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Ballotpedia's Daily Presidential News Briefing - August 26, 2016
From Ballotpedia
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Friday's Leading Stories
- Judge William Dimitrouleas of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida ordered the State Department to determine whether the 14,900 emails uncovered by the FBI during its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server include communications between Clinton and the White House in the days before and after the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi. It has until September 13 to locate and release any emails it finds as part of a FOIA-related lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch. (Reuters)
- During a campaign rally in Nevada, Reno, on Thursday, Hillary Clinton accused Donald Trump of embracing an “emerging racist ideology known as the alt-right” and “taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over the Republican Party.” She continued, “A man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far reaches of the Internet, should never run our government or command our military.” (The New York Times)
- Before her speech, Trump said during a rally in New Hampshire, “Hillary Clinton is going to try to accuse this campaign, and the millions of decent Americans who support this campaign, of being racists. It’s the oldest play in the Democratic playbook: say ‘You’re racist, you’re racist, you’re racist.’ It’s a tired, disgusting argument. It’s the last refuge of the discredited Democratic politician.” (CBS News)
- The Clinton campaign also released a web video on Thursday with video clips of Ku Klux Klan members and white supremacists praising Trump. “If Trump wins, they could be running the country,” the clip ends. "This type of rhetoric and repulsive advertising is revolting and completely beyond the pale. I call on Hillary Clinton to disavow this video and her campaign for this sickening act that has no place in our world,” Pastor Mark Burks, a Trump surrogate, said in a statement. (The Hill)
Polls
- Hillary Clinton led Donald Trump by 10 points, 51 percent to 41 percent, in a national poll released by Quinnipiac on Thursday. “American likely voters give both candidates negative favorability ratings, 41 - 53 percent for Clinton and 33 - 61 percent for Trump. In fact, 37 percent of likely voters say they would consider voting for a third party candidate. In this very negative race, 64 percent of Trump supporters say they are voting mainly anti-Clinton, while 25 percent say they are voting pro-Trump. Among Clinton supporters, 47 percent are mainly anti-Trump while 32 percent are pro- Clinton,” the pollsters noted. (Quinnipiac University)
- In a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday, Clinton’s margin over Trump was seven points, 42 percent to 35 percent. (RealClearPolitics)
Democrats
Hillary Clinton
- Hillary Clinton approved of the peace agreement between the Colombian government and rebel group FARC on Thursday. "As president, I'll ensure that the United States remains their partner in that process. The people of Colombia deserve nothing less. And the safety and security of our hemisphere and world will be strengthened by Colombia's success,” she said in a statement. (Yahoo)
- After the nonprofit group 9/11 Day called on Clinton and Trump to refrain from campaigning on September 11 in remembrance of the victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks, the Clinton campaign confirmed that Clinton and Tim Kaine would not campaign or run ads. President Barack Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.) compiled with a similar request in 2012. (CBS News)
Republicans
- Donald Trump nearly failed to appear on the ballot in Minnesota when it was discovered on Wednesday that he was not listed on the secretary of state’s website. The state requires each party to certify both electors and alternate electors for a presidential candidate to get on the ballot. The state party had failed to do the latter. They have since appointed alternate electors to resolve the problem, but The Washington Post noted this could lead to a legal challenge since state party rules may require they be elected rather than appointed. (The Washington Post)
- Chris Suprun, a Republican elector in Texas, said that he could not rule out supporting Hillary Clinton over Trump because has said “things that in an otherwise typical election year would have you disqualified.” He added that his district, which includes a large portion of Dallas, will likely support Clinton and he must “take a look at all the facts, figure it out and make the right call.” (Politico)
Donald Trump
- The National Hispanic Leadership Agenda, a coalition of 40 nonpartisan advocacy groups, invited Trump to meet with its leadership in an open letter and called on him “to consider the consequences of [his] disparagement of our community and to cease propagating this rhetoric immediately.” (Reuters)
