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Trump Gets a Sizeable Convention Bounce in the Polls

by Penny9573cwi Posted on July 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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We now have four polls out that were taken after the Republican convention: CNN, CBS, Morning Consult, and Gravis Marketing. They show an average post-convention bounce for Trump of 6.3 points. That’s higher than the normal GOP bounce of about 4 points. They also show Trump leading Clinton by an average of 2.5 points.

This is not, by itself, anything for Democrats to be worried about. They’ll get their own bounce this week, and it won’t be until mid-August that everything settles down and we have a good idea of where everything really stands. But we can say two things. First, Donald Trump is suddenly going to start talking about polls again. Second, although liberals might have thought the Republican convention was a dumpster fire, it’s obvious that Trump’s message—even delivered in angry, apocalyptic tones—resonates with a lot of people. Democrats better hope that Team Hillary has an effective answer to that.

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Trump Gets a Sizeable Convention Bounce in the Polls

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The Effect of Emailgate on the Presidential Race Was…Zero

by Iona32C781947 Posted on July 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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On July 5, FBI Director James Comey held a press conference about Hillary Clinton’s email server. By all accounts, his narrative was devastating. She had been “extremely careless.” She had sent and received documents now considered classified. She had used her private server while traveling in unfriendly countries. There was a strong possibility that her server had been hacked.

As it happens, Comey overstated a lot of this stuff. But he did say it. And the reaction of the press was nearly unanimous: Comey had validated many of the worst charges against Clinton. There would be no indictment, but it was certain to hurt Clinton badly. And yet, look what happened according to the Pollster aggregates:

In the week following Comey’s press conference, nothing happened. Clinton’s poll numbers were basically flat, and then bumped up a couple of points. As near as I can tell, Comey’s lengthy rebuke had no effect at all.

This is genuinely puzzling. Sure, the email affair had been going on for a long time and people were pretty tired of it, but Comey made genuine news—all of it bad for Clinton. At the very least, you’d expect a dip in the polls of two or three points for a few weeks.

Why didn’t anyone care? Is this a sign that everyone’s minds are made up, and there’s basically nothing that can change the race at this point? Or does it mean that emailgate was a much smaller deal than we political junkies thought it was?

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The Effect of Emailgate on the Presidential Race Was…Zero

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Possible Clinton VP pick has a weird appeal with enviros, fossil fuel groups

by MelisaTimm Posted on July 13, 2016

Sen. Tim Kaine REUTERS/Jason Reed

citizen kaine

Possible Clinton VP pick has a weird appeal with enviros, fossil fuel groups

By on Jul 13, 2016Share

Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, one of Hillary Clinton’s potential picks for vice president, appears to have an uncanny ability to appease special interests across party divides.

Kaine is no Elizabeth Warren on the environment, but he’s no Jim Webb either, getting good reviews from surprising quarters. As Politico reports, he opposed the Keystone XL pipeline, protected 400,000 acres of land from development as governor of Virginia, supports the Clean Power Plan, and has worked to make coastal communities prepare for climate change and sea-level rise. The League of Conservation Voters has given him a lifetime score of 91 percent.

Kaine, however, has also supported offshore drilling in the Atlantic — contradicting Clinton’s position — and supported a bill to fast-track the construction of natural gas terminals. Even fossil fuel interests have taken a liking to him. “We’re encouraged by the reasonable approach he’s taken on oil and natural gas, that he hasn’t been swayed by politics and ideology,” Miles Morin, executive director of the Virginia Petroleum Council, told Politico.

Of course, being on good terms with the fossil fuel industry is a cause for concern among some greens. “If Kaine is the pick, Hillary will need to stake out much clearer positions on drilling, fracking, and new fossil fuel infrastructure,” said 350.org policy director Jason Kowalski. R.L. Miller, Climate Hawks Vote cofounder and a chair of California Democrats’ environmental caucus, responded to Kaine’s record with a resounding, “meh,” citing his mixed record on fossil fuels as why he’s a bad pick to lure progressive Democrats to the polls.

