Former swimsuit model Rowanne Brewer Lane accused the New York Times of misrepresenting her experience with Donald Trump and turning her story into a “hit piece,” the Los Angeles Times reports.
Said Lane: “They spun it to where it appeared negative. I did not have a negative experience with Donald Trump.”
“Now, it may not be life and death, like the vote passengers on United Flight 93 took, but boy is it consequential.”
— Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), quoted by the AP, on the presidential election.
Washington Post: “Saturday’s raucous state Democratic convention in Nevada encapsulated a lot of the themes of the party’s 2016 election in a relatively short period: complex delegate math, inscrutable processes, allegations of deceit, fury — and a result that doesn’t do much of anything to shift the race’s eventual outcome.”
A New York Times reporter met Shahbaz, a scammer who used fake bank alerts to make victims panic. When confronted, he just laughed—no guilt, no remorse.
That’s how these people think: you’re not a person to them—you’re just a name, an address, and a phone number scraped from a website. That's how they find you.
Incogni deletes your exposed personal data from the web—the same data scammers buy to target victims. The less they can see about you, the safer you stay.
They can’t scam you if they can’t find you. Save 55% on your annual subscription with code POLITICALWIRE.
Note to readers: I use Incogni myself and highly recommend it.
“It’s not like none of the above is a potential option.”
— Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), quoted by Politico, on backing Donald Trump for president.
Carlos Beruff, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Florida, repeatedly referred to President Obama as an “animal” at a county GOP meeting, the Huffington Post reports.
Said Beruff: “Unfortunately, for seven and a half years this animal we call president, because he’s an animal, OK — seven and a half years, has surgically and with thought and very smart, intelligent manner, destroyed this country and dismantled the military under not one, not two, but three secretary of defenses. And they’ve all written books about it.”
This piece is only available to Political Wire members.
Everything we knew about politics suggested Donald Trump couldn’t win the Republican presidential nomination.
But he won because his ability to communicate directly with voters — through both social media and traditional media — was unlike any other candidate. The best political forecasters — almost all of them — got it wrong.
Jonathan Bernstein explains:
Many other political scientists and I thought parties could affect, or even dominate, the information environment, so that voters would mainly hear good things about the party’s chosen candidate and bad things about the contenders it strongly opposed.
I believed well into February that the saturation coverage for Donald Trump would give way to normal reporting once the primaries and caucuses began in earnest. That didn’t happen. As a result, voters never heard the cues from the party — information that was drowned out by the continuing focus on Trump. Even when some of that coverage was negative, it was still about Trump, meaning the other candidates never found their potential constituencies.
This is why Trump can also win the general election. He has an uncanny ability to control and manipulate media coverage.
Nearly everything we know about politics suggests Trump should lose to Hillary Clinton. From his record-high unfavorablity ratings to broader demographic trends to his unique ability to insult women, Hispanics, Muslims and the disabled, Clinton should have the upper hand. The prediction markets find Trump with just a 25% chance to win.
But Trump’s unique ability to control the media should not be underestimated.
I’ve discussed before how President Obama’s campaign masterfully used Facebook during his 2012 re-election campaign to increase turnout among young voters. It was particularly effective because Mitt Romney’s campaign was essentially absent from where the campaign was being waged.
Trump has the combined ability to communicate directly with voters through social media — telling them exactly what they want to hear — while crowding out coverage of Clinton. We’ve never had a candidate like that before.
These skills, combined with a promise to shake up what many believe is a corrupt political and economic system, will probably make this election much closer than forecasters predict.
“Ignorance is not a virtue. It’s not cool to not know what you’re talking about. That’s not keeping it real, or telling it like it is.”
— President Obama, quoted by CBS News, in an attack on Donald Trump.
“Hillary Clinton is considering a running mate who could make a direct appeal to supporters of Bernie Sanders, bridging a generational and political divide,” USA Today reports.
“Clinton’s chief requirements include a candidate’s resume and a fighter capable of hand-to-hand combat with Trump. The campaign’s vetting also prioritizes demographics over someone from a key swing state as she seeks to unify the Democratic voting base, said the individuals coordinating with the campaign, who were not authorized to speak on the record about early deliberations.”
John Boehner “will spend late July and all of August on a cross-country bus trip raising money and campaigning for House Republicans,” Politico reports.
