“If I had a little kid in kindergarten somewhere would feel much more comfortable if I knew on that campus there was a police officer or somebody who was trained with a weapon. I would feel more comfortable. If the teacher was trained in the use of that weapon and had access to it, I would be much more comfortable if they had one than if they didn’t.”
— Ben Carson, in an interview with USA Today.
Gabriel Sherman: “According to a Clinton campaign source, a team of opposition researchers working on behalf of Clinton is currently digging through Biden’s long record in office to develop attack lines in case the vice-president runs. The research effort started about a month ago and is being conducted by operatives at Correct the Record, the pro-Hillary superpac founded by David Brock, which is coordinating with the Clinton campaign.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) “is asking for federal aid for his home state of South Carolina as it battles raging floods, but he voted to oppose similar help for New Jersey in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2013,” CNN reports.
Said Graham: “Let’s just get through this thing, and whatever it costs, it costs.”
Graham was among the GOP senators who opposed federal aid to assist states hit by Hurricane Sandy, but now he doesn’t remember why: “I’m all for helping the people in New Jersey. I don’t really remember me voting that way.”
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New York Times: “For months, Mrs. Clinton has gingerly approached Mr. Sanders, the Vermont senator who has routinely drawn tens of thousands of Democrats to his rallies and who is rivaling her in polls of Iowa and New Hampshire voters. She has seldom mentioned his name, let alone criticized him. But while Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. may be a looming threat, Mr. Sanders poses more immediate concerns to Mrs. Clinton and her aides.”
“Many Democrats believe that Mr. Sanders, an independent who calls himself a democratic socialist, will prove too far left-leaning to capture the nomination, despite his popularity at this stage of the contest. But the growing chance that he could win either Iowa or New Hampshire, or both, has raised the stakes for the Oct. 13 debate in Las Vegas.”
Nate Cohn: “He hasn’t quite had his moment in the media spotlight, he hasn’t made big gains in the polls, and he hasn’t earned many endorsements. But the political landscape surrounding his candidacy could not have changed much more in his favor over the last six months.”
“Mr. Walker’s exit is the most obvious and recent development to help broaden the path ahead… Mr. Walker’s withdrawal did more than release his old supporters. It narrowed the choice for mainstream conservative donors, voters and officials who had been waiting on the sidelines. Without Mr. Walker in the race, the choice for mainstream conservatives started becoming clearer. Unless they are willing to support an anti-establishment candidate like Ted Cruz, it’s down to Mr. Rubio and Mr. Bush.”
“Republicans mangle the English language at twice the rate of Democrats,” USA Today reports.
“According to a new study by the grammar-checking app Grammarly, supporters commenting on Democratic candidates’ Facebook pages made an average of 4.2 mistakes per 100 words compared to 8.7 mistakes for supporters of Republican candidates. The Democratic supporters also showed a larger vocabulary, using on average 300 unique words per 1,000 words, while Republicans used only 245.”
“The trend is starker when broken out by candidate: The five Democratic candidates — Lincoln Chafee, Jim Webb, Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley and Hillary Clinton — all get better Facebook grammar scores (in that order) than every Republican except Carly Fiorina, whose supporters posted the best grammar scores of any GOP candidate, tying her with Clinton.”
A new Goucher poll in Maryland finds Martin O’Malley (D) has made no headway in the presidential race even in his home state.
Hillary Clinton leads the Democratic field with 43%, followed by Joe Biden at 23% and Bernie Sanders at 17%. The former governor gets just 2% support.
A new WMUR poll in New Hampshire finds Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R) leading Gov. Maggie Hassan (D) in the U.S. Senate race, 45% to 43%.
“In the last few days, Hillary Clinton has been, well, everywhere,” First Read notes.
Rick Klein: “Hillary Clinton is a week away from debating her Democratic opponents – a first for the campaign cycle, on several levels. It will, of course, be the first time she and the other Democrats running for president share a stage. It also figures to be the first time that Clinton clearly articulates a real disagreement with those other Democrats – just maybe. The last few days have seen Clinton grow more aggressive, outlining her gun-control plan and placing a TV ad attacking the Benghazi committee as pure politics. So yes, she disagrees with Republicans. More occasionally – as with Syria, and more recently immigration – she’s finding areas of disagreement with President Obama, who’s not running for anything anymore.”
