Earlier this fall, major Democratic groups like the DSCC and the Senate Majority PAC faced a difficult decision: Polling in Florida wasn't looking very good, and maintaining a presence on the airwaves in the third-largest state in the nation would be a very expensive prospect. Instead, they could spend that same money on a trio of races in much cheaper states—Missouri, Indiana, and North Carolina—in effect putting three races into play for the price of one.
That's exactly what they did, and Democrats indeed have a real shot at winning all three of those states. But now, with early voting underway and just two weeks left until Election Day, several recent Florida polls have shown Democratic Rep. Patrick Murphy with a much-improved chance of defeating Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, and even Rubio's internal polling reportedly only has him up 4 to 5 points. And according to a new piece in Politico, Murphy's fans—including Harry Reid, Bill Clinton, and Florida Sen. Bill Nelson—all want to see a few million dollars sent back to the Sunshine State to help make a late gambit for this seat.
The problem is that the DSCC and SMP are almost certainly tapped out, so where could that money come from? The 18th paragraph of Politico's piece might actually be what reporters call the "nut graf": The story notes that former DSCC chair Chuck Schumer is sitting on a massive $20 million war chest, and that—stunningly—he's airing ads in New York City for his own completely uncompetitive re-election bid. Schumer could easily afford to send, say, $5 million to the DSCC and earmark it for Florida. So why isn't he? There are no good answers.
One other savior could be Priorities USA, the main super PAC supporting Hillary Clinton, which recently started airing ads against Republican senators in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania and could do the same further south. (Clinton might also have a vested interest in kneecapping Rubio, a possible 2020 White Hosue challenger.) Another possibility is that Murphy's father, wealthy developer Tom Murphy, could possibly step in, though he's already donated millions to support his son (both to SMP and a separate super PAC).
But Schumer is the obvious choice, particularly since a Murphy victory could spell the difference between Schumer becoming his party's majority—rather than minority—leader next year when he succeeds Reid.
There are many more headlines, because that is the reality of the moment. In most early voting states, Democrats are killing it.
Republicans are already on the defensive, dealing with a nominee they don’t like, facing inevitable defeat. They have little ground game to get their unmotivated voters to the polls. Trump is suppressing his own vote with cries of “rigged!”
And when suddenly low-propensity voters are faced with a choice of turning out to vote for a loser, or staying home and doing anything but waste time on a loser? That means even more victories down ballot.
I’ve already written why an early vote matters more than an Election Day vote—it locks in your ballot in case of emergency or disaster, it frees up GOTV efforts to focus on our genuinely low-performing voters (we know you are going to vote!), it shrinks voter lines on Election Day, ensuring fewer voters are turned away, and … we get headlines like the ones above, hopefully depressing even more of their vote into inaction.
So vote early (if you can), and help lock in even bigger wins on November 8!
Log Cabin president Gregory T. Angelo during a Sirius XM interview at the Republican National Convention.
Log Cabin president Gregory T. Angelo during a Sirius XM interview at the Republican National Convention.
The Log Cabin Republicans finally declined to endorse Donald Trump, saying "rhetoric alone regarding LGBT issues does not equate to doctrine." From their statement:
As Mr. Trump spoke positively about the LGBT community in the United States, he concurrently surrounded himself with senior advisors with a record of opposing LGBT equality and committed himself to supporting legislation such as the so-called ‘First Amendment Defense Act’ that Log Cabin Republicans opposes.”
This is a glass half empty/full moment since Log Cabin actually broke with tradition after endorsing both Mitt Romney in 2012 and John McCain in 2008. At the very least, the group finally pulled support from a GOP nominee who enlisted one of the most prominent anti-LGBTQ lawmakers in the nation as his VP and repeatedly promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn marriage equality. But as LGBTQ blogger and radio host Michelangelo Signorile points out, LCR waited far too long to suddenly provide a clear-eyed assessment of Trump after the group spent the majority of the campaign season lavishing praise on him.
But by telegraphing that LCR was likely backing Trump, saying over and over for more than a year that he was so “pro-LGBT” — including in an interview with me at the RNC — only to decline to officially endorse him two weeks before the election, Log Cabin’s leader, Gregory T. Angelo, still helped Trump throughout the election. The non-endorsement at this point in time has minimal negative impact on the sinking Trump.
