A Very Early Look At Presidential Leaders In Each Party

 The charts above are from the Emerson College Poll -- done on November 3rd and 4th of a nationwide sample of registered voters (417 Democrats with a 4.8 point moe and 420 Republicans with a 4.7 point moe).

A Way Too Early Presidential Poll

 

These charts are from the Echelon Insights Poll -- done between August 14th and 18th of a nationwide sample of 1,057 likely voters, with a 3.6 point margin of error.

I found this interesting and thought you might also. But I urge you to take it with a grain of salt. Much will happen in the next two years that could (and probably will) radically change this.

The important thing right now is to vote as many Republicans out of office as possible in 2026.

The Real Reason For Trump's Third Presidential Campaign

A thought-provoking article from Robert Reich: 

Last Saturday, at the first rally of his presidential campaign, in Waco, Texas, Donald Trump talked about the likely criminal cases being prepared against him as if they were being prepared against his supporters.

“They’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you,” he said, predicting that “you will be vindicated and proud.”

The wording was no accident. To Trump, there is no difference between himself and his supporters, and no difference between his supporters and the parts of the United States where they’re the majority.

 

This is key. Trump views himself, his supporters (whom he calls “my people”), and their domains as one and the same. Anyone who opposes him is “them” — outside the universe of his identity, past the places that embrace him, beyond the borders of his pathological ego.

Trump’s fusion of himself with his supporters galvanizes those who project onto him the power and status they feel they’ve lost in America — people who are mostly white, rural, and without college degrees. 

But Trump is not engaging in this fusion as a means of being reelected president. In fact, even if it helps him win the Republican nomination, it will lose him the general election, because it will turn off all Republicans who are focused on real issues or who worry that he’s nuts, and it will cause independents to flee.

 

The dirty little secret of Trump’s third campaign for president — one that the media has so far ignored — is that he is not seeking to become president of the United States, at least not the United States as it is now organized. He is seeking to become president of a very different nation — overwhelmingly white, straight, Christian, and authoritarian. 

The policies Trump promoted in his speech are designed to change America into that nation — featuring, for example, the “largest mass deportation in United States history,” along with efforts to reverse “declining fertility rates” (white-nationalist code for encouraging white couples to have more babies). 

At his rally last Saturday, Trump claimed that the greatest threat to the United States was “not China or Russia” but the people in the “Department of ‘Injustice,’” and “high-level politicians that work in the U.S. government, like McConnell, Pelosi, Schumer, and Biden.”

When he was president, Trump expressed admiration for Putin and Xi. Presumably, the reason he admires them is that both have fused their personal identities with the identities of their countries (and along the way eliminated all opposition). The greatest threats to Trump’s attempt to accomplish the same in the United States are his domestic opponents, along with Republicans (like Mitch McConnell) who fail to give him full-throttled support.

Similarly, when he spoke last Saturday of “demonic forces” trying to demolish America, he was referring to demonic forces trying to demolish him — and, by implication, his supporters and their America.

For Trump, every major challenge facing America is a major challenge to Trump, and vice versa.

 

Last Saturday, he called the “weaponization of our justice system” the “central issue of our time.” During last year’s midterms, he tried to make his lies about fraud in his 2020 election defeat the most pressing issue facing the nation. 

In his mind, the two are linked. He is now recasting the January 6 attack on the Capitol as an act of patriotism by those who view the 2020 election as illegitimate. The Waco rally even featured singing by men who were imprisoned for their part in the attack. A massive screen flashed images of the January 6 attack while Trump recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

He still has not accepted the result of the 2020 election, because it was the product of people who voted against him, and Trump never considered himself president of people who reject him. Following the same sociopathic logic, he will not accept the result of the 2024 election if he is not elected. His mind is incapable of accepting it. The fusion of himself, his followers, and America renders such an outcome impossible, just as the 2020 outcome was impossible.

Yet in fact he will not be elected — unless the U.S. economy is by then in a deep recession, or Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has a serious health problem.

