CNN interviewing Harry Enten:
A 'blue wave' is probably coming. Or maybe we should call it a 'blue blizzard'
Election polls aren't the only misconception on Enten's mind. He also takes issue with how Trump's approval rating is reported on by the media.
"This is one of the most bizarre things that has occurred in our press over the past two years," Enten said. "People are reporting Trump's approval rating among the GOP as if it's as important as his approval rating overall."
He says the "core Republican electorate" only makes up about 25% of all voters, and this does not indicate how the midterm elections will turn out or reflect "the electorate at large."
At the end of their discussion, Stelter read questions from his newsletter readers, one of which asked Enten to justify his "professional existence." Stelter clarified, posing the question of whether polling helps the public.
"The polling can help tell a truth we can throw up against politicians' lies. It's another way of fact checking. It's another way of investigative journalism," Enten said. "There's going to be coverage of campaigns no matter what we do. And polling I think helps tell a more accurate story for journalists and therefore helps inform the citizenry better."
This is why we concentrate on polling. Without it, the media would call Trump popular.
Roll Call:
Grand Island Town Supervisor Nate McMurray, the Democrat challenging Collins, has said he has seen a boost in fundraising since the news broke. And McMurray could be better-known than another Republican candidate, given he has been campaigning throughout the expansive district since launching his bid in January.
Just noitng the slow media boat is beginning to turn.
David Niewert:
As always, @KevinMKruse has done a superb job limning the historical resonances of Laura Ingraham’s recent remarks that because of immigration, the “America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore.”
As he says, these are remarks straight out of historical white supremacist ideology. Let’s go a little deeper.
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He particularly notes that this upwelling of white supremacy ultimately resulted in the passage in 1924 of the National Origins Act, subsumed under the broader 1924 Immigration Act, whose second component was the complementary Asian Exclusion Act.
This isn’t a question of giving Omarosa attention. it’s a window on how this WH (dys)functioned.
More Franklin:
So that is the overall story. Almost all the decline in Nixon's approval took place between February and early October 1973, a period of continuous damaging news stories about Watergate and a summer of televised Senate hearings.
So in regard to Trump, a steady drumbeat of Mueller stories (and other bad news) will take its toll. Not on the 25% of the public who support him wholeheartedly (the "core Republican electorate" only makes up about 25% of all voters — Harry Enten) but on everyone else. Trump has not yet hit his floor. And those voters that abandon him may well stay home.
CJ Chivers/NY Times Magazine:
War Without End
The Pentagon’s failed campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan left a generation of soldiers with little to fight for but one another.
The governments of Afghanistan and Iraq, each of which the United States spent hundreds of billions of dollars to build and support, are fragile, brutal and uncertain. The nations they struggle to rule harbor large contingents of irregular fighters and terrorists who have been hardened and made savvy, trained by the experience of fighting the American military machine. Much of the infrastructure the United States built with its citizens’ treasure and its troops’ labor lies abandoned. Briefly schools or outposts, many are husks, looted and desolate monuments to forgotten plans. Hundreds of thousands of weapons provided to would-be allies have vanished; an innumerable quantity are on markets or in the hands of Washington’s enemies. Billions of dollars spent creating security partners also deputized pedophiles, torturers and thieves. National police or army units that the Pentagon proclaimed essential to their countries’ futures have disbanded. The Islamic State has sponsored or encouraged terrorist attacks across much of the world — exactly the species of crime the global “war on terror” was supposed to prevent.
Almost two decades after the White House cast American troops as liberators to be welcomed, large swaths of territory where the Pentagon deployed combat forces are under stubborn insurgent influence. Areas once touted as markers of counterinsurgency progress have become no-go zones, regions in which almost no Americans dare tread, save a few journalists and aid workers, or private military contractors or American military and C.I.A. teams.
Jonathan Cohn/HuffPost:
Vote Like The Affordable Care Act Depends On It (It Does)
Obamacare’s future hinges on who controls Washington — and state capitals, too.
The current state of play for health care is a reminder of one way that the GOP’s war on “Obamacare” has made headway ― by giving states more control so that access to health care in places like Georgia looks more and more different than it does in California.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way, at least not exactly. The idea of the ACA was to make sure all Americans, in all states, could get health insurance, partly by creating new, subsidized market of regulated private plans and partly by offering Medicaid to all Americans living below or just above the poverty line.
But a 2012 Supreme Court decision made it easy for state officials to reject the Medicaid expansion and GOP leaders in 17 states have done just that, even though the federal government picks up nearly all of the expansion’s cost. (It’s 18 states if you include Maine Gov. Paul LePage, who refuses to carry out an expansion the state’s voters approved by ballot initiative.) Republican officials in a similar, overlapping list of states have done their best to undermine the private insurance reforms.