A new University of New Hampshire poll shows Hillary Clinton just ahead of Donald Trump in the Granite State, 39% to 37%.
Most interesting: “Neither candidate can clear the 40-percent threshold, but it’s not because voters are torn between the two, the poll shows. Eighteen percent of likely voters said they intend to support another candidate, and only 6 percent were undecided.”
A contentious Republican National Convention is coming to an end, with Donald Trump finally addressing the delegates as his party’s nominee. Can he turn things around?
Add your own observations in the comments.
Ezra Klein: “Tonight, Donald J. Trump will accept the Republican Party’s nomination for president of the United States. And I am, for the first time since I began covering American politics, genuinely afraid.”
“Donald Trump is not a man who should be president. This is not an ideological judgment. This is not something I would say about Mitt Romney or Marco Rubio. This is not a disagreement over Donald Trump’s tax plan or his climate policies. This is about Trump’s character, his temperament, his impulsiveness, his basic decency.”
“He pairs terrible ideas with an alarming temperament; he’s a racist, a sexist, and a demagogue, but he’s also a narcissist, a bully, and a dilettante. He lies so constantly and so fluently that it’s hard to know if he even realizes he’s lying. He delights in schoolyard taunts and luxuriates in backlash.”
Roger Ailes has resigned as Chairman and CEO of Fox News.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “stressed that he disagrees with Donald Trump’s assertion that the United States shouldn’t immediately defend NATO allies, seeking to reassure the international community the U.S. would continue to come to the aid of countries in the alliance if they are attacked,” Politico reports.
Said McConnell: “I disagree with that. NATO is the most important military alliance in world history. I want to reassure our NATO allies that if any of them get attacked, we’ll be there to defend them.”
Wonk Wire: Trump’s NATO comments reaffirm his popularity in Russia.
This is really great:
BuzzFeed: “Despite months of public tension between the Trump and Kasich camps, the governor’s loyalists in Ohio had been making plans for the state party to unify and coordinate with the Trump campaign, according to two sources with knowledge of the effort. One of the governor’s key strategists had been tapped to coordinate get-out-the-vote efforts with Trump, and other Kasich allies were expected to follow suit.”
“But on Monday, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort took the unexpected, and unprecedented, step of blasting Kasich to reporters in his own home state, calling him ‘petulant’ and ’embarrassing’ for his refusal to endorse Trump. Since then, ‘all the top political talent in the state has been called to the sidelines,’ said one Republican close to Kasich.”
Ex-Trump adviser Roger Stone suggested that Donald Trump may put his extensive political capital behind boosting a primary challenger to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in 2018, the Huffington Post reports.
Stone harshly criticized Cruz as “an odious, greasy figure who doesn’t have any of Reagan’s warmth or likeability.”
He added: “Conservatives have long memories. So in four years or eight years after the Trump presidency, conservatives will remember that he walked out on us.”
Just published: The Science of Trump: Explaining the Rise of an Unlikely Candidate by John Sides and Henry Farrell.
“You’re on fire, stupid.”
— Police officer, quoted by the Los Angeles Times, bringing a fire extinguisher to a flag-burning demonstrator outside the GOP convention.
Sen. Ted Cruz’s campaign manager responded to Gov. Chris Christie’s criticism of Cruz’s convention speech, saying that the New Jersey governor had “turned over his political testicles long ago.”
Said Jeff Roe said on the Chris Stigall Show: “That guy turned over his political testicles long ago. So I don’t take what he has to say with any meaning. You know, he embarrassed himself pretty quickly in this.”
A new Suffolk University poll in Ohio finds Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump tied in Ohio at 44% each with 11% still undecided.
In a four-way scenario, with Green Party nominee Jill Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson added into the mix, Clinton edges Trump 43% to 39%, with Johnson getting 5%, Stein 1% and 12% undecided.
Rick Klein: “The central, huge personality of the 2016 campaign has set up a larger-than-life contest for the future of the Republican Party, with battle lines etched long before Donald Trump’s fate is decided. Wednesday night laid out the future paths of the GOP in dramatic, boisterous fashion. If Trump wins, Trumpism, along with its angry populism and strains of nativism, prevails. If he doesn’t, the party will have Mike Pence, whose answer to Trump was to join him, while offering a twist of earnestness and conservative commitment. On the opposite side, there’s John Kasich, rejecting it all by not even showing up at the Trump convention in his home state. There’s Paul Ryan, seeking a middle path though leaning in enough to speak twice – and even wield the gavel – at the convention.”
“And then there’s Ted Cruz, who laid down unmistakable markers with three words: ‘vote your conscience.’ Cruz anticipated a backlash, but he couldn’t have anticipated angry delegates yelling ‘Goldman Sachs’ at his wife. However this breaks, Cruz’s gambit figures to have the longest tail. He will have either sounded conservative alarms about Trump – so much so that his wife and father were threatened with physical harm – or he will have rained on a parade that’s marching to a drummer that’s very much not like him. Cruz’s play may prove to be the boldest, since it’s predicated on the assumption that the Trump phenomenon hasn’t changed the Republican Party in any fundamental way.”
“Corey Lewandowski is like Bob Haldeman without the charm. I mean, he’s an advance man. I’m a political strategist. I have elected other people to public office… He’s a pimple on the ass of history.”
— Ex-Trump adviser Roger Stone, quoted by Yahoo News.
New York Times: “By Tuesday morning, word had spread throughout his campaign that any language in Mr. Trump’s address even loosely inspired by speeches, essays, books or Twitter posts had to be either rewritten or attributed.”
“Mr. Trump’s chief speechwriter, Stephen Miller, reassured colleagues that the acceptance speech was wholly original, according to two staff members who spoke with him and described those conversations on the condition of anonymity. Mr. Miller also told campaign aides that he had looked closely at passages that Mr. Trump had contributed — handwritten on unlined white pages — and was confident they contained no problems. Even so, one of the staff members downloaded plagiarism-detection software and ran a draft of the speech through the program. No red flags came up.”
“The intense scrutiny of Mr. Trump’s words added new pressure to a speechwriting process that has been one of the most unpredictable and free-form in modern presidential campaigns.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) “defended distancing himself from Donald Trump, refusing to say he’s voting for Trump and ripping the Republican National Convention’s response to his speech the night before,” The Hill reports.
Said Cruz: “I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father… Neither he nor his campaign has taken back a word of what they said about my family.”
He added: “In that speech last night, I did not say a single negative word about Donald Trump. And I’ll tell you, this morning and going forward I don’t intend to say negative things about Donald Trump.”
Politico: 5 takeaways from Cruz’s convention stunner
“As Hillary Clinton prepares to make her choice for a vice-presidential candidate, Bill Clinton has privately expressed his support for Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia,” the New York Times reports.
“Mr. Clinton believes that Mr. Kaine, 58, a former governor and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has the domestic and national security résumé that both appeals to voters and makes him prepared for the presidency. People close to Mr. Clinton, who could discuss private conversations only without attribution, said that the former president had left the decision entirely to his wife and that he also has close relationships with Mr. Vilsack and Mr. Perez.”
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.
