Ballotpedia's Daily Presidential News Briefing - August 4, 2016
From Ballotpedia
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Thursday's Leading Stories
- ABC News reported on Wednesday that the Republican National Committee was considering how to replace Donald Trump if he were to drop out of the presidential race. Party strategist Sean Spicer refuted the report, telling The Hill, “Donald Trump is the nominee of the Republican Party full-stop. That’s the reality. The rest is just a media-pundit concoction.” For a technical overview of the story, Ballotpedia has reported on the mechanisms the party could use in the event of a vacancy on the ticket and compiled a state-by-state list of deadlines for political parties to certify the names of their presidential and vice presidential candidates and electors for placement on the general election ballot. (ABC News, The Hill, Ballotpedia)
Polls
- Hillary Clinton led Donald Trump by 10 points in a national Fox News poll released on Wednesday with 49 percent to Trump’s 39 percent. In a three-way contest, she nearly maintains that margin with 44 percent to Trump’s 35 percent and Johnson’s 12 percent. (Fox News)
- In a Civitas/SurveyUSA poll of North Carolina voters, Trump topped Clinton by 4 points, 46 percent to 42 percent. Johnson registered 6 percent support. (Civitas Institute)
- According to several election forecasters, Clinton’s chances of winning in November range from 70 percent to 80 percent. (Political Wire)
- Clinton is 15 points ahead of Trump in New Hampshire, according to a new poll from WBUR. Three months ago the two candidates were nearly tied. Explaining the shift, pollster Steve Koczela said, “After all the hand-wringing about whether Bernie Sanders supporters would end up supporting Hillary Clinton, she's now getting 86 percent of the Democratic vote. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has slipped a bit among Republicans. He's now getting a bit less than two-thirds of the Republican vote." (WBUR)
- In a Franklin & Marshall College poll released on Wednesday, Clinton is 11 points ahead of Trump in Pennsylvania, 49 percent to 38 percent. In a four-way race in Michigan, Detroit News/WDIV-TV found a similar margin with Clinton at 41 percent, Trump 32, Johnson 8, and Stein 3. (Franklin & Marshall, The Detroit News)
Democrats
Hillary Clinton
- The pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA is delaying airing ads in Colorado for two weeks, “reflecting Democrats' growing confidence in the battleground state,” according to Politico. (Politico)
- There is a large gender gap between donations to Clinton’s and Trump’s campaigns. “Women account for a little more than 60% of the identifiable contributions to Clinton’s campaign and outside groups supporting her through the end of June, according to Federal Election Commission data analyzed by Crowdpac, a political crowdfunding website. By contrast, nearly 31% of the donations to help Republican Donald Trump came from female donors,” noted USA Today. (USA Today)
- The New York Times reported on Wednesday that Clinton has placed campaign chair John Podesta and senior adviser Minyon Moore in charge of her White House transition operation, the Clinton-Kaine Transition Fund. (The New York Times)
- On Wednesday, the Clinton campaign released “Someplace,” an ad focused on Trump’s history of outsourcing. The clip is part of an economy-centered ad campaign in battleground states beginning next week. (Talking Points Memo)
- On September 6, Simon & Schuster is set to release Stronger Together, a policy book by Clinton and Kaine. (The Hill)
Republicans
- On Wednesday, Georgia elector Baoky Vu said that he would not personally vote for Donald Trump and might not vote for Trump when acting as a member of the electoral college. He resigned from his post later in the day. (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
- U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) announced on Wednesday that he did not see how he could support Trump in November and was considering writing in a candidate. "I'm an American before I'm a Republican. I'm saying for me personally, how can I support that? Because he's crossed so many red lines that a commander in chief or a candidate for commander in chief should never cross,” he said. (CNN)
Donald Trump
- The Trump campaign released a statement on Wednesday that it had raised $80 million in July and has $74 million cash on hand. According to Reuters, “Of the $80 million raised in July, $64 million was from donations that included matching donations from Trump, it said. Another roughly $16 million was from 20 fundraisers cohosted with the Republican National Committee, the statement said.” (Reuters)
- U.S. Sens. Christopher Coons (D-Conn.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) requested in a letter on Wednesday that Ted Cruz, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights, and Federal Courts, launch an investigation into whether Trump broke the law when he asked that Russia find Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails. (The Dallas Morning News)
- Ret. Adm. John B. Nathman criticized Trump on Wednesday, saying that Trump’s “unstable temperament and ignorance make it clear he cannot serve as president.” (CBS News)
- Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence endorsed House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Wednesday, splitting with the top of his ticket. “I talked to Donald Trump this morning about my support for Paul Ryan, our longtime friendship. He strongly encouraged me to endorse Paul Ryan in next Tuesday’s primary. And I’m pleased to do it. But look, this is all part of a process of bringing a party together,” said Pence. (The New York Times)
- Politico published a profile of Jason Greenblatt, the chief legal officer of the Trump Organization and the head of Trump’s advisory committee on Israel. (Politico)
Third Party Candidates
Jill Stein (Green Party)
- CNN will host a Green Party presidential town hall on August 17 with Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka. (CNN)
- On Wednesday, Baraka wrote an op-ed in CounterPunch condemning how charges against Baltimore police officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray and protesters have been handled. “For some it might seem ironic that the only individuals who ultimately ended up indicted, prosecuted and serving long prison sentences were members of the black working class. But for those of us who live the hellish reality of life in the U.S., there is no irony here, just consistency. It is what a racist, colonial state does,” he wrote. (CounterPunch)
Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party)
- In a fundraising email on Wednesday, Gary Johnson said that he had raised $1 million in the past two weeks from 20,000 small donors. (The Washington Times)
- Johnson and Bill Weld participated in a Libertarian presidential town hall moderated by Anderson Cooper on CNN on Wednesday night. (CNN)
- Weld on Donald Trump’s temperament: “He's a showman. He's a pied piper. He's the music man. More recently, it's gotten more serious, and the noun that comes to my mind is a 'screw loose.’”
- Johnson on Hillary Clinton being “beholden” to Wall Street: “That they're making money off of this. That as secretary of state, Bill goes out, does a million dollar speaking gig and then the next day, Hillary signs an agreement with the sponsor of that speaking gig, and, you know, that's not good. That's beholden, if you want to say that. It smacks of pay-to- play. And I think it goes beyond just smacks of pay-to-play, that it is really something that's out there.
- Johnson on the Black Lives Matter movement: “What it has done for me is, is that my head's been in the sand on this. That's what it's done for me. And that I think we've all had our head's in the sand and let's wake up. This discrimination does exist, it has existed and for me personally, you know, slap, slap, wake up.”
- Johnson on LGBT rights and religious liberty: “Well, that there be a balance. And right now I fear that under the guise of religious liberty, that the LGBT community is being discriminated against. Recently weighed in on Utah's law, which I thought was really a balance between religious freedom and LGBT rights.”
- Weld on addressing the threat of domestic terrorism: “That's the lone wolf problem. The person, the copycat, you know, taking cues from ISIS. And I proposed a 1,000 FBI agent task force, similar to task forces that we had in the Justice Department when I was there under President Reagan. We had one for organized crime called the Organized Crime Strike Forces. And we took out the top three echelons of organized crime by concentrating all the knowledge in one place, and tips and hotlines. And you amass the evidence necessary to get either a search warrant or some form of surveillance to make the case to take out the network. And you know, the tragedy in the Omar Mateen case in Orlando, at the nightclub, was that that man had been interrogated twice by the FBI. And when they couldn't make an airtight case on him, they dropped his name from the list.”
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
