Today's
Quinnipiac poll (.pdf), generic Congressional ballot. The GOP brand remains damaged.
This does not and cannot predict a D House.
First Read:
Strong majorities of Americans say they favor stricter gun laws, including an assault-weapons ban and universal background checks for private gun sales, according to a new national Morning Joe/Marist poll.
Six in 10 respondents – including 83 percent of Democrats, 43 percent of gun owners and 37 percent of Republicans – believe that the laws covering gun sales should be stricter.
This figure is virtually unchanged from the 61 percent who backed stricter gun laws when a NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll asked the same question in February, even though at least one other national survey has found waning support for gun-control laws months after the Dec. 2012 shootings in Newtown, Conn.
But wait!! Everyone knows
support for gun responsibility is
waning! I heard it on cable tv!
McClatchy looks at presidential match ups because why not? What could possibly happen to change the landscape in in 3 years?
The 2016 presidential election is far off, but an early sign indicates that Republicans could face trouble if Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden becomes the Democratic nominee, according to a new McClatchy-Marist poll.
The survey matched Clinton, the former secretary of state, and Vice President Biden against four potential Republican challengers. The Democrats easily beat Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
Against New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, thought to be a long shot for the party’s presidential nomination, Clinton barely won and Biden barely lost.
The results provide fresh evidence that Republicans are still reeling from the 2012 election. The party thought it had a good chance to win the White House, but nominee Mitt Romney lost decisively to President Barack Obama. Republicans also lost seats in both houses of Congress...
Clinton, who Miringoff said benefited from her stint at the State Department, was particularly strong in the poll, rolling up margins of 52-40 over Rubio, 52-41 over Paul and 54-38 over Bush. Biden topped Rubio, 53-39; Paul, 50-41 and Bush, 49-41.
Clinton's support is deep and passionate. But why does McClatchy call Christie a long shot? Because he is. Today's
Quinnipiac poll:
There is no front-runner now for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, leaving a five- way horse race with no candidate above 19 percent among Republican voters, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today.
New Jersey Gov. Christopher Christie, who ran better than other Republicans against top Democrats in a March 7 survey of all American voters by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN- uh-pe-ack) University, gets only 14 percent of Republican voters today.
Florida U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio gets 19 percent of Republican voters, with 17 percent for U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, 15 percent for U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and 10 percent for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Other contenders are at 3 percent or less.
Anyone think that should Rubio, Ryan or Paul stumble, their votes go to Christie? Add to that Christie may be at a high water mark, and you have some interesting dynamics going on. The Republican party doesn't like moderates and that would have to change for them to win. No, Romney didn't 'almost win'. He lost decisively, and he lost because of the economy and not despite it (see predictive models). More politics and policy below the fold.
Maureen Dowd:
I’m worried about how the justices can properly debate same-sex marriage when some don’t even seem to realize that most Americans use the word “gay” now instead of “homosexual”; when Chief Justice John Roberts thinks gays are merely concerned with marriage as a desirable “label,” and when Justice Samuel Alito compares gay marriage to cellphones.
The Nine are back there in their Miss Havisham lairs mulling, disconcertingly disconnected. In his zeal to scare people about the “possible deleterious effect” of gay parents adopting, Justice Antonin Scalia did not seem fully cognizant that gays and lesbians can have their own biological children.
CBS News:
President Obama heads to Denver Wednesday, forging ahead with his effort to get Congress to pass stricter gun control laws and will hold up Colorado as an example of what he wants to see lawmakers in Washington accomplish.
Colorado has gone farther than any state outside the northeast in passing new gun laws. The state now prohibits the sale of magazines that hold more than 15 bullets and requires background checks for all private gun sales. Democrats passed the laws over strong Republican objections. Democrats said they were reacting to last year's massacres at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
Connecticut's General Assembly is expected to pass a gun control package this week that goes even further by banning new high-capacity ammunition magazines and creating new registration requirements for existing magazines that carry 10 or more bullets.
Jonathan Bernstein:
Media Matters has noticed something important: Climate was almost completely absent on the national broadcast network news last year. Only twelve stories, combined, on the CBS, ABC, and NBC news shows, were devoted to the topic — which certainly has a legitimate claim as the single most important policy problem facing the United States right now.
There’s nothing at all wrong with the response that Media Matters is urging, which is for people to write the networks and demand more coverage. However, the real way to get the networks talking climate is to get the political parties and their politicians to talk about it — and especially the president. The evidence is pretty strong that presidents can’t change voters’ minds very well, but they can definitely change what voters think about. That’s because if the president talks about something, the press will cover it.
Oh, and that
Morning Joe/Marist poll shows deficit hawks and conservatives are losing, and rather badly:
But the president’s approach to deficit reduction – calling for a combination of spending cuts and increased tax revenues – is more popular than the Republicans’ cuts-only approach.
Forty-two percent of respondents prefer a mixture of spending cuts (including to entitlement programs) and revenue increases; 35 percent pick increasing mostly revenue; and just 17 percent choose mostly cutting government spending (including to programs like Medicare and Medicaid).