https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/iowa-poll-elizabeth-warren-pete-buttigieg-in-dead-heat/
The latest Quinnipiac poll of Iowa:
Warren 20
Buttigieg 19
Sanders 17
Biden 15
Klobuchar 5
Harris 4
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/reminder-national-presidential-polls-are-useless/
They are useless in gauging congressional popularity. They are useless in determining presidential races.
Earlier this week, tremors of panic spread across left-wing Twitter after the New York Times dropped a Siena College poll showing that Donald Trump remains highly competitive among registered voters in battleground states such as Michigan, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. After gorging on the empty calories of national polls for months, it must have been somewhat shocking for Trump’s opponents to see so many competitive races.
Among “likely voters” the races are even tighter. On the Democratic side, Joe Biden, unsurprisingly, does better than either Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren against Trump. Not everyone, apparently, is enamored with the idea of their health insurance being seized by a massive state bureaucracy.
Former candidate Hillary Clinton — always a keen political strategist — reacted to the news by calling on Democrats to nominate a person “who can win the Electoral College” rather than merely run up the totals in California. “I think several of our candidates could win the popular vote but as I know,” she added, “. . . that’s not enough.”
She’s right. It’s not enough. It’s not anything, actually, save a moral victory or a cudgel with which to try to delegitimize the president. And yet, political observers seem to lament that Democrats are weighed down by the process. Take, for instance, this extraordinarily weird framing of recent polls by the Washington Post: “One year out, Democrats’ margins over Trump point to a substantial popular-vote advantage, but the party still faces obstacles when it comes to the electoral college.”
https://pjmedia.com/trending/2019-election-results-governors-races-sanctuary-cities-mayor-petes-successor-and-more/
Voters across the country went to the polls on Tuesday, handing Democrats some key victories but also electing the first black Republican attorney general in Kentucky. Voters also addressed a broad swath of issues from Airbnb to sanctuary cities.
In Virginia, Democrats took both the House of Delegates and the state Senate. Democrats nationwide interpreted the win as a sign of strength for their party, but the Commonwealth has increasingly favored Democrats in presidential elections and had been moving left in recent years.
“Woo-hoo! Congratulations to the people of Virginia for flipping both the state House and state Senate,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a leading 2020 Democrat, tweeted. “Voting is what our democracy is all about, and Virginia proved that today as they elected [Democrats] up and down the ballot.”
While Democrats will rightly celebrate these victories, it is important to keep in mind that in 25 percent of the state senate races, the Democrat did not face a Republican challenger. I wrote in seven names on my ballot yesterday, voting for the two Independents on the ballot. I had no Republican option.
Karl Frisch, a far-left activist who once worked for Media Matters, became the first openly gay man elected to the Fairfax County School Board.
The two high-profile governor’s races seemed to go in opposite directions. In Kentucky, Attorney General Andy Beshear, a Democrat, enjoyed a close lead in early results and declared his victory while Republican Gov. Matt Bevin refused to concede. In Mississippi, Republican Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves defeated Democrat Attorney General Jim Hood. Trump campaigned for both Republicans.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/senator-warrens-proposal-divide-jerusalem-not-only-frontpagemagcom/
As Democratic candidates for the presidency continue to move further to the left in an effort to distance themselves from the policies and politics of President Trump, the two frontrunners, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have increased the rhetoric against what is normally an untouchable topic for Democrats and Republicans alike: the United States’ relationship with the sole democracy in the Middle East, Israel. While no candidate could expect to survive the political cost of walking away from Israel completely— diplomatically and financially—Sanders and Warren have recently been spouting positions with regard to Israel that show they apparently feel they can make that support conditional and can change the way the U.S. has traditionally been a trustworthy diplomatic partner with shared strategic goals.
At the J Street conference this week in Washington, D.C., for example, Sanders suggested to the attendees of the liberal Jewish Middle East policy group that, while the $3.8 billion in aid the U.S. commits to Israel each year should remain intact, he wondered out loud if this aid could be conditional. “My solution is to say to Israel: you get $3.8 billion dollars every year, if you want military aid you’re going to have to fundamentally change your relationship to the people of Gaza,” Sanders said. “In fact,” he added with breathtaking audacity, “I think it is fair to say that some of that should go right now into humanitarian aid in Gaza.” Perhaps Sanders has forgotten that the humanitarian crisis he alludes to in Hamas-controlled Gaza is largely the result of the terrorist group’s diverting of funds meant for schools, hospitals, food, and infrastructure in Gaza and using them instead for the construction of terror tunnels, rifles, bombs, and some of the 15,000 or so of rockets and mortars that have been launched from Gaza since the 2005 disengagement and have rained down of southern Israeli towns with the sole purpose of murdering Jews.
