Politico: “This time around, the candidate with an aversion to schmoozing and a reputation as a loner in the Senate is bowing to a side of politics he’s long despised. Sanders is making dozens of calls each week to elected officials, labor leaders and party chiefs, according to his aides. In between his rallies, he regularly meets with politicians behind closed doors. And surrogates including Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), the co-chair of his campaign, are aggressively courting House members to get on board.”
“All of that is standard fare for a top-tier presidential campaign, but it represents a major shift for Sanders. His willingness to step up his efforts to win institutional support is the latest sign that he recognizes that shunning the Democratic establishment might work for a long-shot outsider campaign, but won’t cut it if he truly wants to win the nomination.”
PBS: Sanders’ 2020 challenges look a lot like 2016
President Trump’s lone Republican primary challenger, former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, ratcheted up his attacks on the president, ABC News reports. Said Weld: “I celebrate that America has always been a melting pot. It seems he would prefer an Aryan nation.”
“The majority of senior aides and advisers on the top-tier Democratic presidential campaigns are women, and roughly a quarter identified as women of color,” according to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal.
Politico: “Get ready for more Rudy. Done sparring with Robert Mueller, Donald Trump’s personal attorney is now training his attacks on the president’s reelection rivals. Giuliani plans to meet with the president and his campaign in the coming weeks to discuss pivoting to this new role, which he expects will also include making policy and political connections for the 2020 effort.”
“Giuliani has long served as an all-purpose attack dog for Trump — to mixed results. The president and some of his top aides have occasionally cringed at the lawyer’s frequent off-script messaging and rambling TV appearances that can spark one or more unexpected news cycles.”
Politico: “He’s dominating in the polls, his fundraising is going gangbusters and he’s showing broad support from key political players in the early presidential states.”
“So where are the big energetic crowds, the lines around the block to get into Joe Biden’s events? The question is no small matter in a party still recovering from a bitter 2016 defeat — a loss marked by a lack of enthusiasm for an establishment nominee in several critical states.”
CNN: “The former vice president has held 11 public events since launching his campaign on April 25. That’s fewer than most other candidates: former Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas had held 12 by the end of his second night as a presidential candidate. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts held the same number — four — in Iowa on Sunday that Biden has held to date there. And Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont held three in New Hampshire on Monday, matching Biden’s total for the entire campaign.”
“And unlike most of his opponents, Biden has usually declined to take questions from his crowds or reporters.”
New York Times: “After five months as a presidential candidate, Ms. Warren is showing signs of success at distinguishing herself in a packed field. She has inched higher in national polls and, at events within the last month, consistently overshot the campaign’s expected amount of attendees.”
“She has been propelled in part by a number of disruptive choices, most notably the breakneck pace at which she introduces policy proposals. That has helped keep her in the news, put pressure on rivals and provided more opportunities to shore up her campaign’s once-lackluster fund-raising.”
First Read: “Can policy beat Trump? Especially policy that might have little chance for passage in today’s divided Congress?”
A new Monmouth poll finds that 62% of Americans feel that U.S. consumers will bear the brunt of paying for new tariffs on Chinese goods, while just 23% say that Chinese producers will bear more of these costs.
Likewise, 62% believe it is very likely that American companies which sell goods or use materials made in China will simply pass those costs onto domestic consumers.
Of the two dozen Democrats running for president, The Hill finds 12 have met both the polling and donor thresholds set by the DNC to participate in the first debates, while six others have cleared the polling threshold.
Five candidates are still in a scramble to reach either requirement: Bill de Blasio, Seth Moutlon, Michael Bennet, Mike Gravel and Wayne Messam.
Geoffrey Skelley: “The 2016 contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was the eighth consecutive presidential race in which the national popular vote margin was smaller than 10 percentage points. That is, in every presidential election from 1988 to 2016, the difference between the vote shares of the Democratic and Republican nominees was in the single digits. That’s the longest stretch of such elections since the Civil War, surpassing a run of seven straight single-digit margins from 1876 to 1900.”
“In the recent string of close elections, there have been two in which the nominee who won the national popular vote didn’t win the Electoral College — 2000 and 2016. Before 2000, the last time a candidate had won the popular vote but not the Electoral College was in 1888.”
“Now, some might not consider a large single-digit margin — such as Barack Obama’s 7-point win in 2008 — to be ‘close.’ But it’s worth noting that out of 21 presidential elections from 1904 to 1984 — or the time between these two competitive periods — only nine had margins in the single digits. The other 12 were double-digit blowouts.”
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