We have four more polls released today, only a handful of days out from the Israeli election. They show a small but clear and hardening lead for the Zionist Camp/Labor Party over Netanyahu’s Likud. Three polls show ZC/Labor with a four-seat lead over Likud. Another shows a two-point advantage for ZC/Labor. (Here’s the best aggregation of all the polls here.)
(Just after I published this post, two new polls were released, each also showing a four-seat ZC/Labor lead.)
Two points stand out in the polls. Likud is dropping and now ZC/Labor seems to be rising — at least a bit. Also notable is that the center-right bloc itself seems to be under pressure.
Even after everything we’ve seen, I was surprised that Tom Cotton was able to get almost the entire Republican Senate caucus to sign on to his letter advising Iranian hardliners to walk away from a bargain with President Obama and the other world leaders involved in the Iranian nuclear negotiations. But it’s almost more amazing to me how many of them are surprised this may not have been a good idea. Sen. Ron Johnson is the latest to try to distance himself from the letter he signed.
We’re doing a Live Chat with education policy journalist Dana Goldstein at 1:30 PM eastern today in The Hive (sub req). Join us.
I had meant to write this post Monday or Tuesday. But odds and ends and a business trip got in the way. As it happens, another twenty-four hours has only increased the signs that, with less than a week to go before the Israeli elections, Netanyahu is slipping and perhaps in real danger of being ousted as Prime Minister.
As we noted last week, the initial polls after the Prime Minister’s speech to Congress painted an equivocal picture: perhaps a very small bump of support but one that seemed to subside quickly and still leave the Zionist Camp/Labor Party with the slenderest of leads. But over the weekend something changed.
A while back, a Texas GOP legislator greeted visiting Muslims on Texas Muslim Capitol Day with an Israeli flag and an admonition to renounce terrorism and swear allegiance to ‘merica. Noble stuff.
Today, Planned Parenthood is visiting the Texas Capitol, so another GOP legislator greeted them with this.
Senate GOP slips anti-abortion provision into human trafficking bill. Senate Dems unknowingly vote for it in committee (some even co-sponsor it). Everyone gets mad.
Indiana Democratic lawmaker forced to apologize for sexting with the same woman who was at the center of Anthony Weiner’s sexting scandal.
After years of being thwarted, the AP is now suing to obtain Hillary Clinton’s emails from her time at the State Department.
Like many of you, my formative political experiences were in my 20s. And for me, that meant the Clinton years. I was just shy of 24 when Bill Clinton was inaugurated in January 1993 and living in Washington in my early 30s when he left office. I don’t think anyone could be a bigger Clinton diehard than I was in those days. And if it were still the mid- or late 90s, with all the frivolity and nonsense that characterized those years, I still would be. When I was trying to make my way into journalism in the late 90s, I considered writing a book at the phenomenon of Clinton-hating, which I still think would be a fascinating book because feelings about Bill Clinton, on both sides of the equation, are a fascinating way to explore intricacies of that decade.
Sen. Kaine (D-VA) wonders whether senate GOP is “mature” enough to handle national security issues.