So U.S. Senator Rob Portman (R. OH) has said he has no interest in being Donald Trump’s running mate but now Trump doesn’t even want to talk about Portman being on his list of VP picks:
In a telephone interview with the Today show, co-host Matt Laurer asked Trump (at the 4:30 mark of this video) if Portman was on his shortlist of vice presidential candidates.
Trump ducked the direct question, but said: “Well I was actually with him yesterday in a group. We were with a whole group of senators, and frankly it was great. We had a tremendous talk. I had a great talk with Rob, a great talk with all of them. Many of them supported me right after the meeting.”
Lauer asked again if Portman was on Trump’s shortlist.
“Well he is certainly a very -- I’m not going to say who’s on the list, and I have a list of about five or six, and possibly expanding. I’ll make the decision by the convention and probably announce it during the convention, which will be a very exciting convention I have to tell you. But Rob Portman’s a good man, there’s no question about it.”
This might be a sign that Trump is trying to play ball with the party bosses, especially since PPP showed that Trump could really hurt down ballot Republicans like Portman:
There's been a lot of discussion about the impact that Donald Trump's nomination might have on down ballot races. We find Democrats leading the generic Congressional ballot 46/41 right now. Trump's ascendancy is unlikely to cause Republicans to abandon their own party- we find 86% of Democrats planning to vote Democratic and 86% of Republicans planning to vote Republican. But Democrats do have an edge with independent voters at 38/32. We also asked specifically how voters would respond to a Senate candidate in their state supporting Trump. It's a 19 point net negative, with 45% of voters saying they'd be less likely to vote for a Senate hopeful who supported Trump to only 26% who say that would make them more likely to vote for someone. Among independents it's a 23 point net negative.
Portman has said that he will back Trump but he’s going to be spending a lot of money to dupe voters and attack former Governor Ted Strickland (D. OH). Speaking of which, one Super PAC supporting Portman’s latest attack ad against Strickland has been getting called out by PolitiFact for being incredibly misleading:
Now we’d like to know where Fighting for Ohio got that "mixed and spotty" clip. Did the former Ohio governor really fall on his sword over the economic upshot of his tenure?
No, he didn’t. The ad takes Strickland’s words out of context.
Text under the video cites a Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial board’s February interview of Democratic primary Senate candidates, which is posted in its entirety on YouTube.
The context tells the tale. At the 26:13 mark of the interview, primary hopeful P.G. Sittenfeld asked Strickland, "Why should Democratic voters not judge you by your record on guns?" He criticized Strickland for reversing his anti-gun control stance, a change of heart Strickland’s aides have attributed to the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., that resulted in the deaths of 20 children and six adults.
Strickland countered that he welcomed voters to judge him by his record, then changed the subject to the diversity of his cabinet appointees during his term as Ohio’s governor from 2007 to 2011. But the topic snapped back to guns (at the 28-minute mark) when one of the off-camera Plain Dealer interviewers asked Strickland to clarify his stance.
"Has my position changed over time? It has," Strickland answered. "Can people criticize me for that? Absolutely. You’re not going to find me out there saying my records with guns is not a legitimate -- you know, it’s one of many issues that people will look at and make a decision about me and this race, and so on and so forth."
From there, Strickland tried to explain his gun rights position, calling President Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, which he voted against in Congress, "one of the worst pieces of legislation that’s been passed in decades." He said he dropped his NRA membership "five or six years ago," and defended a recent radio interview in which he boasted about his A+ rating from the NRA in 2010.
Strickland’s monologue concluded at the 31:40 minute mark, when he said, "My record is mixed and spotty, and I can be criticized for that."
The next 12 minutes of discussion is fixed on the candidates’ stances on gun control. Not employment, not taxes.
This is the type of attacks we are going up against and we can’t allow Portman to deceive the voters. Click here to donate and get involved with Strickland’s campaign.