Clinton is expected to announce her choice after the GOP convention next week.

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Possible Clinton VP pick has a weird appeal with enviros, fossil fuel groups

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A Closer Look Behind the "Obamacare Surprise"

by MaricruCorona Posted on June 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Helaine Olen writes in Slate that Democrats might be in for a nasty surprise just before the election:

A few weeks ago Politico warned of “Obamacare’s November surprise”: Many consumers enrolling in the health care marketplace on Nov. 1, just one week before the election, can expect increased rates.

Given the current disparity in the polls, it’s unlikely that alone could change the outcome of the election. But it is quite possible it will cause a bit of turmoil in the last week of the campaign. It’s beginning to look likely than many shoppers aren’t going to like what they find.

A report from the Kaiser Family Foundation released earlier this month estimated that the average weighted premium increase for the benchmark second lowest cost silver plan will come in at 10 percent. Last year? It was 5 percent.

This is quite possible. As the Obamacare market shakes out and insurers get a better handle on their actual costs, premiums were always bound to go up. But it’s worth pointing out what’s really happening here: insurers lowballed their premiums at first in order to win market share, coming in at rates far below the CBO’s initial estimates. So even if we do see a 10 percent increase in 2017, premiums will still be well under CBO’s initial projections1:

I’m under no illusion that this will change the politics of a premium increase, of course. Someone, somewhere, will have a 30 percent increase, and that’s undoubtedly what Donald Trump will blather on about. Nonetheless, it’s nice to at least be prepared with the truth. And the truth is that even if there’s a sizeable increase next year, premiums will still be about 15 percent less than CBO projected back when Obamacare was first passed.

1It was surprisingly hard to collect these numbers. You’d think CBO would have them all collected in one place somewhere, but if they do, I couldn’t find them. If anyone can point me to something better, let me know. In the meantime, here are my sources:

Projections:

2014: https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/76701/ib_premiums_update.pdf, p.6.
2015: Interpolation of 2014 and 2016 numbers.
2016: http://cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/107xx/doc10781/11-30-premiums.pdf, p. 7.
2017: Projection based on CBO projection of 8 percent increases between 2016-18. https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-2016/reports/51130-Health_Insurance_Premiums_OneCol.pdf, p. 12.

Actual:

2014: http://cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/45231-ACA_Estimates.pdf, p. 6.
2015: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-2016/reports/49892/49892-breakout-AppendixB.pdf, p. 120.
2016: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-2016/reports/51130-Health_Insurance_Premiums_OneCol.pdf, p. 12.
2017: Estimate based on 10 percent increase from 2016.

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A Closer Look Behind the "Obamacare Surprise"

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Trump and his hairspray leave cloud of weird in coal country

by Ebony72Mlar Posted on May 9, 2016

Trump and his hairspray leave cloud of weird in coal country

By on May 9, 2016Share

Donald “Climate Change Is a Hoax” Trump told voters in West Virginia last week not to bother going to the polls for the state’s primary on Tuesday. “You don’t have to vote anymore, save your vote for the general election, forget this one, the primary’s done,” Trump told the crowd at a campaign stop in the state’s capital, the Charleston Gazette-Mail reports. That doesn’t sound like a comment from a politician — what kind of candidate tells people not to vote? — but of course, Trump isn’t one.

Still, it was not the most bizarre occurrence at the Charleston rally: That honor is reserved for the moment Trump donned a hard hat and did a little working-in-the-coal-mine dance.

The coal-loving crowd ate it right up. Many of them stood in the audience holding “Trump digs coal” signs.

“I’ll tell you what, folks, you’re amazing people,” Trump said. “The courage of the miners and the way the miners love what they do, they love what they do. If I win we’re going to bring those miners back.”

As the Gazette-Mail points out, this is quite a change of attitude toward the mining community. In 1990, Trump told Playboy, “If I had been the son of a coal miner, I would have left the damn mines. But most people don’t have the imagination — or whatever — to leave their mine. They don’t have it.”

