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Ballotpedia's Daily Presidential News Briefing - June 2, 2016
From Ballotpedia
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Thursday's Leading Stories
- According to an analysis by USA Today, Donald Trump and his companies have been involved in at least 3,500 legal actions, an “unprecedented” number for a presidential nominee. “Just since he announced his candidacy a year ago, at least 70 new cases have been filed, about evenly divided between lawsuits filed by him and his companies and those filed against them. And the records review found at least 50 civil lawsuits remain open even as he moves toward claiming the nomination at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in seven weeks,” USA Today reported on Wednesday. It also found that Trump’s legal involvement surpassed that of five other leading real estate executives, including Sam Zell and Larry Silverstein, combined. (USA Today)
- During a campaign event in Newark, New Jersey, on Wednesday, Hillary Clinton charged that Donald Trump “took advantage of vulnerable Americans” with Trump University, his education program at the center of two class-action lawsuits. “This is just more evidence that Donald Trump himself is a fraud. He is trying to scam America the way he scammed all those people at Trump U. It’s important that we recognize what he has done because that’s usually a pretty good indicator of what he will do, and on issue after issue, we see someone who is unqualified and unfit to be president of the United States,” she said. (Politico)
- Trump responded on Twitter, writing, “Crooked Hillary Clinton is a fraud who has put the public and country at risk by her illegal and very stupid use of e-mails. Many missing!” (Twitter)
Polls
- According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll released on Wednesday, Hillary Clinton holds a narrow lead over Bernie Sanders in California, 49 percent to 47 percent. (NBC News)
- In a poll released by Field on Thursday, Clinton again registered a two-point lead over Sanders in California, 45 percent to 43 percent. (San Francisco Chronicle)
- Trump leads Clinton in Georgia, 45 percent to 38 percent, in a general election matchup released by Public Policy Polling on Wednesday. Gary Johnson and Jill Stein have 6 percent and 2 percent, respectively. (Public Policy Polling)
Democrats
- President Barack Obama is impatient to begin campaigning on behalf of the Democratic nominee, CNN reported on Wednesday. During a speech in Elkhart, Indiana, he broadly spoke about the election, saying, “If what you care about in this election is your pocketbook, if what you're concerned about is who will look out for the interests of working people and grow the middle class, if that's what you're concerned about – the economy – the debate is not even close.” Although Obama did not name any of the three leading candidates by name, a White House source said that Obama planned to “explode onto the scene” when the Democratic primary process finished. (CNN)
Hillary Clinton
- Alejandro Padilla, the governor of Puerto Rico, endorsed Hillary Clinton on Wednesday. “She supports the legislation in Congress to help Puerto Rico, although, like myself, with serious objections to the anti-democratic parts of the measure that would impose a fiscal control board," he said in a statement in Spanish. (The Hill)
- The Clinton campaign announced on Wednesday that Clinton and her family donated $105,000 to veterans charities between 2006 and 2012. (The New York Times)
- Katherine Fernández Rundle, a superdelegate and the state attorney for Miami-Dade County, said she will support Clinton at the national convention. (The Tampa Bay Times)
- Bryan Pagliano, the State Department employee who set up Clinton’s private email server, is declining to participate in a deposition scheduled for June 6 as part of a lawsuit brought by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch. In a filing on Wednesday, Pagliano’s lawyers said that he would invoke his Fifth Amendment rights. “Judicial Watch may move to unseal the materials at any time. Furthermore, in the event of a leak or data breach at the court reporting company, Mr. Pagliano would be hard-pressed to prevent further dissemination and republication of the video. Given that there is no proper purpose for videotaping the deposition in the first place, Judicial Watch’s preference should yield to the significant constitutional interests at stake,” they wrote. (Politico)
Bernie Sanders
- Federal judge William Alsup rejected a lawsuit from Bernie Sanders supporters on Wednesday alleging confusing rules surrounding primary participation for unaffiliated voters caused harm. “The citizens of California are smart enough to know what their rights are,” he said at the hearing. According to The Los Angeles Times, Alsup “also questioned why the plaintiffs had filed a lawsuit about well-established election procedures so close to the presidential primary itself.” (The Los Angeles Times)
- Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela, called Sanders “our revolutionary friend” on Tuesday night. He added, “If the elections were free ... Bernie Sanders would be president of the United States." (Reuters)
