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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: August 2015

Fox Takes the Wheel

Yesterday’s two events on Fox News, involving all 17 Republican presidential candidates, offered quite an extended show. But Fox took a more aggressive role in shaping the field than any media operation in memory. That’s what I wrote about this morning at TPMCafe:

The Republican Party has famously missed most of the markers set out for it in the RNC’s so-called “autopsy report” in March of 2013.
[But] here’s one thing Republicans promised themselves to do after the last cycle that’s actually been implemented: partner with conservative media so that the GOP candidates weren’t being subjected to hostile questioning from “outsiders.”
So today we had the first official GOP presidential debate, and the seven-candidate “undercard” forum earlier in the day, both sponsored by Fox News. And they put their stamp on the events in a way that is almost certain to shape, if not winnow, the gigantic GOP field.
At the 5:00 p.m. “Happy Hour” debate, virtually all of the questions were framed from the point of view of a conservative movement vetting the candidates, beginning with a battery about electability and exploring potential ideological heresies like Lindsey Graham’s openness to compromise with Democrats and Rick Santorum’s strange interest in wage levels for working-class people.
The candidate Republicans in general most wanted to promote to a higher tier, Carly Fiorina, was universally proclaimed the winner of the early forum, partly because she was one of two candidates who drew a question that enabled her to take a shot at Donald Trump even as she pandered to his followers. No one asked her (not in the forum, or in the extensive pre- or post-forum discussion at Fox) about her uniquely disastrous business and political record. It helped that Santorum, Pataki and Gilmore were clearly living in the 1990s, while Rick Perry returned to his inarticulate and gaffe-ridden 2012 ways. Bobby Jindal hung on to his prospects of serving in somebody else’s cabinet. All in all, it’s exactly what Republicans wanted from this event.
Fox News’ purpose in the main 10-candidate event was made plain with the first question: an in-your-face spotlight on Donald Trump’s refusal to promise not to run as an independent candidate. And the relentless pounding of Trump–on his bankruptcies, his past support for single-payer health care and abortion rights, his “specific evidence” for claiming Mexico has dispatched criminals to the U.S. (slurs about immigrants by other candidates didn’t come up) and even his sexist tweets—continued right on through to Frank Luntz’s post-debate focus group, designed to show how much damage Trump had sustained. It was by far the least impartial showing by debate sponsors I have seen, up to and including the disgraceful ABC-moderated 2008 Democratic event that involved a deliberate trashing of all the candidates.
The Trump-bashing agenda distracted from the other candidates significantly. In what may have been another example of Fox carrying water for the GOP and conservative orthodoxy, Chris Christie was invited to savage Rand Paul on surveillance policy and aid to Israel. Paul responded with a nasty crack at Christie’s famous hug of Obama, and Christie responded by citing the 9/11 survivors he had hugged (and that Paul had implicitly disrespected by objecting to warrantless wiretapping and so forth). On a separate front, Christie and Huckabee were invited to mix it up on “entitlement reform,” and they did so rather cordially. But these were the rare non-Trump points of collision.
The strange direction of the questioning made it hard to name a “winner.” Jeb Bush deftly handled a Common Core question. Scott Walker misdirected his way around a pointed question about his jobs record. Ben Carson gave some glimpses of the craziness of his world view (a reference to Saul Alinsky, an apparent dismissal of complaints about torture as–you guessed it!–political correctness), but recovered with a nice rap about his surgical successes in his closing. Rubio apparently impressed people who hadn’t heard his well-worn up-from-poverty story; he also covered his ideological flanks by denying he was for a rape/incest exception to a hypothetical abortion ban. And Kasich (who benefited from a home-crowd advantage) probably struck a chord with people who are not “base” conservatives and are thus open to his defense of his Medicaid expansion and his interest in people “left in the shadows.”
From the perspective of Fox News and its GOP allies, you’d guess the ideal denouement would be Trump crashing in the polls, to be replaced in the top ten by Carly Fiorina. We’ll see how avidly and universally the conservative spin machine pursues that outcome in the days just ahead.

One final note: it’s interesting the biggest strategic decision facing the GOP in the days just ahead–whether to pursue various “defunding” demands up to and beyond the point of a government shutdown–came up briefly at the early event but not at all during the official debate. It makes you wonder if there was a call from the offices of the Senate Republican Leader to Fox News poohbahs indicating a candidate feeding frenzy on that subject would not be helpful.
That couldn’t happen, could it?