- During a campaign rally in New Hampshire on Thursday, Trump commented on reports that there may have a been a conflict of interest between the State Department and Clinton Foundation when Clinton was secretary of state. “This week the curtain was truly lifted. The corruption was revealed for all to see. The veil was pulled back on a vast criminal enterprise run out of the State Department by Hillary Clinton,” he said. (RealClearPolitics)
- Trump reiterated his charge that Clinton was “a bigot” in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Thursday, saying, “She is selling them down the tubes because she's not doing anything for those communities. She talks a good game. But she doesn't do anything.” He continued, “Her policies are bigoted because she knows they're not going to work." (CNN)
Third Party Candidates
Jill Stein (Green Party)
- Jill Stein was interviewed by the editorial board of The Washington Post on Thursday, where she discussed a range of policy issues. (The Washington Post)
- On whether experience is necessary to become president: “I don’t believe that it is rocket science, and, shall I say, I think the most important critical skill to bring to public office now is the freedom to actually respond to the public interest and to work aggressively and creatively to find common ground among diverse interests and to move forward on an agenda that benefits us all…”
- On NATO: “I think we need to take a good hard look at NATO. In my view NATO needs to be part of a re-examination of a foreign policy that has been based on economic and military domination and we need to look at what the consequences of this kind of foreign policy are.”
- On Russian expansion and Vladimir Putin’s goals: “Not good. Not good. I would have no faith and trust in Putin, but on the other hand I think to be needlessly militarizing this conflict is not in the interest of the American people. It’s certainly – and take the Middle East as a case in point, a case study of where we’ve had incredible chaos – who has benefitted from this? I don’t think the American people, I don’t think the people of the Middle East.”
- On Syria: “I think number one, we need a weapons embargo. Number two, we need to freeze the funds that are supporting ISIS and other terrorist groups. We need to stop the flow of jihadi terrorist groups and then we need to push very hard to have a peace process and to call a cease fire and to expand on the efforts that have been begun, which Barack Obama himself has put his weight behind. I think we need to put additional weight behind that and be working with a principled collaboration with everyone we can towards that immediate end of a weapons embargo, a freeze on the funding and a cease fire.”
- On the Paris climate agreement: “We would move to work with the international community to basically override that accord, and create a much more effective document that could actually stop climate change because it won’t do that now.”
- On whether Ajamu Baraka calling President Barack Obama an “Uncle Tom” was akin to Donald Trump’s rhetoric: “Well, you know, with Donald Trump, it’s non-stop and it’s 24-7. With my running mate, you’re mostly going to hear about human rights, about how we get rid of the legacy of racism, how we end war. So he may have used a term that some find offensive, and that’s unfortunate, but on the balance you’re going to find what he is talking about exactly in the tradition of Martin Luther King.”
Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party)
- Nearly two-thirds of Americans want Gary Johnson to be included in the presidential debates this year, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released on Thursday. (Quinnipiac University)
- John Stossel of Fox Business Network is set to moderate a Libertarian town hall with Johnson and Bill Weld on Friday night. (Washington Times)
- In an interview with Vermont Public Radio on Wednesday, Johnson said that he has changed his position on mandatory vaccinations. “It’s an evolution actually just in the last few months, just in the last month or so. I was under the belief that … ‘Why require a vaccine? If I don’t want my child to have a vaccine and you want yours to, let yours have the vaccine and they’ll be immune.’ Well, it turns out that that’s not the case, and it may sound terribly uninformed on my part, but I didn’t realize that,” he said. Johnson added that he believes the issue should be handled at the local level, but if it were to become a federal issue, he would “probably” support mandatory vaccinations. (Vermont Public Radio)
See also
- Presidential election, 2016
- Presidential candidates, 2016
- Presidential debates (2015-2016)
- Important dates in the 2016 presidential race
- Polls and Straw polls
- 2016 presidential candidate ratings and scorecards