Trump, naturally, blames the coal industry’s troubles on the EPA, an agency he plans to shut down. But the reality is that coal is suffering because natural gas is beating it in the marketplace and demand from China is declining — trends a President Trump would be unlikely to reverse.

The Charleston rally also included an off-the-wall, off-the-script hairspray rant, detailed by The Intercept:

“My hair look okay?” Trump asked the crowd. “Got a little spray — give me a little spray.”

“You know, you’re not allowed to use hairspray anymore because if affects the ozone. You know that, right?” he said to laughter. “I said, ‘You mean to tell me’ — ’cause you know hairspray’s not like it used to be, it used to be real good,” he added, to more laughs. “Give me a mirror. But no, in the old days, you put the hairspray on, it was good. Today, you put the hairspray on, it’s good for 12 minutes, right?”

“I said, ‘Wait a minute — so if I take hairspray and if I spray it in my apartment, which is all sealed, you’re telling me that affects the ozone layer?’” “‘Yes.’” I say, no way, folks. No way!”

“No way!” he added to cheers. “That’s like a lot of the rules and regulations you people have in the mines, right? It’s the same kind of stuff.”

Bemoaning the ineffectiveness of modern-day hairspray may seem like an odd way to relate to miners, but, hey, Trump’s shtick is clearly working for him.

After the rally, Trump said the crowd in Charleston numbered 28,000. The fire marshal’s count, says the Gazette-Mail, was 11,600.

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Trump and his hairspray leave cloud of weird in coal country

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Donald Trump’s Ground Game Is Much Better Than We Thought

by MaritaUmkshvyj Posted on April 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Tuesday’s Republican primary in Pennsylvania was the ultimate test of the three campaigns’ ground organization. And the candidate who’s been most widely impugned for his ground game came out on top by a vast margin.

Donald Trump won the Pennsylvania Republican primary with 57 percent of the vote. But that was only half the battle in the Keystone State. Unlike voters in most states, who select the candidate of their choice (or a slate of delegates listed under that candidate), GOP voters in Pennsylvania see only delegates’ names on the ballot. The delegates they elect to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland are not obligated to support any particular candidate at the convention. That means that for the candidates, getting sympathetic delegates elected is just as important as winning the popular vote.

The Trump campaign nailed this challenge. According to ABC News, at least 41 of the 54 unbound delegates in Pennsylvania will back Trump. Runner-up Ted Cruz has the support of just three delegates in the state, while nine remain uncommitted.

Pennsylvania’s system of directly electing delegates presented a challenge for the campaigns. A Republican voter in Pennsylvania needed to know not only his or her choice for president, but also which candidates for delegate would support that person in Cleveland this summer. That required the campaigns to do two things: ensure that sympathetic delegates made it onto the ballot (or at least identify the supportive candidates) in each congressional district, and launch a substantial information campaign so voters would know which delegates to choose.

Trump was not expected to perform well in this regard. His campaign, which has built its success on a massive press and social-media presence, has been criticized for its lack of ground organizing, which presaged trouble in the crucial delegate-wrangling stage in the latter part of the race. The Cruz campaign has been getting credit for its behind-the-scenes maneuvering to send pro-Cruz delegates to the convention in Cleveland; in states like Colorado, for example, Cruz’s delegate strategy won him nearly every delegate from the state and left none for Trump.

But in Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign educated its supporters better than the Cruz campaign, and the results showed.

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Donald Trump’s Ground Game Is Much Better Than We Thought

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Helping the Poor Is the Right Thing to Do, But Maybe Not Much of a Political Winner

by DinaRamsey Posted on April 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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I don’t want to make too big a deal out of one comment from one guy, but here’s the response of a minimum-wage worker who got a big increase when Emeryville raised its minimum wage to $14 per hour:

Security guard Kenneth Lofton was among the workers who benefited last year when this East Bay city hiked its hourly minimum wage to nearly $15 for employees at large companies. The jump was almost 70% more than what he used to make in nearby Oakland when he was paid $10 an hour.