Fear of Trump Sets Debate Coverage Tone, But No Shockers

For cord-cutters and others who missed the Republican presidential debates last night, you can watch clips gratis at Fox News. For a blow by blow analysis, however, you can’t do better than Ed Kilgore’s live-blogging at The Washington Monthly, which political wonks and junkies will be perusing for further clues throughout the day. Kilgore has other perceptive posts on the debate and the Fox News’s relentless attack against Trump here, here and here.
In addition to Trump’s increased leverage, the trans-media consensus seems to be that one clear winner was…Carly Fiorina, who used her spot in the ‘happy hour” pre-debate to amp up her political persona as one of the more sober candidates. Despite her dubious track record as a business leader, Fiorina may have at least secured a spot on the short list of veep candidates. Kilgore however likens her performance to “a former CEO used to doing power-point presentations for stockholders doing her standard speech, amplified by a very lucky question she got about Donald Trump.”
Elsewhere, Michael Barbaro and Nicholas Confessore provide short takes at the New York Times, with plaudits for Rubio, Paul and Kasich. In another Times article Barbaro does an excellent job of showing how boorish was Trump’s performance, almost beyond expectations, although his verbal output at center stage tripled that of the others. He probably enhanced his image as the new face of the GOP, much to the party’s detriment.
At The Times Upshot, Nate Cohn credits Walker and Kasich with “good performances,” and Rubio “the debate’s top performer.” (To me Walker seemed somewhat muffled and Rubio and Kasich just so-so, while Bush did better than I expected).
At WaPo’s The Fix, Chris Cillizza’s “Winners and losers from the first Republican presidential debate” credits Ben Carson with the best closing statement, and puts Rubio Kasich and Fiorina in the winner’s circle. WaPo’s Stephen Stromberg argues that Christie, Kasich and Rubio “won the debate,” while the Post’s Jonathan Capehart gives the nod to Rubio and Fiorina.
Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. adds, “I saw three shows tonight during Fox News’ Republican debate: The Trump Show, The Kasich Dissent, and Everybody Else. Among those in that last category, Jeb Bush had a good night, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie had his moments, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) won more friends.”
In “Three Takeaways From the GOP Debate” the Wall St. Journal says Walker, Rubio, Kasich and Bush looked the most “presidential.”
Of course pundit consensus will not necessarily be reflected in opinion polls or election results going forward — especially when the wild card is a joker named Trump. While Trump may not have what it takes to be elected president, his refusal to rule out a run as a write-in Independent could make him a potential kingmaker. That prospect makes the GOP strategists and their minions at Fox News very nervous.


