“The conservative political data firm i360 is polling more than 200,000 registered voters every month in an effort to offer Republicans unparalleled voter turnout capabilities in the midterm elections and beyond,” the Washington Examiner reports.

“The Democrats have been at the forefront of collecting data on prospective voters and using the information to drive turnout, far outpacing the Republican Party’s data-mining efforts. But i360 believes it has turned a corner, with company officials asserting that the firm’s access to proprietary survey data on millions of Americans offers Republicans an advantage in the competition to sway public opinion and influence the vote.”

Claremont Courier: “Canvassers working on behalf of the Let Claremont Vote Committee started making the rounds last week, circulating a petition for a separate measure calling for voter approval on the city’s water bonds. At around 6:45 p.m. on Wednesday, July 16, two canvassers–an unidentified male and female–arrived to the Claremont home of Pat O’Malley. His wife, Shelley, had just finished giving their baby a bath when she passed by the family’s home surveillance monitor and witnessed the couple at their front door. After watching the monitor for a moment, Ms. O’Malley couldn’t believe her eyes. The man was groping the woman, right there on the O’Malley’s front porch.”

Patrick Ruffini: “Campaigns control precious few things through their own deliberate effort, independent of what their opponent does or doesn’t do. Turnout is one of those things. Persuasion, like the search for the blockbuster drug or summer movie, can yield fantastic results, but is often hit or miss – too often outside the capability of the campaign or the candidate to fully control.”

Mark Leibovich: “In recent years, American politics has been overrun by an adversity-theft epidemic. These days, the practice has infested campaigns across the country, at every level, wherever the tiresome same notes of media consultants can be heard — as in, pretty much everywhere. It does not matter that the most recent hard knocks endured by many of today’s politicians came well before they were born, as with Chris Christie, whose father worked in a Breyer’s plant. We will still hear about it as if it were yesterday.”

Marc Ambinder: “I don’t think unions will ever give up on Democrats. The party will always be friendlier than Republicans. In big, populous states, union endorsements still matter.”

“But I do predict, based on conversations I’ve had with labor leaders here, that, to get attention, labor will take a page from the Tea Party movement and try to become more militant and more focused on income inequality. Because Americans support labor’s causes, by and large, but don’t like the labor movement as a spokesman for them, I also predict that the labor movement will go through several more circular firing squads, where forward-thinking union leaders call for the movement at large to devote less political attention to the specific, contractual concerns of their own workers and more to campaigns that non-union workers can rally around, like state minimum wage campaigns, and a call to reduce concentrated corporate political power.”

“In the past few months, Republicans have called Wendy Davis, a Democratic candidate for Texas governor, ‘Abortion Barbie,’ likened Alison Lundergan Grimes, a Senate candidate from Kentucky, to an ’empty dress,’ criticized Hillary Rodham Clinton’s thighs, and referred to a pregnant woman as a ‘host,” the New York Times reports.

“Democrats do not just get mad when they hear those words. They cash in.”

“In fact, they are trying to find even more examples by tracking Republican opponents, their surrogates and conservative news media personalities, then blasting their comments out to supporters to build voter lists and drum up donations, casting aside the well-worn advice to shrug off sexist comments lest they draw attention to gender over issues.”

Los Angeles Times: “Forget the chicken dinner, the rubbery staple of the political fundraising circuit… The push to be creative and different — did we mention the food truck serving lobster or the trip to the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race? — grows out of the fierce competition for limited campaign dollars, reflected by the more than two dozen invitations that some Washington lobbyists say arrive in the mail every day.”

“This being Washington, politicians, as always, are looking for ways to stand out.”

“In politics, nobody does something for nothing.”

— Connecticut Democratic Party Chairwoman Nany DiNardo, quoted by the Connecticut Post.

The Week: Why don’t more politicians apologize?

David Smith: “There is little doubt that dogs are politically useful. A half-serious study in the political science journal PS suggests a ‘diversionary dog’ theory. The authors find that presidents display their dogs more during wartime and scandals, though less during economic crises, when the public does not want to see the president frolicking with a spoiled pet.”

Eleanor Clift: “We all know that Anthony Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, learned from the master: she worked for Hillary Clinton in the late 1990s, when the first lady was humiliated by Bill during the Monica Lewinsky affair but nevertheless chose to stand by him. Now Abedin is soldiering her way through a similar situation. And at Tuesday’s press conference, where she spoke on her husband’s behalf in the wake of new allegations against him, it was clear that she was operating from the Hillary playbook. Her message to the public was simple: she loves him, she’s forgiven him, she believes in him, and they’re moving forward.”

“This strategy worked for the Clintons politically. But after this latest press conference, I’m pretty sure that Abedin has stretched the Hillary mantle past the breaking point.”

Capital New York notes that Eliot Spitzer “seems happy to indulge his status as a national celebrity, in a way that Anthony Weiner, by comparison, hasn’t seen fit to do. Weiner, for all the press coverage he’s generated, has yet to sit for a single national television interview since he entered the race in May.”

Howard Kurtz: “Once it was all so blatant. Some calculating pol, realizing that his position had become unpopular or untenable, would execute a backflip off the high board. The press would blow the whistle on this naked opportunism, and the flip-flop police would beat him senseless.”

“Now the slippery officeholders and aspirants simply announce that they are ‘evolving.’ I mean, who could be against that?”

“Evolving suggests a certain intellectual process as the person in question grapples with new evidence. It is part of a continuing quest to sort through the nuances and reach a modern conclusion in these turbulent times. It is practically professorial rather than a shameful cave-in.”

Rick Klein: “It’s either the worst kind of Washington fight, or the best kind. The stand-off over sequestration’s automatic spending cuts is peculiar in part because there’s no real attempt to do anything about it. All the focus is falling on who should take the blame after it happens. So it’s the worst kind of fight because something big is about to happen, with real consequences for government and military services, that almost nobody in Washington wants to see take place. But it’s the best kind of fight because at least this time there’s no brinksmanship and almost certainly fruitless late-night, high-stakes meeting.”

The Cloakroom: Maybe President Obama should use reverse psychology to get his agenda past Republicans.

Marc Ambinder: “Politics without dirty deals is not politics. It’s something else.
It’s not something we’ve seen here; there are no historical antecedents
for it. Purely deliberative reasoning, shorn of self-interest, is an
academic exercise. Let it by all means by an aspirational ideal. Call
out cynicism where you see it, but don’t lump all cynicism and
opportunism together. Be wary of judging what is with what you think must be. If humanism on a grand scale is your goal, you aren’t going to get there without getting mud on your jersey.”

The Cloakroom: When politicians forget what’s behind them.

A guest post from Brad Phillips, author of The Media Training Bible.

You’ve made a mistake. Fair enough. It happens.

But far too many politicians and public officials are reluctant to issue a full and unequivocal apology after making a mistake. That’s not because they’re bad or uncaring people. More commonly, it’s a human reaction from a defensive person who feels that his or her well-intentioned motives were misunderstood.

As a result, the spokesperson usually issues a hedged “half apology” that goes something like this:
“If you were offended by what I said, then I am sorry.”

[Read more…]