Brace yourselves. We have been here before. It culminated on January 6, 2021. The angry, xenophobic, misogynistic, racist, antisemitic, conspiratorial forces Trump unleashed then are still very much with us. And they are now more entrenched in Congress and state legislatures than they were then. By November 2024, they will be ready for a second attempted coup.

Trump wants and expects a civil war over himself, a final clash between Americans who love him and Americans who loathe him — between his egomaniacal views of good and evil. A civil war is unlikely, but the next year and a half is likely to be fraught — another stress test of American democracy. 

Last Saturday was only Trump’s first campaign rally. It will not go up from here. 

Warren Runs A Different Kind Of Campaign (& It's Working)

(This caricature of Senator Elizabeth Warren is by DonkeyHotey.)

If there's a hard and fast rule about campaigning for president, it is to not be too specific. Candidates like to talk in generalities, and even when they come out in favor of an issue (or against something), they won't be too specific about how they will handle it. The idea is that getting too specific will make some people upset, and lose votes.

Well, Elizabeth Warren has thrown out the rule book. She doesn't just tell voters what she supports and opposes, but she has plans on how to accomplish things she supports and defeat things she opposes -- and those plans are very specific.

And Democrats like it. While most of the candidates for the Democratic nomination are struggling to maintain their support or actually losing some support, Warren is gaining support. And she has moved from back in the pack to second place. Only Biden polls better, and she may close in on him if her momentum continues.

Here's part of an excellent op-ed by Paul Krugman in The New York Times about Warren's success with a different kind of campaign:

Not long ago, political pundits were writing off Elizabeth Warren’s political chances, but recent polling makes her an increasingly plausible contender, and her comeback has been getting her a sudden wave of favorable media coverage.

Will she actually be the Democratic nominee? If so, will she win? I have absolutely no idea. Nor does anyone else.

But the political strategy powering her comeback is interesting. And I think many observers are missing a key reason her strategy seems to be working — namely, that her agenda is radical in content and implications, but well grounded in evidence and serious scholarship.

Normally, would-be presidential nominees campaign on some combination of personal narrative and soaring rhetoric promoting broad themes: “I’m a war hero/symbol of the American dream/longtime challenger of the Establishment, and as president I’ll bring us together/drain the swamp/fight the power.”

Warren, by contrast, has been rolling out substantive, detailed policy proposals — many, many substantive, detailed policy proposals. Traditional punditry says that this should be a turnoff, that voters’ eyes will just glaze over at the proliferation of white papers.

But Warren has managed to turn relentless wonkery into a defining aspect of her political persona. Supporters show up at her rallies wearing T-shirts that proclaim “Warren has a plan for that!” And she is, by all accounts, managing to make earnest policy discussion a way to connect with her audiences. . . .

In that case, however, why haven’t other presidential contenders been rolling out comparable plans? The answer, I’d suggest, is that Warren — herself a significant policy scholar — understood from the beginning something that other candidates are only beginning to grasp: The difference between being serious and being Serious.

What I mean by being Serious is buying into inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom — the kind of conventional wisdom that in 2011, with unemployment still catastrophically high and interest rates at historic lows, created an elite consensus that we should stop worrying about jobs and focus on … entitlement reform. What I mean by being serious is paying attention to actual evidence on the effects of economic and social programs.

What Warren gets is that serious analysis is a lot more favorable to a progressive agenda than Serious conventional wisdom, which is obsessed with keeping taxes low and restraining spending. Leading experts on the economics of taxation favor substantial increases in tax rates on high incomes and wealth. Top economists studying social spending argue that there are huge benefits to higher spending on early child care.

As a result, Warren has been able to lay out plans that are very progressive but also well grounded in evidence and analysis.

Do her rivals share her understanding that progressivism and solid intellectual foundations can go hand in hand? In the past, at least, Joe Biden was worryingly Serious; he was deeply involved in the Obama administration’s fortunately unsuccessful attempt to negotiate a budget Grand Bargain that would have slashed Social Security and Medicare, reflecting the Beltway’s obsession with entitlement cuts. It’s not yet clear whether he has moved on.