- Sanders noted this week that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) rejected his pick of RoseAnn DeMoro, the executive director of National Nurses United, to serve on the Platform Drafting Committee. DeMoro said on Wednesday that Sanders had wanted her to advocate for universal healthcare. She also said that the DNC had chosen four men and only one woman from Sanders’ preferred list of potential committee members to create the appearance that Sanders only wanted men. “I think it was a set-up. It fed into the 'Bernie bro' narrative and meme – oh, Bernie picked one woman, he's a sexist. As soon as the list was out, there were articles about how he chose two 'anti-Israel' people. The truth of the matter is that they were choices the DNC had signed off on,” she said. (The Washington Post)
- Platform Committee spokeswoman Dana Vickers Shelley said on Wednesday that it was DeMoro’s position as a labor activist that led to her exclusion. Vickers Shelley said, “Because union leadership was represented on the full platform committee, a decision was made no union leadership would be represented on the platform drafting committee. That was communicated to the campaigns, and they understood our rationale.” (The Washington Post)
Republicans
- New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R) said on Wednesday that she would not back Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson because he supports reducing the military and legalizing marijuana. (The Washington Times)
- Ruth Guerra, the director of Hispanic media relations for the Republican National Committee (RNC), confirmed on Wednesday that she was resigning her post and joining the American Action Network. The New York Times reported that Guerra “told colleagues this year that she was uncomfortable working for Mr. Trump.” (The New York Times)
- The RNC released a memo on Wednesday highlighting recent reports regarding Hillary Clinton’s private email server use. “Hillary Clinton’s dishonesty has caught up with her again. And with the Judicial Watch lawsuit and the FBI investigation still rolling full steam ahead, the worst of Hillary Clinton’s woes over her secret email server may still be yet to come. It’s going to be a long summer for Crooked Hillary,” chief strategist Sean Spicer wrote. (Republican National Committee, The Hill)
Donald Trump
- In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter published on Wednesday, Donald Trump said that top talent agent Ari Emanuel, the brother of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, offered to produce a film for Trump for the Republican National Convention in July. (The Hollywood Reporter)
- On Wednesday, Gonzalo P. Curiel, the federal judge overseeing a class-action lawsuit against Trump University, ordered that some documents made public in the case be sealed again as they were “mistakenly” released. (CBS News)
- NextGen Climate Action Committee, a super PAC working “to prevent climate disaster and promote prosperity for every American,” released a Spanish-language ad on Wednesday highlighting Trump’s immigration policy and encouraging Latinos in California to vote. Featured in the ad is billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer, who has contributed $24 million to NextGen. (NBC News)
- Last week, the AFL-CIO launched campaigns in several battleground states, including Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Nevada, to educate voters about Trump’s positions on labor and employment and his business record. “Unions spend heavily to support Democrats in elections and wield great influence over whether their members support those candidates. But labor leaders fear many of their members could be drawn to Mr. Trump. Merged Wall Street Journal/NBC News polling data from the first four months of the year show that among white union households, support is split evenly between Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton, at 44% each, in a potential general-election matchup,” The Wall Street Journal reported. (The Wall Street Journal)
Third Party Candidates
- Natalie Jackson, a senior polling editor at The Huffington Post, wrote an article on Wednesday explaining why it was challenging to poll for third-party candidates. “Whether pollsters should be polling on Johnson, or Stein for that matter, doesn’t have an easy answer. Research from 2014 has shown that when pollsters include third-party or independent candidates, the polls overestimate those candidates’ support. But when they don’t include them, the share of the third-party or independent vote is underestimated in their polls,” she said. (The Huffington Post)
Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party)
- On Wednesday, Gary Johnson embraced Donald Trump calling him a “fringe candidate.” He said during an interview on Fox Business, “I’m a total fringe candidate. I’m a Republican governor that got to serve two terms in a Democrat state. Gee, Bill Weld did the same thing. I supported gay rights. I supported woman’s [sic] right to choose. I espoused legalizing marijuana in 1999. I’m about as fringe as you can get.” (The Wall Street Journal)
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