….”It’s somewhat better, but not much,” Lofton said Tuesday morning while eating breakfast and manning the security gate at an Emeryville parking lot. “The high cost of living here takes a big bite out of whatever monetary increase you get, so it’s like not getting an increase at all.”

But, he said, “at least they’re trying.”

This is crazy. If Lofton works full time, he’s seeing an increase of $160 per week. Call it $130 or so after taxes. That’s real money. But “it’s like not getting an increase at all.”

Raising the minimum wage—whether to $12, $14, or $15—is the right thing to do. But as a purely political matter, comments like Lofton’s make you wonder if this kind of thing provides any benefits for Democrats. It earns them plenty of annoyance from employers, along with at least some annoyance from consumers who have to pay higher prices, but it’s not clear if this is offset much by increased loyalty from the folks who are helped. Is Lofton more likely to show up at the polls in November because he got a raise? Hard to say.

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Helping the Poor Is the Right Thing to Do, But Maybe Not Much of a Political Winner

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John McCain Concedes the GOP May Have Lost Hispanics

by RayfordHaydon Posted on March 22, 2016

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Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., appears to have conceded that the Republican Party has alienated Hispanic voters and will have to rely increasingly on white voters to win in November.

“An interesting phenomenon right now is the huge turnouts for the Republican primaries, low turnout for the Democrat primaries,” McCain said in a Sunday appearance on the Phoenix-based show Politics in the Yard. “Now if all those people would get behind the Republican candidate, I think we could win this election despite the alienation, frankly, of a lot of the Hispanic voters.”

McCain will face perhaps his toughest re-election fight this fall. A former champion of comprehensive immigration reform, he is likely to struggle in a year in which Donald Trump is pushing Latinos away from the Republican Party. McCain will face off against several Republican primary challengers in August. Polls show McCain currently tied with his general election opponent, Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (D-Ariz.).

McCain has steered clear of Donald Trump, who is the favorite to win the Arizona Republican primary on Tuesday night. The Hill reported last week that McCain would not attend any of the rallies Trump held in Arizona this weekend. McCain endorsed his colleague Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in the presidential primary; after Graham dropped out, McCain said he would not endorse anyone.

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John McCain Concedes the GOP May Have Lost Hispanics

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After Michigan Loss, Clinton Campaign Holds On to…Math

by DelbertBuzacott Posted on March 9, 2016

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After a surprising loss in the Michigan primary on Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton’s campaign contends it is still on track to win the nomination, thanks to the delegate math. And her campaign strategists are not second-guessing the decisions that likely hurt her in Michigan—and could haunt her next week in three more significant Midwestern contests.

“From the beginning, we have approached this nomination as a battle for delegates,” campaign manager Robby Mook said Wednesday on a conference call with reporters. “Last night really showed why that approach made sense.”

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After Michigan Loss, Clinton Campaign Holds On to…Math

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Hillary Clinton Just Won the South Carolina Primary

by CelsaLuster317 Posted on February 28, 2016

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Hillary Clinton won the South Carolina Democratic primary handily on Saturday, according to multiple news outlets, which called the race as soon as the polls closed. Just days before Super Tuesday, her win underscores what many pundits have been saying all along—despite her opponent Bernie Sanders’ surprise success in early states, Clinton still holds critical sway among Southern black voters.

According to preliminary exit polls, more than 60 percent of South Carolina primary voters were black; an astounding 84 percent of them voted for Clinton. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have long been popular among black voters, while Sanders has struggled to make his message resonate in the state.

Clinton worked hard to consolidate her support in the lead-up to the primary, traveling to far-flung corners of the state and deploying Bill Clinton for good measure. Sanders, by contrast, appeared to be looking ahead to primaries in other states.

The real test for both campaigns comes Tuesday, when 11 states, American Samoa, and Democrats abroad will all vote on their choice for the Democratic nomination.

This story has been updated.

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Hillary Clinton Just Won the South Carolina Primary

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