New York Sen. Chuck Schumer—in line to be the next Democratic leader in the Senate—is sitting on $20 million in campaign cash. Meanwhile, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has dropped its investment in beating Marco Rubio as he tries to get re-elected in Florida. That race has tightened, but Democratic Rep. Patrick Murphy needs money to have a chance at taking down Rubio. The answer: Schumer should transfer some of his $20 million to the DSCC, which could then use it to help win Florida’s Senate seat, making it that much more likely that Schumer will become majority leader rather than minority leader.
Early Wednesday afternoon, David Nir called on Daily Kos readers to encourage Schumer to do that:
Here’s how you can encourage him—politely—to do the right thing:
You should use your own words, but our message is a simple one: “Please send money to the DSCC to help Patrick Murphy end Marco Rubio’s political career.”
Within just a couple hours, the #RetireRubio hashtag was taking off.
Trump must have decided that these were his kind of people.
Trump must have decided that these were his kind of people.
Donald Trump told Fox News on Tuesday that Obamacare is "a disaster, and I've been saying it from the time before they even voted for it." You know what's coming next, don't you?
He was lying.
In fact, Trump issued no such scathing criticism. He had positive things to say about Obamacare, along with some warnings about costs to corporations, even on the 2010 day it was approved by Congress. His views on that day can best be described as ambivalent.
Trump, now the Republican presidential candidate, was interviewed about Obamacare on March 22, 2010, the day the House of Representatives voted to approve Obama’s sweeping transformation of the American health care system. HLN host Joy Behar asked him if he was “happy.”
Trump’s response: “I’m really torn.”
“Number one, as a human being, I like to see people — it’s inconceivable that, you know, people are sick, like you get sick, or I get sick, or the kids get sick, and you bring ‘em to a doctor, inconceivable that, you know, 31 or 33 million people can’t do that. So on one level, I think something had to be done,” he began.
He then offered criticism, saying “it’s really going to cost a lot of money in terms of competitiveness with this country” and would cost a friend’s company “over $200 million a year.”
He concluded "So it is a very, very tough situation." Which is not calling it a "disaster." Who could have guessed that Donald Trump had nuanced, even thoughtful thoughts on public policy? Well, in March, 2010, he was. That changed soon enough.
But Trump on Obamacare is an awful lot like Trump on Iraq, and like Trump on anything. You can't believe a word he says.
Any way you look at it, House Speaker Paul Ryan faces a living hell when Congress reconvenes on Nov. 13. Or more of a living hell than it already was.
Some in the deeply factionalized Republican Party, including Mr. Trump and some of his senior aides, are already fanning the flames for a revolt against the House speaker, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, once Congress reconvenes after the election. Mr. Trump, who has lashed out at the speaker for being critical of him, has privately said that Mr. Ryan should pay a price for his disloyalty, according to two people close to Mr. Trump who insisted on anonymity to describe internal campaign discussions.
Mr. Trump made his frustrations plain on Tuesday. “The people are very angry with the leadership of this party, because this is an election that we will win, 100 percent, if we had support from the top,” he said in an interview with Reuters ...
“There’s a huge chunk of people who want to see a fight taken to D.C.,” said Representative Dave Brat, Republican of Virginia and a member of the House Freedom Caucus, which has pressed Mr. Ryan on several issues since he became speaker last year. Mr. Brat said many conservatives remained perplexed as to why Mr. Ryan and Republican leaders would choose to criticize Mr. Trump rather than focus their energy on Mrs. Clinton.
“Leadership comes and smacks our guy?” Mr. Brat said. “That’s where you’re going to put down a marker? Really?”
Oh, goody. It's not like the Freedom Caucus types really had to have an excuse to fight Ryan, because infighting is their whole reason for being. But this sure is a good one! Ryan is facing the very happy prospect, on our side anyway, of a Republican conference so diminished, the biggest bloc will be the maniacs. That would be true whether he kept the majority or not. Gee … that’s too bad.
What would be extra good, though, is for him to lose both the majority and the speakership and any reason for staying in national politics. There has to be something good that comes out of Trump, and if it's an end to Paul Ryan's political future, so be it
Thank you, exotic local peasants, for picking up my tax bill
Thank you, exotic local peasants, for picking up my tax bill
Sure, Donald Trump reported a $1 billion dollar loss on his federal taxes—twice—to avoid paying decades of income tax. And yes, he cheated New York state out of sales tax on expensive jewelry. And okay, he used his “charitable foundation” as a plain old tax dodge to both take in income without paying taxes and pay his bills without tapping his own accounts.