Bernie Sanders, by contrast, has never bought into the Beltway consensus, and he is clearly committed to a very ambitious agenda. But his policy specifics remain oddly vague. Most notably, we still have very little idea how he would pay for Medicare for All.

My guess is that this is in part because Sanders sees himself as being in a war with the Establishment very broadly defined. As a result, his policy team, such as it is, consists of people who devote a lot of energy to attacking mainstream policy research, leaving them unable and/or unwilling to incorporate its findings into specific policy proposals.

Now, none of this means that Warren will be the nominee. Many Democratic voters clearly prefer Biden’s affable conventionality, and many others share Sanders’s tear-the-whole-thing-down instincts. All we really know is that there turns out to be a significant constituency most pundits probably didn’t even realize was there: voters who want a significant policy move to the left, but also want a candidate who really seems to have thought things through.

We don’t yet know whether this constituency is big enough to be decisive in the Democratic primaries. But if it is, Warren has a plan for that.

Elizabeth Warren Is Gaining Support In The Latest Polls

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) did not get her presidential campaign off to a great start, but that seems to be changing now.

As the only Democratic candidate to offer a series of specific proposals to make life better for most Americans, she seems to be getting the attention of Democratic voters. In the three most recent polls, she has shown a significant climbing in support (finishing above Bernie Sanders in one of the three polls).

Here is part of what Max Greenwood said about this in The Hill:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) almost single-minded focus on policy and her ambitious field organizing may be starting to pay off.

A handful of national polls released this week show the Massachusetts senator gaining on her competition, even placing second to former Vice President Joe Biden in one survey.

At the same time, she has largely cemented her standing as the leader of the ideas primary; a candidate who has managed to secure consistent media coverage and draw curious voters to campaign events by issuing a steady stream of detailed progressive policy proposals on everything from corporate consolidation in the agriculture sector to mounting student loan debt.

“She definitely, I think, stumbled a little out of the gate. But the last week to 10 days have obviously been her best,” Joe Trippi, a veteran adviser to multiple Democratic presidential campaigns, said. “She’s obviously done very well.”. . .

At the same time, Warren has largely established herself as a kind of thought leader in the Democratic field, embracing her reputation as a detail-oriented policy wonk who excels at explaining often-complex proposals to audiences. One slogan, “Warren has a plan for that,” has become a rallying cry for the senator’s supporters.

Her regular release of policy proposals has guaranteed her steady coverage in the media, while also putting pressure on her opponents to stake out positions of their own.

Pete Buttigieg Has Graphics For Wherever You Live

Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who is running for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination, believes graphics send a powerful message. So he has had them created for D.C., the territories, and all 50 states. He is urging supporters to download them and put them on their social media sites.  Here is what was created for his candidacy:

This New (And Large) Poll Has Biden Still In The Lead

These charts are from a new Morning Consult Poll. It was done between April 1st and 7th of a national sample of 12,940 registered voters likely to vote in a Democratic primary or caucus. Because of the large sample, the margin of error is only 1 point.

The top chart shows the nine candidates who are currently leading the field -- from Biden with 32% to Gillibrand and Klobuchar with 2%.

The chart below shows the favorability rating of each candidate. As you can see, there are quite a few candidates that aren't very well known to the public. Can they improve their standing in the next few months? We shall see.

Nearly 3 Out Of 4 Republicans Are Remarkably Stupid

I seldom agree with Republicans on policy, but I was still shocked at the results of this poll. It seems that 72% of Republicans believe highly-ranked law enforcement officials (in FBI) broke the law to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president -- and 55% strongly believe that!

They believe Donald Trump's ridiculous accusation that the FBI planted a spy in his organization, and that spy was to gather information to keep Trump from becoming president.