Not to be outdone in dangerous rhetoric about Israel’s future relationship with the United States, Senator Warren delivered a videotaped speech to the J Street conferees, announcing that if she becomes president she will push for the oft-discussed two-state solution, “the best outcome for U.S. interests,” as she put it. It will be “the best outcome for Israel’s security and future, and the best outcome for ensuring the Palestinian’s right to freedom and self-determination,” at the same time “ensuring an end to Israeli occupation.” There is nothing new about that proposal; what was new, and shocking, about Warren’s speech was her strident addition to the two-state plan, namely, that Jerusalem—the spiritual and ancestral home of Judaism for some 3000 years—would be carved up into two capitals, one Israeli and one Palestinian. “I will make clear,” she announced in her professorial tone, “that in a two-state agreement, both parties should be able to have their capitals in Jerusalem.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/kamala-harris-blames-american-racism-failed-daniel-greenfield/
Senator Kamala Harris polled at 3% in last month’s Quinnipiac poll. That must make the San Fran and Hollywood donors who stuffed $11.6 million in her pantsuit pockets this quarter feel good about giving to charity.
A quarter of Iowa Democrat caucusgoers have a negative opinion of Harris. That’s up minus eleven points since June. So, Harris is making weekly trips to Iowa while claiming that she’s going to move there. Not even Democrats are stupid enough to believe that she’s going to leave her Brentwood mansion to move to a place where the temperatures are currently hovering around the low thirties.
And her Iowa stump speech is now all about accusing anyone who doesn’t vote for her of racism.
In her speeches, Harris claims that “electability”, the question of whether a candidate polling 3% nationwide can beat President Trump, is the “elephant in the room—but actually more accurately, the donkey in the room.”
There’s a donkey in the room all-right. Or maybe it’s a jackass.
“It’s been coming up in connection to my campaign: is America ready for that? Are they ready for a woman of color to be President of the United States?” Harris insists.
When Harris tried this line in an Axios on HBO interview, a baffled Margaret Talev asked, “America was ready for a black man to be President of the United States.”
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/11/nancy_and_willie_warning_democrats.html
A few days after witnessing “Democrats minus two” vote for some version of an “impeach but not impeach” resolution, we get these two warnings from the West Coast.
First, Willie Brown, retired Democrat, warned Democrats about impeachment. He was brutally honest:
If the goal was to damage President Trump by formalizing the impeachment inquiry, it’s Mission Unaccomplished for House Democrats.
If anything, the vote solidified Trump’s hold on power. There were zero GOP defections, meaning we have zero drama heading into the public phase of impeachment. Everyone is pretty much in the same lanes they’ve been in since the Russian-collusion investigation, the obstruction of justice investigation and every other investigation.
Unfortunately for the Democrats, that gives people little reason to be glued to their screens when House committees take public testimony. The basic story — Trump pressured Ukraine to announce investigations into Democrats that would help Trump — is out there already. People know how they feel about it, and if you believe the polls, they’re pretty evenly split on whether the president deserves to be thrown out of office.
Again, that was Willie Brown, not Rush Limbaugh.
https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/10/31/senators-sanders-and-warren-offer-the-squ
“In the warmest of human hearts,” the socialist Irving Howe once wrote, “there is always a cold spot for the Jews.” The plans which socialist Bernie Sanders and more-than-socialist Elizabeth Warren have just set forth for resolving the Israel-Palestine “conflict” demonstrate that, in their view, Jews have not done enough dying in the past century.
The plans certainly give no evidence of compassion for the three generations of Israelis who have had to bury their own children. No, their compassion is reserved, in Sanders’ case, for the Arab residents of Gaza, ruled by the Hamas organization, whose written constitution pledges its votaries to “kill Jews wherever you find them,” and who use the billions of dollars sent them by charitable organizations to achieve that aim.
Sanders wants America to send funds intended for Israel to Gaza so its rulers will have money to pay for electricity and groceries, lest they be forced to divert the fabulous sums of money they now receive for more sanguine purposes, especially underground tunnels into Israel to perpetrate raw murder.
Warren, less patient than Sanders, would like to give the Palestinian Arabs joint control of the city of Jerusalem so that they can plant their “capital” city in Israel’s capital. The Arabs never, in their long history in the region, thought of making Jerusalem even the capital of a province. But when their war of 1948 against the nascent Jewish state gave the Jordanians half of the city, they showed, apparently unbeknownst to Warren, what happens in such an arrangement: they proceeded to destroy the synagogues, the cemeteries, the holy places, and the Jewish inhabitants of their half with a savagery that would have shamed animals.
Since in this enterprise of Middle East peacemaking, nothing succeeds like failure, the Palestinians were again, in later years, offered control of eastern Jerusalem by Ehud Barak and other Israeli doves, but to no avail.
