Punchbowl News: “The latest DCCC battleground poll conducted in June has Democrats down three points on the generic ballot, according to several sources who saw the data this week.”
“While that number is still within the margin of error, it’s certainly not where some in the Democratic Party expected to be given the GOP dysfunction that’s played out since Republicans took over in the House in January.”
A new Pew Research poll finds just 35% of Americans approve of President Biden’s job performance, while 62% disapprove.
“Cornel West, the Ivy League academic and progressive activist mounting a third-party campaign for president, has chosen former Green Party candidate Jill Stein to help him challenge to President Joe Biden from the left,” Bloomberg reports.
“Stein said Wednesday that she’s serving as the ‘interim coordinator’ for the West campaign, a catch-all role that encompasses fundraising, communications and campaign management until West can build a more traditional campaign.” Which means Vladimir Putin is running his campaign. West is dead to all progressives and Democrats forever. He is a Republican now.
“He called her a ‘grandstanding loser’ and a RINO. She said his ‘entire legacy was wiped out’ on Jan. 6, 2021,” Politico reports.
“But all of a sudden, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) has turned into one of former President Donald Trump’s unlikeliest top defenders.”
“On primetime and daytime news shows over the past two weeks — and on Twitter and Facebook — Mace has accused President Joe Biden’s administration of trying to stop Democrats’ ‘No. 1 opponent for the presidency.’ On the night this month that news of Trump’s latest indictment broke, Mace was the first member of Congress to go on Fox News.”
Donald Trump explained in a video that “sometimes it’s necessary to talk badly about those that for no reason other than politics speak badly about you.”
He said he does this “otherwise the people that love you don’t know whether or not they’re for real, are they saying the truth or not? So sometimes you have to punch down and you have to say what’s happening otherwise they won’t understand, it’s not fair for them.”
“Nobody in Joe Biden’s world of big money donors is sweating it — and least not yet,” Politico reports.
“But as the president sets out for the customary end-of-quarter haul, with a big swing of fundraising events through America’s big-money alcoves, a concern has crept in. In interviews with more than a dozen bundlers and donors across the country in recent weeks, as well as late-arriving pleas reviewed by West Wing Playbook, people have expressed nervousness that early fundraisers aren’t delivering as they’d hoped.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s wealthy donors and supporters lent a golf simulator to the Governor’s Mansion and provided private flights to fundraisers and other political events, the Washington Post reports.
DELAWARE U.S. SENATOR. EMILY’s List has endorsed Democratic Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, who has no serious opposition in sight.
KENTUCKY GOVERNOR. Medium Buying reports that the RGA, via its Kentucky Values/State Solutions affiliate, has increased its total spending on ads opposing Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear to $1.55 million, an increase of more than $1 million compared to 10 days earlier.
CALIFORNIA U.S. SENATOR. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) wasted no time after he was censured by House Republicans to use the political stunt as a fundraising tool for his run for Senate, Mediaite reports.
ARIZONA U.S. SENATOR. FWIW: “Publicly and in the press, Kyrsten Sinema is playing coy about whether or not she’s running for re-election. Online, however, her re-election campaign is kicking into gear. Sinema’s campaign has made digital moves signaling its intent to wage a tough battle for re-election.”
LOUISIANA GOVERNOR. The Democratic pollster The Kitchens Group and the data firm Vantage Data House have released a survey to NOLA.com showing Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry and former state Transportation Shawn Wilson, who is currently the only notable Democrat in the contest, far ahead in the October all-party primary.
This poll, which Kitchens says Vantage funded in order to get its name out, puts Landry and Wilson at 31% and 21%, respectively, with no one else breaking 6%. Reporter Tyler Bridges notes that this survey was in the field about two weeks after allies of Landry and former state Chamber of Commerce head Stephen Waguespack, began airing ads attacking the other Republican.
MONTANA U.S. SENATOR. The Democratic firm Public Policy Polling shows Rep. Matt Rosendale with a wide 64-10 lead in a hypothetical GOP primary against Tim Sheehy, a wealthy businessman and Navy SEAL veteran whom the party establishment is hoping to recruit. PPP, which did not mention a client, found Sheehy with a 10-14 favorable rating, which the pollster said gives him “only a nominally greater profile than a name out of the phone book.” Rosendale, who represented the entire state in D.C. for a term before Montana gained a second House seat for the 2022 elections, by contrast posts a 67-10 score.
Neither man has announced a bid against Tester yet, though the National Journal recently reported that Sheehy is “expected to jump in around the second quarter FEC filing deadline on July 15.” Sheehy has not run for office before, but party leaders like Montana’s junior senator, NRSC head Steve Daines, hope his personal resources would help him get his name out.
The far-right Club for Growth is likewise hoping to land Rosendale, but while Politico said back in April the congressman was telling people he planned to run, we’ve heard nothing new over the ensuing two months. Tester defeated Rosendale in 2018, and the party establishment reportedly doesn’t want to give him a second chance.
WASHINGTON GOVERNOR. Republican state Sen. Drew MacEwen tweeted Wednesday that he spoke with former GOP Rep. Dave Reichert, whom he reports is “actively exploring a run” for governor next year, and MacEwen said he would support Reichert rather than run himself. Reichert had previously refused to rule out running last month, but he has had a long history of flirting with running for statewide office yet never actually doing it.
Reichert’s political career began when he was appointed sheriff of heavily Democratic King County in 1997, a post that he easily held in that year’s elections and again in 2001. He gained further prominence when notorious serial killer Gary Ridgway, better known as the Green River Killer, was brought to justice during his tenure in the early 2000s. Reichert benefitted from this fame in 2004 when he ran for and won an open congressional district in the eastern Seattle suburbs that had historically favored Republicans downballot but had become Democratic-leaning at the federal level.
Gaining a reputation as a pragmatic conservative, Reichert had repeatedly survived difficult reelection battles until post-2010 redistricting made his seat redder and insulated him from a tough challenge until the 2018 elections. But Reichert finally opted not to seek reelection ahead of that year’s blue wave, and Democrat Kim Schrier flipped his 8th District that year and still holds it to this day.
NEVADA 1ST DISTRICT. 2022 Republican nominee Mark Robertson declared this week that he’d seek a rematch against Democratic Rep. Dina Titus in this constituency in the eastern Las Vegas area. Robertson, who is a retired Army colonel, is the first notable Republican to announce, though restaurateur Flemming Larsen filed FEC paperwork all the way back in February.
Robertson challenged the incumbent last cycle after legislative Democrats dropped Joe Biden’s margin of victory from 61-36 to 53-45 in order to make the 3rd and 4th Districts bluer, and the four largest House outside groups ended up spending a combined $15.4 million here. Titus, who publicly blasted the redistricting plan, prevailed 52-46 as her fellow Democratic Reps. Susie Lee and Steven Horsford each won 52-48.
“it’s certainly not where some in the Democratic Party expected to be given the GOP dysfunction that’s played out since Republicans took over in the House in January”
And it sure feels like it is only Hakeem Jeffries who is regularly and sharply pointing out this dysfunction. Democrats all over need to start talking about what is not getting done due to GOP bullshit.
But it sure seems as though the GOP will be breaking the Appropriations process soon so there’s more opportunities to clearly hang government shutdowns around the GOPs neck.