This accusation simply makes no sense. If they wanted to prevent a Trump presidency, why did they wait until months after he was in office to admit there was an investigation starting in the summer of 2016 to see if the Trump campaign was colluding with a foreign government? Wouldn't it have made more sense to announce that before the election (like they did with the Clinton investigation)? Announcing the Clinton investigation and keeping the Trump investigation quiet seems to show the FBI actually was working in favor of Trump -- not against him.

Trump won the Electoral College by a razor-thin margin in a few states. If the FBI had really wanted to prevent his presidency, releasing information about their investigation before the election could easily have done that.

But common sense and facts are not things the current Republican base respect. They only care about the incessant flow of lies coming from the mouth of their orange demagogue. For them, whatever Trump says is true -- regardless of how ridiculous it is or how many facts prove it to be false.

The FBI has never embedded a spy in a presidential campaign, and they didn't do that with the Trump campaign. They were simply investigating some bragging by a Trump aide that Russia was providing help to the campaign. The FBI was just doing its job!

The chart above shows the result of a new Rasmussen Poll -- done on May 22nd and 23rd of a national sample of 1,000 likely voters, with a 3 point margin of error. The chart shows only the responses of Republicans.

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And that's not the only stupid thing Republicans believe. As the chart below shows, 48% of Republicans (and 50% of Trump voters) still believe there were 3 to 5 million fraudulent votes cast in the 2016 election (which is the only reason their orange narcissist didn't win the popular vote) and another35% of both groups aren't sure. Once again, more than 3/4's show their idiocy. There is not a shred of evidence that even a hundred fraudulent votes were cast in 2016.

This chart is from a Huffington Post / YouGov Poll -- done between May 17th and 20th of a national sample of 1,000 voters, with a 3.7 point margin of error.

Leftist Leading Among Mexico's Presidential Candidates

The candidates for president in Mexico are (from left to right) Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador [MORENO], Jose Antonio Meade [PRI], Ricardo Anaya [PAN], and Margarita Zavala [Independent].

It's about three months until Mexico goes to the polls and chooses a new president (on July 1st). Right now, the candidate of the left, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, has a substantial (and growing) 18 point lead in in polling. Lopez Obrador kicked off his campaign by demanding respect for Mexico from Donald Trump.

Lopez Obrador is not anti-American -- none of Mexico's candidates are. But he is the least likely to bend to the will of the American government. And Trump can blame himself for the likelihood that the leftist could win this time. The Mexican people know about all the bad things Trump has said about them and their country, and they don't like it at all.

The Reuters Poll was done between March 23rd and 28th of 800 Mexican voters, and has a margin of error of 3.5 points.

Did Warren Shut The Door On A 2020 Presidential Bid ?

There were many Democrats who were disappointed when Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) did not run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. And those same Democrats (mostly progressives) are pushing for her to run in 2020 for the party's presidential nomination.

They may be disappointed then at what she told CNN and NBC in a couple of recent interviews. She told Jim Acosta of CNN:

"I am not running for president in 2020." 

She then repeated that to Chuck Todd of NBC, saying:

"For the people of Massachusetts, and for the people across this country. This government is working better and better and better for a thinner and thinner slice at the top. I am in these fights, and I am in this fight to retain my Senate seat in 2018. That's where I'm focused. That's where I'm going to stay focused. I'm not running for president."

Is that true? Has she shut the door (and nailed it shut) about a 2020 presidential bid? That is the question. Is she just talking about right now -- knowing it's too early to declare such a bid? Or is she seriously not wanting to run?

I don't think she has completely shut the door. She has an election to win in Massachusetts this year, and talking about a possible presidential bid in 2020 is not going to help her do that. I think she's just being smart, and that she knows the important thing for Democrats (and the country) right now is not to speculate about 2020, but to win this November.

Personally, I hope she does run in 2020. Win or lose, a Warren presidential bid would probably keep Bernie Sanders from replicating his 2016 fiasco -- and that would be good for the Democratic Party.

Trump Calls It A "Witch Hunt" - The Public Disagrees

Donald Trump, and his administration lackeys, are desperately trying to minimize the investigations into whether Russia interfered with the 2016 presidential election, and whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia in that interference. They are labeling the investigations as a "witch hunt" with no substance.