It is no accident that Senators Sanders and Warren should offer their pro-Arab peace schemes, brimming with repudiation of their party’s long-standing political and spiritual bond with the Jewish people, at just this time.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/trump-reelection-campaign-white-working-class-democratic-nominee/
How the white working class — and the Democratic nominee — could save Donald Trump in 2020
At first glance, President Trump’s reelection chances don’t look good. Stories about impeachment and presidential misbehavior dominate the news. Trump’s disapproval rating is high. Independent voters are against him. GOP congressmen are retiring from suburban districts that trend Democratic. The generic ballot is about where it was last cycle. Trump’s win in 2016, when some 78,000 voters in three states gave him the Electoral College, was a close-run thing. Seems hard to repeat.
And yet liberals are filled with apprehension. They are coming to recognize the potential size of the president’s pool of supporters. They fret over the capacities and liabilities of the eventual Democratic nominee. And their concerns are related: Trump’s ability to recapitulate or expand his winning coalition depends in large part on the identity of his opponent. Given these uncertainties, it would be foolish to predict Trump’s fate. He might even be stronger than he appears.
“Despite demographic trends that continue to favor the Democrats, and despite Trump’s unpopularity among wide swathes of the electorate, it will still be difficult for the Democrats to prevail against an incumbent president who has presided over a growing, low-unemployment economy and retains strong loyalty among key sectors of the electorate,” write Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin of the Center for American Progress. No conservatives they.
The Democratic difficulty has a name: the Electoral College. Twice in the 21st century, the level of the presidential vote has mattered less than its distribution. Trump’s people are spread much more evenly across the country than his opponents are. His base of white voters without college degrees, say Teixeira and Halpin, “make up more than half of all eligible voters in critical Electoral College states he won in 2016—including Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—and in key target states for 2020 such as New Hampshire.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bonfire-of-the-democratic-partys-once-rising-stars/
Let the 2020 cycle be a warning to political correspondents who write glowing profile pieces on the next great Democratic party hope. For some of us, the best part of this cycle so far is watching the slow-motion implosion of so many wildly over-hyped “rising stars” of the Democratic party — relentlessly trying and failing to gain traction against a trio of well-worn septuagenarians. This primary is turning into a giant bonfire of once-promising political talents who could make national reporters swoon.
As far back as 2017, Vogue and other national glossies gushed over the presidential potential of Kirsten Gillibrand.
Beto O’Rourke was the favorite subject of glowing profiles in national publications throughout 2018.
Julian Castro spent much of the past decade being touted as “the Latino Obama.”
Cory Booker was the subject of documentaries and a social media star . . . and like the rest, he’s an afterthought.
And as our John McCormick notes, Kamala Harris’s campaign may be reaching the stage of an M.Night Shamalayan character — long since dead, but still walking around in denial of this difficult truth. Harris stands out from the others because in early summer, she appeared to have reached the top tier, or at least be knocking on the door. But difficulties in defending her record as a prosecutor have her well behind everywhere, even in her home state.
Some of the blame for these crash-and-burn campaigns goes beyond the candidates. It’s tougher to stand out among twenty-something candidates than among a half-dozen. Booker spent much of his career emulating the early Barack Obama and trying to cultivate a post-partisan problem-solver image, and with the election of Donald Trump, Democrats aren’t as interested in that — consider him a species that could not adapt to political climate change.
https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/30/kamala-harris-to-cut-staff-and-restructure-campaign-to-save-sinking-presidential-bid/
Kamala Harris, according to a memo obtained by Politico on Wednesday, is reportedly letting go of “dozens” of campaign staff at her Baltimore headquarters and will send some to Iowa as she hopes to save her presidential ambitions.
Harris’ decision to double-down on Iowa comes after her campaign posted poor fundraising numbers for the third quarter, struggling to garner the necessary resources and support required to be a competitive candidate. Politico reports that the “overhaul will touch nearly every face of Harris’ operation,” with staff layoffs and reassignments coming from New Hampshire, Nevada, and California, the senator’s home state.
High-level campaign staff, including Campaign Manager Juan Rodriguez will also see their salaries cut.
Harris’ latest decision to re-focus her efforts on Iowa comes after the California senator already announced in September that the month of October would be focused on the critical first-in-the-nation caucus state, spending 15 of the month’s 30 days so far in the Hawkeye state.
“I’m f-cking moving to Iowa,” Harris was caught joking to Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono.
The campaign pledged a third-place finish in the state to stay competitive in the primary, a campaign promise that Harris’ latest moves signal might have been a bad bet as she finds herself polling worse there than she did at the beginning of the month.
According to Real Clear Politics’ latest aggregate of polls, Harris is only polling with 2.7 percent support, trailing behind six other candidates and tied with Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and billionaire Tom Steyer.
Harris entered the race as a top-tier candidate. With a breakout moment at the first Democratic primary debate calling out former Vice President Joe Biden for his previous opposition to bussing, Harris was once seen as a candidate on the rise before seeing a steady decline in support starting in July.
Nationally, Harris is at 5 percent support in Real Clear Politics’ aggregate of polls, behind Biden, Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