... documents obtained by The Huffington Post show that the candidate has also repeatedly fought to lower the amount he pays in state and local taxes, in some cases telling authorities that his properties are worth tens of millions of dollars less than he’s claimed in his federal election filings.
Donald Trump to the public: These are the greatest assets anywhere!
Donald Trump to the government: These old shacks aren’t worth spit.
He talked the tax board in Las Vegas into knocking the appraisal of his Trump Hotel down to $25 million, then the very next week, listed its value at $50 million in his financial statements. Maybe that’s just Trump in his “smart businessman” role, putting one over on the government. Except Trump’s campaign has been arguing that, even if it’s true that he paid no federal taxes for decades (it’s true), he still pays out gobs of state and local taxes.
… Trump’s aggressive tax tactics are not always consistent with his personal financial disclosures, nor with his campaign’s insistence that the state and local taxes his company pays offset the massive federal income tax deduction he has apparently claimed.
Trump has cheated at every level from the exceptionally large to the unbelievably petty—even prying money out of a local public library.
Welcome to the Daily Kos Elections early voting roundup, which appears every weekday until Election Day. Click here to find out if and when early voting is available in your state.
We’re two weeks out from Election Day, and according to the tally being kept by Professor Michael McDonald, we now have seen more than 10 million votes tallied in the 2016 election. This means, in all probability, that around 7 to 8 percent of the total electorate has already cast ballots, and that’s only going to grow.
The big headline on Tuesday was the continued long lines in Texas, which continue to set records when compared to past cycles. Polling data in the past two weeks had hinted at a surprising level of competitiveness in the largest historically red state in the Union. For veteran Democratic election junkies, a purple Texas had long seemed like a noble project for future cycles, but a touch too ambitious for the present. These early vote numbers make it seem like it’s edging closer to reality.
Now, a cautionary note—the news is not uniformly positive: There are some red counties that are voting huge (though there may be a critical caveat there, too, which I will address in a moment), and some blue counties (like San Antonio’s Bexar County) are not booming at the same rate.
All that said, something is clearly happening in the Lone Star State, so let’s start there. We also have updates for Florida, Colorado, Nevada, Louisiana, and Ohio.
Well, that was fast. Nevada Republican Joe Heck has gone from "why wouldn't I trust Trump" to have his finger on the nuclear button last month to refusing to say if he's voting for Trump now. Because, he claims, it should be a "secret ballot."
On Tuesday at a national security roundtable with GOP Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Heck said he likely would not reveal who he was voting for before the election, and voters didn’t have a right to know anyway.
“It’s a personal decision who you vote for,” Heck said. “It’s a secret ballot, just like your ballot is a secret ballot.”
The shadow of Trump is looming large over the Nevada Senate race, and Heck might have the most serious problem. […]
Heck was ahead in the polls until the recordings surfaced in September and Heck called on Trump to resign. Since then, Cortez Masto has led in all the polls, save for one.
Heck's constituents might just have something to say about whether they have a right to know who he's voting for, since he wants to be representing them in the Senate and all. That’s on all sides of the equation—the ardent Trump supporters who are pissed at him for dumping Trump, and all those Nevadans who are terrified at what a President Trump could mean.
It's not often that you can say "CNN nailed it!" but John King nails it: "No, no … You are a member of the United States Congress, you're a declared member of the Republican Party and you want to be in the United States Senate. Leaders lead, right?"
New Hampshire GOP gubernatorial nominee Chris Sununu
New Hampshire GOP gubernatorial nominee Chris Sununu
Monmouth is out with another poll of New Hampshire. They show GOP Sen. Kelly Ayotte and Democrat Maggie Hassan deadlocked 46-46, which is about par for the course here: The Daily Kos Elections polling average has Hassan ahead 46-44. They also have Hillary Clinton up 46-42, which is a bit smaller than her 46-39 average in the Granite State. However, their gubernatorial numbers are a bit more interesting. One month ago, Monmouth found Chris Sununu, a member of New Hampshire’s powerful GOP political family, leading Democrat Colin Van Ostern by a 49-43 margin. Now, Monmouth has Van Ostern up 48-43, an almost complete reversal.