“The trip — on Boehner’s bus, dubbed ‘Freedom One’ — will begin after the Republican National Convention in Cleveland and end Labor Day weekend. Boehner has done these trips for years, but it is especially significant that the former speaker — who left Congress after being targeted by House conservatives — is spending his summer campaigning less than a year after leaving office.”
Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) “has carved out a name for himself on the national stage as a leader in the ‘Never Trump’ Republican faction,” the Omaha World Herald reports.
“On the home front, however, the Nebraska freshman found himself rebuked Saturday by party loyalists upset at his call for a third candidate to arise and give conservatives such as himself an alternative to Donald Trump in the fall election. Delegates at the State Republican Convention overwhelmingly passed a resolution opposing Sasse’s call for a third candidate.”
Kansas City Star: “Candidates and voters in both major parties appear to be switching long-held positions on trade policy: Free-trade Republicans are becoming protectionist, while some Democrats are moving the opposite direction on exports and imports.”
“The flip-flops are making it harder to reach consensus in Washington. A major trade deal with Asian nations has stalled largely because of tangled trade politics, for example. But the changing views may also make it harder to decipher races up and down the ballot this year, from president to Congress and beyond. Trade policy no longer breaks along clean partisan lines.”
“As he tries to charm Republicans still skeptical of his presidential candidacy, Donald Trump has a challenge: On several key issues, he sounds an awful lot like a Democrat,” the AP reports.
“And on some points of policy, such as trade and national defense, the billionaire businessman could even find himself running to the left of Hillary Clinton, his likely Democratic rival in the general election.”
The Upshot: Where Trump breaks with the Republican party
“Priorities USA, the big money pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC, will begin airing general election ads against presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump on Wednesday,” CNN reports.
Donald Trump said he is “unlikely to have a good relationship with David Cameron because the British prime minister cast the U.S. presidential candidate as ‘divisive, stupid and wrong’ for proposing a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States,” Reuters reports.
Said Trump: “It looks like we’re not going to have a very good relationship, who knows. I hope to have a good relationship with him but it sounds like he’s not willing to address the problem either.”
“Targeted by progressive activists hoping to kill his chances of being Hillary Clinton’s running mate, Julián Castro is set this week to announce changes to a hot-button Housing and Urban Development program to sell bad mortgages on its books,” Politico reports.
“Castro’s actions could potentially defuse an issue that activists have been using to question his progressive credentials — and he’ll be doing it at the moment the running mate search has begun to get serious at Clinton campaign headquarters.”
“Donald Trump plans to attack the character, honesty and authenticity of Hillary and Bill Clinton in the months ahead, in hopes of increasing their unpopularity among voters and deflecting attention from his vulnerabilities,” the New York Times reports.
“Democratic Party activists in some U.S. states are using Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate who has stirred controversy with his comments about illegal immigrants and women, as the centerpiece of their ‘get out the vote’ campaign for the November elections,” Reuters reports.
Hillary Clinton “has always made known that she wants Bill Clinton to have some kind of role in the White House should she become president, but over the past few weeks she’s begun to reveal more about what exactly that would be,” ABC News reports.
Said Clinton: “My husband, who I’m going to put in charge of revitalizing the economy, cause you know he knows how to do it. And especially in places like coal country and inner cities and other parts of our country that have really been left out.”
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.
“There are a lot of blogs and news sites claiming to understand politics, but only a few actually do. Political Wire is one of them.”
— Chuck Todd, host of “Meet the Press”
“Concise. Relevant. To the point. Political Wire is the first site I check when I’m looking for the latest political nugget. That pretty much says it all.”
— Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the Rothenberg Political Report
“Political Wire is one of only four or five sites that I check every day and sometimes several times a day, for the latest political news and developments.”
— Charlie Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report
“The big news, delicious tidbits, pearls of wisdom — nicely packaged, constantly updated… What political junkie could ask for more?”
— Larry Sabato, Center for Politics, University of Virginia
“Political Wire is a great, great site.”
— Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”
“Taegan Goddard has a knack for digging out political gems that too often get passed over by the mainstream press, and for delivering the latest electoral developments in a sharp, no frills style that makes his Political Wire an addictive blog habit you don’t want to kick.”
— Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post
“Political Wire is one of the absolute must-read sites in the blogosphere.”
— Glenn Reynolds, founder of Instapundit
“I rely on Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire for straight, fair political news, he gets right to the point. It’s an eagerly anticipated part of my news reading.”
— Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.