand sanitizer, poured the sanitizer over herself and set herself on fire with a lighter, the AP reports.
Dan Drezner: “The question is why it is happening. As I’ll explain in a moment, there are so many ways this can go wrong that it boggles the mind. Remember Mitt Romney’s disastrous overseas trip in 2012? Scott Walker’s bumbling overseas trip in early 2015? Multiply that by a factor of 10 and that’s how badly this could go.”
“After refusing to debate while running a slash and burn campaign devoid of actual ideas, I hope the senator can rest comfortably with his conscience as he continues to lecture others about civility.”
— Kelli Ward (R), quoted by the Arizona Republic, after losing her primary challenge to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).
FiveThirtyEight: “Running our polls-only model using only live-interview surveys, Clinton leads Trump by 7 points and has an 86% chance of winning. Running it with only nonlive-interview polls, Clinton leads Trump by 5 points and has a 71% chance of winning.”
Lynn Vavreck: “There is no reason to speculate about whether nominating Donald Trump has cost the Republican Party support in this presidential election. There is plenty of data to demonstrate that it has.”
Politico: “After weeks of Brooklyn telegraphing a competitive race in traditionally red states and making public moves that look like initial investments — boosting staff, holding fundraisers, and promising more investments — Trump is now campaigning in Arizona, which has voted Republican in 15 of the last 16 elections, while his running mate goes to Georgia, a state that’s gone red in seven of the last eight cycles.”
“That’s a deployment of precious resources away from swing states that Trump must win to make the Electoral College math work in his favor.”
“I’ll concede that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a corporate stooge.”
— Tim Canova (D), quoted by the Sun-Sentinel, after losing his primary challenge to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL).
Hours after a dominating primary win, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) sent a Wednesday morning challenge to Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-FL): face off in six live televised debates, including one on Spanish-language TV, Politico reports.
“In challenging his rival, Rubio is cutting against the conventional wisdom for winning campaigns, which usually seek to minimize on-stage debates with trailing rivals. Rubio has led Murphy in the last nine polls taken since July 1.”
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows 41% of Americans have a favorable impression of Hillary Clinton, while 56% have an unfavorable one.
“That’s the worst image Clinton has had in her quarter-century in national public life. Her previous low favorable rating this year was in July, when it was 42 percent, lower than any mark in historical Post-ABC polls except a few points in the 1990s when a large share of the public had no opinion of her. Her previous high for unfavorable views was in June, when 55 percent disliked Clinton.”
“Donald Trump winning the Republican presidential nomination is the biggest surprise of the election season, but GOP senators’ success in primaries has to be a close second,” Roll Call reports.
“Two years after Pat Roberts, Thad Cochran and Mitch McConnell labored through competitive primaries, four years after Richard Lugar lost his primary in Indiana, and six years after Bob Bennett and Lisa Murkowski lost their primaries, this year’s class of GOP senators have not only survived, but thrived in intra-party contests.”
“Donald Trump is considering jetting to Mexico City on Wednesday for a meeting with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, just hours before he delivers a high-stakes speech in Arizona to clarify his views on immigration policy,” the Washington Post reports.
“Peña Nieto invited both Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to visit Mexico last Friday… Trump, sensing an opportunity, decided over the weekend to accept the invitation and push for a visit this week, according to the people familiar with the discussions.”
Bloomberg: “The trip is a go unless the Secret Service nixes it for safety reasons, a campaign aide said, though Trump has often changed plans without warning.”
Former Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) said that Donald Trump was “raised up” by God to win in the general election, The Hill reports.
Said Bachmann: “This is one thing I know from the Book of Daniel: the bottom line of the Book of Daniel is this: it teaches us that the most high God lifts up who He will and takes down who he will.”
“I actually supported Ted Cruz. I thought he was fabulous but I also see that at the end of the day God raised up, I believe Donald Trump who was going to be the nominee in this election. I don’t think God sits things out. He’s a sovereign God. Donald Trump became our nominee. I think it’s very likely that in the day that we live in, that Donald Trump is the only individual who could win in a General Election of the seventeen who ran. Maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know but I do know that the Bible is true and that Daniel teaches the most high God which is one of God’s names is the one who lifts up who he will and takes down who He will…”
The Lid: “Hillary Clinton is beating Donald Trump in almost all national polls, in TV ad spending and in nearly every measure of campaign organization. But she’s way behind on one tally that Donald Trump will continue to make into a talking point every day that goes by: Press conferences… Trump has held 17 press conference since the beginning of the year, compared to a big zero for Clinton.”
“Plenty of pols are media-averse — and Clinton’s decades in public life have certainly given her a wealth of examples of the risks associated with a media free-for-all. And her team counters that she’s participated in hundreds of one-on-one interviews throughout her campaign. But her avoidance of even casual gaggles with reporters this cycle has become nearly a campaign-defining condition.”
Rick Hasen: “Going mostly (but not completely) unnoticed is the following statement in the Republican Party platform: ‘In order to preserve the principle of one person, one vote, we urge our elected representatives to ensure that citizenship, rather than mere residency, be made the basis for the apportionment of representatives among the states.'”
“Currently, congressional districts are apportioned based upon total population. If Republicans were able to actually follow through on this, it would mean that areas with large Latino populations, where there are more non-citizens, would lose representation compared to whiter, more Republican districts. It would shift more power in Congress to the Republicans.”
“But there’s a problem with this aspirational plan, something called the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which provides in Section 2 that “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed.” Last time I checked, non-citizens were still “persons.” So maybe this part of the platform is an oblique call for a constitutional amendment?”
“My daughter’s getting married in October, and I figured if I did the show, I’d at least not embarrass her when we did the father-daughter dance.”
— Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, quoted by the Texas Tribune, on why he agreed to appear on “Dancing with the Stars.”
Rudy Giuliani writing in USA Today:
I did not come to a conclusion on this matter; I simply asked people to draw their own conclusions. I hope Secretary Clinton is perfectly healthy, and I feel that I have performed a public service if I can motivate the press to fulfill its responsibility to get the public the information it deserves — and the same standard should be applied to all candidates.
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.