But he has not convinced the American public of that. They don't see the investigations as a witch hunt at all. They see them as investigating something important to the preservation of our democratic system.

About 60% say Russia did interfere in the election, 72% say the Russian interference helped Trump to win, 66% now don't trust Trump to effectively negotiate with the Russian leader (Putin), 67% think members of the Trump campaign intentionally colluded with the Russians to affect the election, and 63% say it was inappropriate for Kushner, Manafort, and Trump Jr. to meet with the Russians.

Those are some pretty substantial numbers, and they're not good for the Trump administration. One Republican (Trey Gowdy) says he's tired of the drip, drip, drip of facts about the Trump campaign meetings with Russia, and he asked them to get all the truth out immediately about those meetings. But Trump can't do that. The truth is that his campaign (likely with his knowledge and permission) did collude with the Russians -- and that collusion was both unethical and illegal. It would result in his impeachment.

The charts above are from a new ABC News / Washington Post Poll -- done between July 10th and 13th of a random national sample of 1,001 adults, with a 3.5 point margin of error.

Question Is Not Was There Collusion, But How Far Did It Go?

(Cartoon image is by Arend van Dam at cagle.com.)

There is no longer any question of whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russian officials to subvert the 2016 presidential election. They did. The only remaining question is how much collusion there was.

The following op-ed is by Jonathan Chart in New York Magazine:

Not long ago, it was fashionable for pundits to assert there was no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. That line was shaky at the time, and has been quickly blown to smithereens. We have gone from evidence of collusion to proof, with emails establishing the campaign’s clear interest in accepting Moscow’s help to win the election.

This is a very simple test of the common English understanding of the term “collusion.” Your campaign is told that Russia wants to help you win the election. (“This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”) If you refuse to take the meeting, or perhaps take it only to angrily tell your interlocutor you want no part of the project, then it isn’t collusion. If you take the meeting on the proposed terms, you are colluding. If somehow the information on offer turned out to have no value, and the contacts went no farther, then the meeting was ineffectual collusion. But Donald Trump Jr.’s response clearly indicates that he accepted the meeting in order to collude. (“If it’s what you say I love it.”)

This is the scope of the unresolved question now. How much collusion happened?

Previous news reports have established other potential avenues for collusion. There is The Wall Street Journal reporting from June, which shows both a Republican staffer identifying himself as working for Michael Flynn trying to acquire stolen Democratic emails from Russia, and Russians working to get stolen emails to Flynn. There is also the Washington Postreport from May revealing that Jared Kushner tried to establish a secret communications channel with Russia during the transition.

The revelatory emails suggest other possible channels of collusion. One email from Goldstone states, “I can send this info to your father via Rhona” — presumably Rhona Graff, Donald Trump’s personal assistant — thereby implying that President Trump may have received the information himself, and not merely through his aides. (Also, Rhona should probably hire a lawyer, if she hasn’t already.) It’s also noteworthy that Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner attended the meeting with a lawyer Trump Jr. identified as a “Russian government attorney” that was specifically dedicated to collusion.

How far the collusion went, and what elements will be provable, is hard to say. But a few larger realities are suggestive. Trump has, and many of his close advisers have, lied repeatedly about their contacts with Russia. Many of his norm-breaking actions — from the refusal to disclose the tax returns that would reveal the extent of his ties to, or dependence upon, Moscow, to his firing of Preet Bharara and James Comey — can be most rationally explained as a desire to cover the story up.

On a broader plane, Trump is a swindler who partners with mobsters and has built his life around the ethos that the logic of winning overpowers any other morality. The most sinister versions of the collusion scenario have been treated as unlikely or paranoid hypotheses. But it is the explanation most consistent with distinct sleaziness that defines Trump and which he has always looked for in his partners, from Roy Cohn to Manafort. To imagine that Trump might have had the chance to benefit politically from Russian espionage, and turned it down out of a sense of responsibility, is the unlikeliest scenario of all.