“But – as Saturday Night Live pointed out politely – she remains slow in actually taking controversial positions, and she still doesn’t have a position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership the Obama administration worked to secure. For Democrats who sense a lack of passion in Clinton’s campaign – and those who see Bernie Sanders as a more clean break with the status quo – the question to be answered is when Clinton contrasts herself with what the people she’s directly running against would do as president.”
MSNBC: “Trump campaign officials say he has only spent about $2 million – far less than fellow GOP candidates Dr. Ben Carson and Sen. Ted Cruz, for instance. each spent $5.5 million just through July, according to the latest FEC reports. Hillary Clinton’s campaign, meanwhile, spent $18 million in the same period; that’s nine times Trump’s entire spending to date.”
First Read: “Speaking of McCarthy, with the leadership elections now set for Oct. 29, time isn’t his friend as he runs to succeed John Boehner as speaker. Think about it: His opponents now have three weeks to thwart his bid. And maybe more importantly, if the Benghazi hearing on Oct. 22 doesn’t go well for Republicans (with Hillary using McCarthy’s comments as a shield), you might have plenty of upset House Republicans. So that’s the danger for McCarthy. The good news perhaps is that the additional three weeks gives him more time to shore up his position. But those three weeks could also make things worse.”
The Hill: “At Hillary Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, staffers are invited to complete a phrase that is written on a wall: ‘Hillary for…'”
“Beside it, staffers have plastered dozens of sticky notes with various words and phrases.”
“While the wall could be seen as a freewheeling experiment in the manner of a tech startup, it could also be regarded as symptomatic of a nagging problem for Clinton in the 2016 race: namely, the difficulty she has had in explaining why she’s running for president.”
Charlie Cook: “It is hard to overstate the unusual boom-and-bust nature of our elections these days. Depending on whether the year is divisible by four, we have two very different Americas. One of them exists when the presidency is at stake, and the electorate is big, broad, and demographically diverse—looking pretty much like the country. But midterm-election America, with an electorate only about 60 percent the size of presidential years, is older, whiter, more conservative, and more Republican. This, in effect, puts a thumb on the scale that simply isn’t there in presidential years, when the turnout is substantially larger.”
“The result: Democrats have fared well in Senate races when the presidency was up for grabs. In 2008 and 2012, they picked up eight and two seats, respectively. Their gain in 2012 wasn’t larger because they’d already picked up four seats in 2000 and six more in 2006—the two previous times this class of senators had faced voters—leaving fewer additional seats within their reach.”
Donald Trump predicts a “major collapse” in the Republican campaign and a “depression” for the television industry should he prematurely exit the presidential race, the New York Times reports.
Said Trump: “There’d be a major collapse of the race, and there’d be a major collapse of television ratings. It would become a depression in television.”
According to Politico, it was Joe Biden himself who first talked to Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, “painting a tragic portrait of a dying son, Beau’s face partially paralyzed, sitting his father down and trying to make him promise to run for president because ‘the White House should not revert to the Clintons and that the country would be better off with Biden values.'”
“It was no coincidence that the preliminary pieces around a prospective campaign started moving right after that column. People read Dowd and started reaching out, those around the vice president would say by way of defensive explanation. He was just answering the phone and listening. But in truth, Biden had effectively placed an ad in The New York Times, asking them to call.”
First Read: “This isn’t a good story for Biden. Why? Biden’s biggest political strength, by far, has been his emotional authenticity. But this story kind of undercuts that. Who appears to be the calculating politician now? “
“I think I am distinctly horrifying to liberals.”
— Carly Fiorina, quoted by Politico, after a poll was released showing her besting Hillary Clinton in a hypothetical general election matchup in Iowa.
Hillary Clinton “is losing in New Hampshire, and at least one small contingent of family allies thinks it’s nearly time to cut bait,” Politico reports.
“The group — veterans of the family’s old campaigns and people close to Clinton’s fundraising — see little reason to support a strategy that continues to pour resources into the state where Bernie Sanders’ already surprising lead shows no signs of shrinking.”
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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