Political Strategy Notes

Today marks the 50th anniversary of President Johnson’s signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But the anniversary is likely to be overshadowed by the first major televised debates of Republican presidential candidates. The big debate, the one with the candidates leading in the polls, with Donald Trump and nine others, will be broadcast from Cleveland at 8:50 EDT. There will also be a sort of a pre-game ‘weenie bowl’ broadcast at 5 pm for the 7 candidates who didn’t make the top ten cut, but it’s unclear who will show up for that unhappy affair (Would you?). In any event, the hope is that all of the candidates who participate will be at least asked to address GOP-driven voter suppression on the day our nation commemorates one of the most significant milestones in the history of democracy. For those who can bear it, Fox News is providing an “Election HQ 2016 app.”
Ari Berman, political correspondent for The Nation and author of “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America,” has an op-ed in the New York Times, “Why the Voting Rights Act Is Once Again Under Threat.” Berman notes that, despite growing protests against voter suppression in NC and other states, “The voting rights landscape today most closely resembles the period before 1965, when the blight of voting discrimination could be challenged only on a torturous case-by-case basis.”
Greg Speed, president, America Votes and America Votes Action Fund, writes at HuffPo: “While there is little prospect of congressional action on strengthening the VRA in the near future, there has been a growing trend of state legislation building modern, more accessible voting systems signaling hope for breaking down some barriers to minority voters and other segments of the electorate…Colorado, Oregon and California have excelled in the movement to modernize election systems with significant changes, such as automatic mail ballots and, in Oregon, automatic voter registration….This year, states like Florida, New Mexico and Indiana also took important steps forward by enacting election modernization laws with strong bipartisan support. America Votes was deeply engaged in the push for online registration in Florida and New Mexico, where state and local officials from both parties strongly supported online voter registration…Seeing bipartisan support in states this year for online registration and other laws expanding early voting, rights restoration and Election Day registration is very encouraging. ”
At The Plum Line Greg Sargent reports on a new Washington Post poll: “…A large majority of Americans now thinks the country needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights… 52-43. There’s been a big shift towards seeing a need for more racial change among whites overall (now at 53-44) and independents (62-34)…But Republicans and conservatives differ with majority sentiment: majorities of Republicans (63-34) and conservatives (52-46) say that the country has already made “the changes needed to give blacks equal rights with whites.”
Facing South’s Sue Sturgis has “A Texas-sized reminder of why the Voting Rights Act still matters.” One of her revealing stats: “While the GOP majority in the Texas legislature claimed rampant voter fraud makes strict photo ID rules necessary, number of people who have actually been accused of such ballot fraud since 2004: 4.”
Adel M. Stan reports at The American Prospect on the Koch Brothers grovelfest last week and “why Jeb Bush’s Pitch to the Koch brothers Should Scare You.” Stan defines the stakes in 2016 for Bush in particular. But it could also apply to most of the other GOP presidential candidates: “…The election of a president who is ready to make life easier for the biggest hoarders of private capital could be devastating to any shred of democracy left in our political system…The appointment of Supreme Court justices by a president who holds the shrouded workings of private capital in such high esteem promises future decisions that will make Citizens United look like a ray of sunlight…In his bid to become the third in his family’s dynasty of mediocrity to occupy the White House, Jeb Bush is ready to sell the nation to the most secretive corner of the 1 percent…With masses of private capital to back him–routed through the Kochs’ opaquely funded nonprofits–he could actually win.”
Republicans switching parties to become, gasp, Democrats? It happens …sometimes, reports Nathan L. Gonzales at Rothenblog.
Alan I. Abramowitz and Steven Webster crunch some polling data at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball and observe “Democratic and Republican primary voters in 2016 are likely to be drawn disproportionately from the angriest segment of each party’s base and that candidates who can tap into that anger are likely to do well…No matter who wins the Democratic and Republican nominations next year, we can expect anger at the opposing party’s candidate to run high, and we can expect both parties’ nominees to seek to tap into this anger in order to energize and mobilize their supporters. It promises to be a long and nasty campaign.”
Hey Republicans, you really think this guy can manage America’s budget?


August 5: The Un-Magnificent Seven

After months of scheming and maneuvering to boost their national poll standings and thus qualify for the ten-candidate first Republican candidates’ debate on Fox News, the hammer finally fell on seven would-be presidents who did not make the cut. I talked about the implications today at the Washington Monthly:

Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, George Pataki and Jim Gilmore…have been relegated to a 5:00 PM “forum” on Fox tomorrow that will last an hour; the top ten will rumble for two hours at 9:00 PM.
One of the story-lines for the next couple of weeks will be the fate of the candidates who didn’t make the cut. Will the media start treating them like the Walking Dead? Will donors and previously committed activists abandon them? Will any of them see the handwriting on the wall and just drop out? Or could this whole make-the-top-ten obsession of the last couple of months turn out to have been a chimera?
You’d have to figure that three of the leftover candidates have a survival advantage. Perry has gotten off to a good start substantively and in terms of early Iowa impressions. He also has a lifeline to Texas and Christian Right money. Fiorina remains a candidate other Republicans want to push in front of cameras to savage Hillary Clinton without the appearance of male pigginess. And Lindsey Graham is this cycle’s clown prince, beloved by media for his jokiness, his moderation on some domestic issues, and his mad bomber hawkiness on foreign policy, making him a nice matched set with Rand Paul.
As long as Rick Santorum has Foster Friess willing to finance his Super-PAC, however, he can probably stick around. And what else does Bobby Jindal have to do? Govern Louisiana? Hah!
In the wake of not making the Fox cut, Team Jindal has settled on an interesting reaction: predicting Bobby will overwhelm the field with his Big Brain (per Buzzfeed‘s Rosie Gray):

The Bobby Jindal campaign likewise responded with a certain level of disdain for its fellow undercard debaters.
“Unlike other candidates, Bobby has a tremendous bandwidth for information and policy,” said Jindal spokesperson Shannon Dirman. “He’s smart, has the backbone to do the right thing, and his experience has prepared him well for debates on any number of policy topics. If anyone thinks they can beat him in a debate I’d love to learn about it.”

