Alayna Treene at Politico:
Pelosi believes there is a ceiling on how much the party can shift public opinion on Trump, the aides say, noting that his approval rating has remained steady over the last several months.
- But demonizing McConnell "is something even the more moderate Democrats can glom onto," one aide said. "He's seen as the face of obstruction and Trump’s enabler in the Senate. It's easy to message against him."
Details: Over the next few months, Pelosi will be hyper-focused on McConnell and "his refusal to pass meaningful legislation," per the Democratic leadership aides. The Senate's inaction on gun violence is a particularly effective example, they add.
- Another benefit of the strategy, in their view, is that it creates a fresher way for the caucus to pivot to their own legislative achievements: "Their message of ‘look at all the things we’re passing' was falling flat," a Democratic congressional aide said.
- By focusing on McConnell and Senate Republicans' blocking tactics, the aide said, House Democrats can "tout the good they’ve done and also helps show the importance of Dems taking back the Senate.”
Rebecca Klar at The Hill:
Texas Rep. Vincente Gonzalez switched his presidential endorsement from fellow Texan Julián Castro former Vice President Joe Biden.
Gonzalez said Biden is the Democratic candidate with the best chance to beat President Trump in the general election.
"I think at this point in time we need to narrow the field and unite as Democrats to defeat Trump in November 2020, and that's why I believe I'm moving my support to Vice President Joe [Biden]," Gonzalez said Sunday in a CNN interview.
..
The endorsement swap came after Castro, a former Housing and Urban Development secretary, hit Biden for his age and memory during last week's Democratic debate.
"Are you forgetting what you said just two minutes ago?” Castro asked Biden. A review of the debate transcript appears to prove that Biden did not contradict himself when describing his health care proposal
In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's approach to governing.
The update --recently published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.
Trump has always liked dictators.
Nancy A. Youssef, Vivian Salama and Michael C. Bender at WSJ:
Inside a room of the ornately decorated Hotel du Palais during last month’s Group of Seven summit in Biarritz, France, President Trump awaited a meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi.
“Where’s my favorite dictator?” Mr. Trump called out in a voice loud enough to be heard by the small gathering of American and Egyptian officials. Several people who were in the room at the time said they heard the question.
The witnesses said they believed the president made the comment jokingly, but said his question was met by a stunned silence.
It couldn’t be determined whether Mr. Sisi was present or heard the remark.
The White House declined to comment. Egyptian officials couldn’t be reached for comment.
Even if lighthearted, Mr. Trump’s quip drew attention to an uncomfortable facet of the U.S.-Egypt relationship.
In Defying the Odds, we discuss the early stages of the 2016 campaign, when many candidates were unknowns. The update -- recently published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. We are now in the early stages of the 2020 race.
Lloyd Green at The Guardian:
Joe Biden sits squarely atop an unwieldy Democratic presidential field, and is the only challenger who appears comfortably competitive when paired against Donald Trump in electoral battlegrounds such as Michigan, New Hampshire and Wisconsin. While other contenders lead the president in national polls, Biden is the one candidate who generates the kind of coalition necessary to avoid the debacle of 2016, that is a Democratic popular vote victory coupled with another electoral college defeat.
Biden is reassuring, not strident, and in that sense he is the anti-Trump. Barack Obama’s vice-president runs well with traditional Democratic constituencies along with those swing voters necessary to cobble together a win on election day 2020.
...
Trump is unpopular but that does not make a Democratic victory a given. Unalloyed progressive economics tethered to full-throated multiculturalism could cost them the White House. It is a reality that many Democrats understand and intuit. That is why the numbers show Biden leading the primary field. Electability is a real thing.
Votrs in Mecklenburg County, a suburban stronghold, gave Democrat Dan McCready a margin of 12 percentage points over Republican Dan Bishop, bigger than the nine-point advantage McCready posted there during last year’s invalidated race in the state’s 9th Congressional District.
Bishop won the race based on running up the count in the more exurban and rural portions of the district in the south-central part of the state, continuing the geographical divide in the era of President Trump. That provided a sigh of relief for Republicans worried that defeat would have prompted even more retirement announcements.
But Democrats see the trend going deeply in their favor — in 2016, Republicans won this seat by more than 17 percentage points. “They needed to win it, they squeaked by. I don’t think any Republican in the House, who’s concerned about his or her electoral prospects, can feel better about the situation,” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, told reporters.
Democrats can still play offense in 2020 as at least 25 Republicans still in office won by less than 5 percentage points last year, including a handful who have already decided not to run again in 2020. History falls on the Democratic side, as the House majority has not changed hands during a presidential election year since 1952.
And Republicans face a conundrum if they are going to try to win back the net gain of 19 seats they need to reclaim the majority. Many of those seats look more like the suburban portions of Mecklenberg County than they do Union County, a rural county along the state border that gave the GOP candidate 60 percent of its vote.
But the party’s current messaging focus — heavily reliant on disparaging Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), along with her “squad” of liberal freshmen — is resonating in rural areas that, for the most part, Republicans already hold.
Alan Fram at AP:
Special elections generally attract such low turnout that their results aren’t predictive of future general elections. Even so, the narrow margin in the GOP-tilted district suggested that Democrats’ 2018 string of victories in suburban districts in red states including Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas could persist next year.
Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois, who runs House Democrats’ political committee, said the close race showed her party is “pushing further into Republican strongholds” and was in a “commanding position” to do well next year.
Michael Bitzer, a politics professor at Catawba College in North Carolina, said the narrow margin suggests that the country’s other closely divided swing districts “could be still up for grabs.”
There is almost no pathway to Republicans regaining House control next year unless they avoid losing more suburban districts and win back some they lost last year.
Alexander Bolton at The Hill:
A Senate Republican aide said “the suburbs are key” in describing the dynamics on gun legislation.
“House Republicans got rocked in the suburbs in the last election,” the aide added, referring to the key demographic change that fueled the Democratic takeover of the House in 2018.
...
McConnell told reporters in April that stopping the erosion of support from suburban voters would be central to keeping Republican control of the Senate in the 2020 election.
He noted that Republicans lost control of the House in 2018 because “we got crushed in the suburbs.”
“We lost college graduates and women in the suburbs, which led in the House to loses in suburban Kansas City; Oklahoma City; Houston; Dallas; Atlanta; Charleston, S.C.,” McConnell said in the April interview. “We’re determined not to lose women, certainly not by 19 points, and college graduates in our Senate races. And I don’t think we will.”
A Republican poll of 1,000 registered voters in key suburban districts conducted by Public Opinion Strategies on Aug. 7-8 found that suburban women voters rated working to prevent gun violence as their top priority.
Seventy-two percent of suburban women surveyed by the poll said gun laws should be more strict and 55 percent said they believe that stricter laws would help prevent gun violence.