The last Monmouth poll was finished just after both Sununu and Van Ostern won their primaries, and neither was particularly well-known. The gubernatorial race has attracted far less money and attention than the presidential or Senate contests, and we wondered if Sununu, the son of former Gov. John Sununu and the brother of an ex-U.S. senator, could just coast to victory on the strength of his last name. And indeed, most September polls showed Sununu with a wider lead than either Ayotte or Donald Trump.
However, both parties have been running commercials here, and they seem to have helped Van Ostern spring into the lead. The last public poll to show Sununu ahead was a UMass Lowell survey from two weeks ago that had him up just 41-39. However, a MassInc poll from around that time showed Van Ostern ahead 47-44. In the last week, SurveyMonkey and the University of New Hampshire has Van Ostern ahead 53-43 and 44-38, respectively, while on Tuesday, YouGov dropped a poll showing him narrowly leading 44-43. We still have relatively few polls to work with, and they show everything from a 10-point Van Ostern victory to almost a tie. However, at the very least, it seems clear that Sununu’s early lead has vanished as the candidates have become better known.
While the Senate race continues to dwarf the gubernatorial contest when it comes to outside spending, Sununu’s allies at the Republican Governors Association are continuing to air ads. The RGA’s latest spot, which comes from their “Live Free PAC,” contrasts the two candidates. After the narrator argues that Sununu is a strong leader who “won’t raise taxes,” he declares that Van Ostern is an Obamacare lover who wants to bring Syrian refugees to New Hampshire and “won’t rule out higher taxes.” It’s a pretty bland offering compared to the more-focused Democratic spots that have portrayed Sununu as a heartless CEO who cut his employees’ benefits.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren has been hitting the trail as if it were her job on the line this election, working for Hillary Clinton and hopeful Senate colleagues. In North Carolina, she spared no pity for her current colleague Richard Burr, and his total capitulation to Donald Trump. He asked for it—and Warren delivered.
Warren listed insults Trump has used on the campaign trail, including calling Mexicans "rapists" and attacking a Gold Star Family, emphasizing that Burr "fully supports" Trump.
"Trump calls women fat pigs and bimbos and brags about sexually assaulting women, and Richard Burr is like a puppy on a leash, sticking right there with Donald Trump," she said. "If Richard Burr is just going to be Donald Trump’s lap dog, then let him go off and do that. But the people of North Carolina need a strong, independent voice to fight for the families of North Carolina. And that is Deborah Ross." […]
"According to Donald Trump, a woman who fights back is a nasty woman," she said. "Women have had it with guys like Donald Trump and Richard Burr. And nasty women have really had it with guys like Donald Trump and Richard Burr."
This one's a toss up, with Ross continuing to run all-out to unseat Burr—with a little help from her friends. Having Elizabeth Warren on your side in this election is surely a lot better than having Trump.
Senate races aren't the only down-ballot contests a Clinton Super PAC is eyeing these days. Now Priorities USA has funded an ad for an Iowa House race in which Democrat Monica Vernon is working to unseat GOP Rep. Rod Blum. The polls weren't looking good for Vernon earlier this month, but the race is still considered a toss up. Nothing like a little presidential firepower to shake things up. Paul Kane writes:
Priorities USA, an independent group designed primarily to elect Clinton, is now funding a 30-second ad in Iowa that has the double effect of hitting Trump for his controversial statements and tagging freshman Rep. Rod Blum (R) for his continued support of his party’s presidential nominee.
“Send me back to Congress, and you send Donald Trump to the White House,” Blum says at a campaign rally in the 30-second ad, after an array of controversial Trump statements appear on the screen. “Rod Blum still supports Trump today and even attacked Republicans who spoke out against Trump,” the narrator says.
All these Clinton ads are twofers that both remind voters of how rancid Trump is while counting on him to sink all his GOP supporters like a bag of cement. Priorities USA has already posted similar themed ads about GOP Sens. Kelly Ayotte and Pat Toomey, but the ad targeting Blum is the group's first foray into the House. House Majority PAC is also taking aim at Blum with more of an issues-based ad.
Blum will be getting back up from Trump... Nix that. Trump just snubbed the GOP by ending his high-dollar fundraisers for the party. That's what you get when you nominate a raging narcissist who's taking all his marbles and going home in advance of getting thrashed at the polls by a woman.