Bobby used the term “bandwidth” himself a couple of times during Monday’s Voters First Forum in NH. It’s apparently the new term for “smartest guy in the room,” which will probably be etched on Jindal’s political tombstone. He’s got all the arrogance of Donald Trump, but without the poll numbers.

Another theory is that the “undercard” debaters tomorrow will benefit from not having to share a stage with Donald Trump. If no one much is watching, though, the 5:00 PM forum will just be another place in America without a spotlight tomorrow.


The Un-Magnificent Seven

After months of scheming and maneuvering to boost their national poll standings and thus qualify for the ten-candidate first Republican candidates’ debate on Fox News, the hammer finally fell on seven would-be presidents who did not make the cut. I talked about the implications today at the Washington Monthly:

Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, George Pataki and Jim Gilmore…have been relegated to a 5:00 PM “forum” on Fox tomorrow that will last an hour; the top ten will rumble for two hours at 9:00 PM.
One of the story-lines for the next couple of weeks will be the fate of the candidates who didn’t make the cut. Will the media start treating them like the Walking Dead? Will donors and previously committed activists abandon them? Will any of them see the handwriting on the wall and just drop out? Or could this whole make-the-top-ten obsession of the last couple of months turn out to have been a chimera?
You’d have to figure that three of the leftover candidates have a survival advantage. Perry has gotten off to a good start substantively and in terms of early Iowa impressions. He also has a lifeline to Texas and Christian Right money. Fiorina remains a candidate other Republicans want to push in front of cameras to savage Hillary Clinton without the appearance of male pigginess. And Lindsey Graham is this cycle’s clown prince, beloved by media for his jokiness, his moderation on some domestic issues, and his mad bomber hawkiness on foreign policy, making him a nice matched set with Rand Paul.
As long as Rick Santorum has Foster Friess willing to finance his Super-PAC, however, he can probably stick around. And what else does Bobby Jindal have to do? Govern Louisiana? Hah!
In the wake of not making the Fox cut, Team Jindal has settled on an interesting reaction: predicting Bobby will overwhelm the field with his Big Brain (per Buzzfeed‘s Rosie Gray):

The Bobby Jindal campaign likewise responded with a certain level of disdain for its fellow undercard debaters.
“Unlike other candidates, Bobby has a tremendous bandwidth for information and policy,” said Jindal spokesperson Shannon Dirman. “He’s smart, has the backbone to do the right thing, and his experience has prepared him well for debates on any number of policy topics. If anyone thinks they can beat him in a debate I’d love to learn about it.”

Bobby used the term “bandwidth” himself a couple of times during Monday’s Voters First Forum in NH. It’s apparently the new term for “smartest guy in the room,” which will probably be etched on Jindal’s political tombstone. He’s got all the arrogance of Donald Trump, but without the poll numbers.

Another theory is that the “undercard” debaters tomorrow will benefit from not having to share a stage with Donald Trump. If no one much is watching, though, the 5:00 PM forum will just be another place in America without a spotlight tomorrow.


Trump’s Appeal to White Working-Class Voters Not Likely to Last

In his New Yorker article, “Donald Trump’s Sales Pitch,” James Surowiecki shares some salient thoughts about white working-class support for Donald Trump:

Donald Trump’s campaign slogan is “Make America Great Again!” A better one might be “Only in America.” You could not ask for a better illustration of the complexity of ordinary Americans’ attitudes toward class, wealth, and social identity than the fact that a billionaire’s popularity among working-class voters has given him the lead in the race for the Republican Presidential nomination. In a recent Washington Post/ABC poll, Trump was the candidate of choice of a full third of white Republicans with no college education. Working-class voters face stagnant wages and diminished job prospects, and a 2014 poll found that seventy-four per cent of them think “the U.S. economic system generally favors the wealthy.” Why on earth would they support a billionaire?
Part of the answer is Trump’s nativist and populist rhetoric. But his wealth is giving him a boost, too. The Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who’s published reams of work on white working-class attitudes, told me, “There is no bigger problem for these voters than the corruption of the political system. They think big companies are buying influence, while average people are blocked out.” Trump’s riches allow him to portray himself as someone who can’t be bought, and his competitors as slaves to their donors. (Ross Perot pioneered this tactic during the 1992 campaign.) “I don’t give a shit about lobbyists,” Trump proclaimed at an event in May. And his willingness to talk about issues that other candidates are shying away from, like immigration and trade, reinforces the message that money makes him free.
Trump has also succeeded in presenting himself as a self-made man, who has flourished thanks to deal-making savvy. In fact, Trump was born into money, and his first great real-estate success–the transformation of New York’s Commodore Hotel into the Grand Hyatt–was enabled by a tax abatement worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet many voters see Trump as someone who embodies the American dream of making your own fortune. And that dream remains surprisingly potent: in a 2011 Pew survey, hard work and personal drive (not luck or family connections) were the factors respondents cited most frequently to explain why people got ahead. Even Trump’s unabashed revelling in his wealth works to his benefit, since it makes him seem like an ordinary guy who can’t get over how cool it is to be rich.

Surowiecki goes on to point out that Trump’s ‘winner’ image is packaged in a veil of distractions, since his business losses have included four bankruptcies, which he shrewdly projects as biz as usual for a courageous, visionary entrepreneur. “…The businessman he most resembles is P. T. Barnum…Barnum’s key insight into how to arrest public attention was that, to some degree, Americans enjoy brazen exaggeration. No American businessman since Barnum has been a better master of humbug…”
Surowiecki says it is “highly-improbable that he could ultimately win the nomination.” Yet “his bizarre blend of populist message and glitzy ways” resonates well “with precisely the voters that any Republican candidate needs in order to get elected.” As Greenberg says, “Trump is a huge problem for the Party. He’s appealing to a very important part of the base, and bringing out the issues the other candidates don’t want to be talking about.”
Democrats have known at least since FDR, and later JFK, that working-class voters don’t care how much money a candidate has, as long as the candidate seems honest and unafraid to support bold policies that can improve their lives.
Trump gets credit for being honest, just because he has no filter between his brain and his mouth, and that makes him look candid in comparison to his equivocating opposition, all of whom seem to be beholden to one sugar daddy or another. But that’s only part of what is needed to get elected. When the novelty fades, and Trump is held accountable to explain how his policies can benefit working people, that’s when he will tank as gloriously as he has risen.


Dems Unveil War on Gerrymandering…at Last

From Jonathan Martin’s New York Times article, “Democrats Unveil a Plan to Fight Gerrymandering“:

The Democratic Governors Association is creating a fund dedicated to winning races in states where governors have some control over congressional redistricting, the party’s first step in a long-range campaign to make control of the House more competitive.
Billed as “Unrig the Map,” the effort will target 18 of the 35 states in which governors play a role in redistricting, and where new congressional maps could allow Democrats to win House seats that are now drawn in a way to favor Republicans. The fund will be used for governors’ races over the next five years, leading up to the 2020 census.
Democratic officials said that they hoped to raise “tens of millions” for the effort and that they believed they could gain as many as 44 House seats if lines were more favorably redrawn in the 18 battleground states. Many of those states still have Republican-controlled legislatures, but with Democratic governors in place they could at least veto the next round of congressional maps and send the disputes to the courts.

“About time” or “What took them so long?” seem like appropriate responses, before we settle for “better late than never.” But this campaign is really a call to arms for Democrats, who get it that all the good we do in presidential election years is rigged to be undone in the following midterm elections, and without a congressional working majority Democratic presidents will be doomed to nibbling at the fringes of social change into the forseeable future.
Martin reminds his readers of one of the most disturbing political statistics in recent memory — that Democrats won 2 million more votes than Republicans in 2010, but still we got “shellacked.” The presidential race gets all of the media glory, but the midterms define the limits of the majority’s hopes and dreams, thanks in large part to gerrymandering. Yes, political apathy and voter suppression also play important roles in the midterm “correction.” But having no plan to fight gerrymandering has proven to be a loser.
But ther DGA initiative won’t be cheap. As Martin points out,

..Democrats have also been badly outplayed and outspent in the battle for statehouses. Both parties operate networks of political committees intended to channel national money into governor and state legislative races. But the Republican version is far better financed: The Republican Governors Association, for example, spent $170 million during the 2014 cycle, compared with $98 million for the Democratic Governors Association.
Democratic governors and strategists have often complained that their donors are too focused on more glamorous presidential and Senate races, while Republicans have been pouring money into state-level contests.

Martin concludes by quoting top Democratic donor Peter Emerson, who said, “We’re late to the game, but we don’t have to come up with a new strategy — we just have to adapt to their strategy.”
Better we should improve on their strategy and use our edge in social media and small donor contributions to fund the campaign. Dems simply must make this campaign a priority or accept the alternative — perpetual gridlock.


Political Strategy Notes

Following what HuffPo’s political commentaors Michael McAuliffe and Christine Conetta call “The GOP’s Epic Month Of Dysfunction,” Michael Tomasky puts the Republicans’ current situation in perspective with his Daily Beast post “The GOP: Still the Party of Stupid,” which calls the current GOP pack of presidential wannabes “an astonishingly weak field.” Tomasky notes the GOP field’s “hostility to actual ideas that might stand a chance of addressing the country’s actual problems,” and adds, “The Democratic Party has its problems, but at least Democrats are talking about middle-class wage stagnation, which is the country’s core economic quandary.”
If Jeb Bush wants to be a different kind of Republican, he should end GOP war on voting,” writes Paul Waldman at The Plum Line. Walkman explained, “And while Jeb will happily tout his record on things like charter schools as helping African-Americans, one topic he didn’t raise [when he recently spoke at the Urban League] was voting rights. That may be because on that subject, his hands are as dirty as anyone’s…When he was governor of Florida, Bush’s administration ordered a purge of the voter rolls that disenfranchised thousands of African-Americans, in a happy coincidence that made it possible for his brother to become president. The private corporation they hired to eliminate felons from the rolls did so by chucking off people who had a names similar to those of felons; people who had voted all their lives showed up on election day to be told that they couldn’t vote….At a moment when his party is fighting with all its might to limit the number of African-Americans who make it to the polls, it’s going to be awfully hard to make a case that the GOP has their interests at heart.”
NYT’s Jonathan Martin presents an interesting argument that Jeb Bush benefits from Trump’s campaign because Bush wasn’t going to get those voters anyway, and Trump draws support away from Scott Walker. “Mr. Trump’s bombastic ways have simultaneously made it all but impossible for those vying to be the alternative to Mr. Bush to emerge, and easier for Mr. Bush, the former Florida governor, to position himself as the serious and thoughtful alternative to a candidate who has upended the early nominating process.” Bush can’t have Trump as his running mate, unless he wants to run alongside a loose canon. So how would he keep Trump from running a third party campaign? Cabinet post?
John Sides interviews David Shor at The Monkey Cage on the topic, “Do early campaign polls tell us anything? Let’s ask a campaign data guru.” Much of their discussion is about the utility of early polls to political scientists (they agree that early polls don’t help much with outcome predictions). But I think they missed an important benefit of early polls, which is they help candidates to better hone their messaging.
Marian Cogan’s “Everyone Is Already Freaking Out Over the 2016 Election Polls” at New York Magazine has more to say about the misuse of early polling.
At The Upshot, Lynn Vavreck mulls over “2016 Endorsements: How and Why They Matter,” and shows that there is a relationship between a presidential candidate’s success and his/her endorsements. It’s just not quite so clear that it’s a causal relationship.
In his post at AlJazeera America, “Most Americans don’t vote in elections. Here’s why,” Demos research associate Sean McElwee contends that “The rise of the donor class and the influx of corporate cash have caused many voters to lose faith in politics.”
But many want to vote, but are still being denied their voting rights by Republican-driven suppressive state legislation and court rulings. Jim Rutenberg’s excellent “A Dream Undone” in the New York Times Magazine takes a thorough look “inside the 50-year campaign to roll back the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”
For Kasich’s campaign, there’s good news and bad news.


NYT grossly libels Hillary Clinton on front page, runs inadequate corrections on back pages and then tells Clinton campaign: “we don’t plan to comment further.” Perhaps they should change their corporate slogan to “all the smears that fit the print.”

The New York Times screwed up badly on July 22nd, when ‘the newspaper of record’ ran a disastrously-flawed story saying that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has been targeted by criminal referrals from two inspectors general relating to her e-mail usage during her tenure as Secretary of State.
The Times report included some astounding errors, and the newspaper’s clumsy walkback compounded the mess exponentially. Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri responded with a devastating letter to executive editor Dean Banquet. The Eric Wemple blog at The Washington Post frames Palmieri’s letter and the stunningly inadequate Times response:

Thanks to a letter from Clinton campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri shared this evening with the Erik Wemple Blog, we now know that the version of events from within the Times was incomplete. In a lengthy, detailed and merciless letter, Palmieri documents just how rushed and reckless was the Times’ push to publish the story that night.

You can read more about it right here.