Yesterday Quinnipiac came out with batch of swing state polls showing Donald Trump near even or ahead in three key swing states – Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio. In recent cycles, the Q poll has tended to be Republican friendly at least in part because it models the electorate with fewer college educated voters and fewer minority voters than other pollsters; indeed, fewer than the number who’ve shown up in recent presidential elections. But this morning Reuters/Ipsos released its latest weekly poll which shows Trump just 1 point behind Clinton at Clinton 41, Trump 40. The same poll showed Trump 9 points back just one week ago.
That’s a big big move and from a poll that hasn’t shown a clear GOP lean.
So what’s up?
House Speaker Paul Ryan just took a small number of questions about Donald Trump and his efforts to genuinely unify the GOP for the November election. It was notable what he did and did not say.
The gist of Ryan’s remarks is that there are different wings in the GOP, as there is in any national political coalition, and they need to unify around a common message while accepting existence of different wings, different policy positions, etc. Secondly, it’s been a deeply bruising primary. Simply on an interpersonal level, it takes a while to absorb and get past that.
Trump campaign capo Paul Manafort says GOP convention will be “the ultimate reality show.”
The Trump campaign is now saying its decision to include a prominent white nationalist on its California delegate slate was the result of a “database error.”
And no. That does not make any sense.
Paul Ryan’s spokeswoman pleads with reporters to stop asking questions about Donald Trump.
If you missed Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s powerful statement on transgender rights, it’s worth a watch.
One of the great privileges of being in Congress is the relative anonymity, the anonymity of numbers. That may sound counter-intuitive or even nonsensical; but it’s true. Very few pieces of legislation are sufficiently politicized to focus a spotlight individually on the hundreds of members of the House of Representatives. It’s scarcely less true of the Senate. Even when issues or bills do gin up sufficient attention members can usually skate by with bromides about considering all the relevant issues or giving this important issue careful consideration and other such can-kicking nonsense. Then there are all the parliamentary complexities that help further muddy the picture. Without any way to get a clear sense of where people stand and which votes count, politicians can do what they do best, which is to keep their options open as long as possible and hope that hard decisions never have to be made at all. The key is that there’s safety in the herd. As long as there’s some diffuse, collective decision-making and no real way to pin particular people down, everybody is safe.
I wanted to share a couple thoughts on Paul Ryan’s statement that he’s happy to step down as convention chair if that’s what Donald Trump wants. First, it’s important to recognize that the nominee owns the convention. It’s his show. If Trump wanted someone else to chair the convention, Ryan would really have little choice but to step aside. But that’s really not the point.
Donald Trump is out with a new statement this morning, attacking The New York Times for distorting what he said about reducing the federal debt by deal-making with bond holders to reduce the amount the US government has to pay out to them. In truth, it’s more than just the Times, though Trump seems to have decided they were the best target for his broadside. You can read the statement here.
Keep an eye on our Official TPM Trump Elected Official Endorsement Scoreboard next week as we continue to add new names to each of the five categories. I will say that I am mildly surprised at how many elected officials have essentially decided to sit out the election.
Here’s what I mean.