Susan J Demas/Michigan Advance:
If you think women can’t win after 2016, try coming to Michigan
My favorite implicit rule is that you can’t cover a female contender without negatively comparing her to another woman — like the sub-genre of stories backhandedly complimenting Warren while gratuitously slamming Hillary Clinton.
Of course, there’s nothing that makes male journalists descend into a blinding rage more than suggesting they might (even subconsciously) cover women unfairly. Look, there’s nothing sexist about framing the presidency as an office that’s won by “regular guys” who you want to have a beer with. No, that definitely doesn’t box women out.
When all else fails, point to the fact that voters have just decided, at this early juncture, that white male candidates are just more electable — while conveniently ignoring how glossy Vanity Fair profiles of O’Rourke, fawning covering of Buttigieg’s fluency in Norweigan and the Intercept’s relentless stanning of Sanders help shape the debate.
Biden’s entry
(From John Anzalone, click the tweet then click the pic for larger version. And see Monmouth comment on national polls and their relative unimportance from pollster Patrick Murray.)
Morning Consult:
Joe Biden Is the Front-Runner — Over Democrats, and Donald Trump
8-point lead over Trump a contrast to Obama’s standing at this point in 2012 cycle
A new Morning Consult/Politico poll conducted April 19-21 among 1,992 registered voters found Biden leading the president by 8 percentage points in a hypothetical matchup, 42 percent to 34 percent. Biden has a significant edge over Trump among women (17 points), millennials (22 points) and independents (10 points).
Harry Enten/CNN:
The case for and against Joe Biden's 2020 chances
A lot of the attacks on Biden are, from an electoral angle, silly. Going after Biden for his lack of
liberal wokeness, for example, seems destined to fail, given that the polling shows that Democrats want the party to move in
a more moderate direction.
Biden's age is more likely to derail his candidacy. An
NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken in late February showed that only 33% of Democrats would feel enthusiastic or comfortable nominating someone older than 75.
A
2013 study by political scientists Jens Hainmueller, Daniel J. Hopkins and Teppei Yamamoto came to a similar conclusion. Candidates older than 75 were penalized compared to younger candidates.
Now, could it be the case that Democrats are merely opposed to an older candidate in the abstract? Sure. The yearning for a younger candidate
may be a weak preference that could be overturned based on who is running. After all, Biden and the even older Sanders are doing well in the polls right now.
Monmouth:
Dem 2020 Diversity Not a Priority
“National primary polls have limited utility at this stage of the game. They give us a sense of who is breaking through the media noise, but the vast majority of the voters we poll nationally are not paying attention and in fact will never have the opportunity to winnow down the field at the ballot box. It’s worth looking at these results in the context of polls from the early states, where all these candidates are better known,” said Murray.
Monmouth conducted a poll of likely Iowa caucusgoers earlier this month. Candidate familiarity – as measured by the percentage of voters who could offer an opinion – was higher for all candidates in that poll than in the current national results, including Biden (4 points higher), Sanders (7 points higher), Buttigieg (13 points higher), Harris (14 points higher), Booker (14 points higher), Warren (17 points higher), O’Rourke (18 points higher), and Klobuchar (21 points higher).
Sanders is the only one of these eight contenders who has a lower rating among likely Iowa voters (net +41) than he does among all Democratic-identifiers nationally (+44). Klobuchar, on the other hand, has a significantly better rating in Iowa (+41) than she does nationally (+14).
KFF:
Surprise Medical Bills and Public’s View of the Supreme Court and Continuing Protections for People With Pre-Existing Conditions
- The Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions continue to weigh heavily on the minds of Americans, especially in light of the ongoing legal battle on the future of the ACA. The majority of the public say they do not want to see the Supreme Court overturn either the pre-existing condition protections (68 percent) or the entire health care law (54 percent); and most – including about half of Republicans – also say it is “very important” to them that the ACA provisions protecting people with pre-existing conditions remain law even after hearing that these protections may have led to increased insurance costs for some healthy people.
- Addressing health care costs are on the forefront of the public’s mind when it comes to their priorities for Congress with far more Americans saying targeted actions on prescription drug costs (68 percent), protections for pre-existing conditions (64 percent), and surprise medical bills (50 percent) are the “top priority” for Congress compared to broader reforms like implementing a national Medicare-for-all plan (31 percent), or repealing and replacing the ACA (27 percent).
Medicare-for-All is at this point in time not a national priority. In fact, check out this new Winthrop poll from South Carolina:
- A third of Winthrop Poll respondents said they are strongly in favor of getting their health coverage from a single government plan, while 38% strongly oppose.
- One solution that could work – and is supported by more than half of S.C. residents - is a government administered health plan where individuals could keep the coverage they have if they prefer.
Hey, but if policy is your thing, Elizabeth Warren has you covered:
Charlie Sykes/Bulwark:
Did Trump’s Attempts to Obstruct Actually Work?
Let’s go to the report.
But the pattern with Manafort was even clearer and apparently more successful. At one point, Manafort confided to Rick Gates that word had been passed to him that the president was “going to take care of us.” Even as Manafort faced trials, Wittes writes, “Trump publicly flirted with the idea of a pardon and blasted the prosecution. He praised Manafort’s bravery and refusal to flip. And he commented on the trial during the jury’s deliberations.”
Mueller’s report lingers on Trump’s behavior, noting that “there is evidence that the President’s actions had the potential to influence Manafort’s decision whether to cooperate with the government.”
Wittes notes that Mueller’s conclusion about Trump’s intentions was quite blunt: The evidence “indicates that the President intended to encourage Manafort to not cooperate with the government.” Moreover, Mueller concluded, the record “supports the inference that the President intended Manafort to believe that he could receive a pardon, which would make cooperation with the government as a means of obtaining a lesser sentence unnecessary.” Mueller also found that the evidence “supports a conclusion that the President intended, at least in part, to influence the jury.”
Matthew Dowd/ABC:
Nixon and Trump: The politics of Impeachment
First, before impeachment hearings began in 1973, less than a fifth of voters supported impeachment. It was through the impeachment hearings, when key people testified and significant evidence against Nixon was presented, that his impeachment numbers rose. According to a Reuters/IPSOS poll conducted last week, 40% of voters support impeachment of President Trump, a number nearly twice as high as what existed for Nixon before the onset of hearings.
Second, prior to hearings in 1973, Nixon’s net positive job approval was approximately 5 points. His support had deteriorated in the first quarter of 1973 off the high that came in the aftermath of winning a landslide election in 1972, but before the hearings his approval was still a net positive. At this moment, when one looks at the averages of all the polls on Trump’s approval, he has a net negative of 12 points. Thus Trump’s net job approval is 17 points lower than where Nixon’s were prior to impeachment hearings….
My sense is that Speaker Pelosi is managing this process well, and understands that unless impeachment becomes a more bipartisan affair, the politics could blow back on Democrats in 2020. Pelosi's strategy of playing this out step-by-step, having her committee chairs hold hearings to advance the effort to build various evidentiary cases which could highlight the president’s potentially obstructive actions, and holding off on impeachment for now is probably the most common sense political approach.
Charlie Cook/National Journal:
What to Watch for in the Race for the House Majority
Democrats hold the early advantage to retain control of the chamber.
There are good reasons to watch the House. Democratic control is hardly a lock, but if you had to bet today, with just what we know today, there is a greater chance that Democrats will hold the chamber than Republicans will in recapturing it.
Trump is racist to his core, and a liar to boot.
And this: