Early though it is, Dante Chinni explains “Why the GOP Should Worry About Hillary Clinton’s Poll Numbers” at NBC’s MTP web page: “The Urban Suburbs (about 29 million votes in 2012) should be the place the GOP nominee aims to sway voters, and going by these numbers, Rubio would be the best candidate there. He loses by only 17 points. But, it’s very early — and losing by 17 points probably isn’t going to get it done for the GOP. That’s worse than Romney did.”
Here’s a revealing tidbit which shows how low the NC GOP will go, from Bob Geary’s “It’s time to rise up against voter suppression by Republicans” at IndyWeek: Geary explains that NC’s “monster” voter suppression law “reduces the number of early-voting days from 17 to 10. (In the 2012 elections, 70 percent of black voters came early, compared to 52 percent of whites.) It eliminates same-day registration and voting during the early voting period. (Blacks, who are 22 percent of the voting population, were 34 percent of the same-day registrant-voters.) And if you vote in the wrong precinct–say, because you moved–none of your votes count, even for president….One upshot is that people who come to an early-voting site and aren’t properly registered will be too late to get properly registered in time to vote on Election Day. North Carolina, in the top 12 states for voter turnout since same-day registration began in 2008, may sink back to the bottom.”
Freddie Allen reports at The Charlotte Post that “”The number of voters silenced because of the new [NC voter suppression] law likely exceeds 30,000 and could reach 50,000 or more,” according to analysis by Democracy North Carolina, a watchdog group that monitors elections.”
On a more positive note, at Newsweek, Fred Askin’s excellent update “The Battle to Keep the Vote: State by State” notes, “A number of states have adopted online voting registration, making it easier for eligible voters to get on the rolls in states like Illinois, Virginia and West Virginia. And Maryland expanded early voting and allowed same-day registration during early voting…But most significantly, Oregon adopted universal registration of anyone over 18 who does not opt out….Democrats have successfully extended Election Day registration in the blue states of Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, California and Rhode Island, bringing the number of EDR states to 13 plus the District of Columbia…Republicans in Maine went so far as to repeal their long-standing Election Day Registration law (EDR); however, voters reinstated it in 2011 when Democrats managed to place the issue on a referendum ballot.”
Paul Krugman shreds “The Laziness Dogma,” which undergirds much Republican myth-mongering, most recently in Jeb Bush’s clumsy, walked-back diss of American workers.
In his syndicated column, E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes on Hillary Clinton’s emerging economic policy strategy: “Her package includes new benefits for individuals (family leave, child care, more affordable access to college)…Other incentives will promote profit-sharing, and…proposals on executive compensation along the lines of a bill introduced by Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md. It would give CEOs less favorable tax treatment for their bonus packages unless they offered wage hikes to their workers matching increases in productivity and the cost of living…Ms. Clinton’s ideas reflect a wide center-left consensus on behalf of bottom-up or, as many progressives call it, “middle-out” economics. They also underscore how the nomination challenge she faces from Sen. Bernie Sanders differs from the problem created for Republicans by Mr. Trump.”
At National Journal, S. V. Date takes a look at “Hillary Clinton’s White Male Voter Problem.” Date quotes Democratic campaign activist Steve Schale: “Every point of white share you lose, you have to win Hispanics by 4 to 5 points more” to make up for it, Schale said. “In ’08, we knew if we really focused on keeping whites above 40 (percent), we couldn’t lose. To me, that makes more sense than always trying to cobble out a tight win. And at some point we are going to max out (with) Hispanics.” But Date adds, “Republican pollster Bill McInturff scratches his head while watching all this hand-wringing over a demographic group that will continue to decline in significance. For one thing, he said, the 27-percentage point advantage Republicans built among white men in 2012 is probably about as bad as it can get for Clinton, given that a sizeable percentage of white men are white-collar liberals…McInturff has prepared an analysis that even increases the Republican advantage with white men, to 31 percent, and decreases the GOP’s disadvantage among black and Latino voters slightly. But it still shows Republicans losing the next election by 3 points.”
Alex Seitz-Wald reports at MSNBC that Democratic presidential candidate former Sen. Jim Webb is crafting his pitch as a centrist, appealing to white working-class and southern white voters, while dissing Dems on the left.
But in his NYT Sunday Review article, “The Dream World of the Southern Republicans,” long-time observer of racial politics in the south Howell Raines explains “…Republican officeholders live in a dream world where they think rhetoric and repetition will somehow cause minority voters and center-left whites to turn into Republican voters. Alarmed Republican political professionals warn that unless their candidates stop obstructing on health care and make progress on gender issues, the party will lose the White House in 2016 and in quadrennial spurts see its Southern hegemony dismantled by new voters in the New Sunbelt….The longer they take to get it, the greater the odds that multiethnic Democrats will finally break the Republican lock on the solidly red South.”