Good post! 
I saw the Moody story briefly this morning but it was quickly buried. Thanks for posting, these polls are fascinating.
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I just did a little thread about it, eight posts. It turns out that the news outlets are cherrypicking to get sensational headlines, but if you read the articles, at least some of them, a Trump win is still a long-shot. The pollster is reputable, but the presentation of its findings by these various outlets is not.
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Madam Secretary just putting that out there, whoa. Yes we all have our suspicions but…
Hillary Clinton suggests Putin has kompromat on Trump, Russia will back Tulsi Gabbard third-party bid
In a conversation on former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s podcast, Clinton suggested the Russians are leveraging a number of top U.S. politicians. She suggested Russia had kompromat on Trump. She accused 2016 Green Party nominee Jill Stein of being a “Russian asset.” And she suggested Russia might back Gabbard as a third-party candidate.
“They’re also going to do third-party again,” Clinton said. “I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on someone who’s currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”
The “again” referred to Stein, whom some Clinton supporters have accused (rather baselessly) of serving as a spoiler for Clinton in 2016. Stein got around 1 percent of the vote in the three decisive states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — but exit polls showed most of her voters wouldn’t have supported either Clinton or Trump if Stein weren’t running.
Clinton then flat-out labeled Stein a “Russian asset.”
“And that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she’s also a Russian asset,” Clinton said. “Yeah, she’s a Russian asset — I mean, totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate. So I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed.”
At another point in the interview, Clinton wagered that Russia does in fact have some compromising material on Trump, suggesting that’s why so many of Trump’s decisions have erred in a pro-Russian direction.
“I don’t know what Putin has on him, whether it’s both personal and financial,” Clinton said. “I assume it is.”
She then switched gears: “But more than that, there is this bizarre adulation Trump has for dictators and authoritarians. He dreams of being able to order people to do things and make them do it. He has no democratic instincts, really.”
The idea that Russia had information on Trump that provided leverage over him was a key, unproven claim in the Steele dossier, a document consisting of allegations involving Trump and Russia that was compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.
She seems to be referring to this NBC report on Ms. Gabbard from earlier in the year. It’s weird.
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Hillary is working all those speculative angles. Whether Tulsi has Russian bots working in her favor or not, her possible 3rd party run does bring some speculation.
But the Russian kompromat question on T still runs through his presidency, and definitely stokes all the questions from Schiff/Pelosi/SDNY 'n co.
There is no question there is something up with Putin/T - a gravy train, and access to election tampering (manipulation via social media).
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Indeed. Trump loves dictators, but he will usually also argue with and rant at them. There are very few exceptions. He fought with Kim. He has tussled with Erdogan. There are really only two he has never once said a bad word against:
MBS and Putin. And his track record on Putin is especially notable given that Putin has NOT returned the favor. He’s said some brutal things about the US, and Russian state media has often trolled Trump. Trump’s utterly obsequious attitude toward him is mind-boggling unless Putin owns him.
What is the nature of that relationship? Monetary, criminal, both, or something more? I don’t pretend to know. But I have a whole thread here demonstrating how Putin owns Trump.
Yet another House Republican has decided to spend more time with his family. Interestingly, just the day before announcing his retirement he said he wouldn’t rule out voting for impeachment.
Representative Francis Rooney, Republican of Florida, who has refused to rule out voting to impeach President Trump, said on Saturday that he would not be seeking re-election.
Mr. Rooney, who first won his district in southwest Florida in 2016, said on Fox News that he believed he had accomplished what he wanted to do in Congress and had grown frustrated with aspects of legislative service.
Asked if he was interested in a third term, Mr. Rooney said, “I don’t really think I do, and I don’t really think I want one.”
…
A day earlier, Mr. Rooney became the first House Republican to indicate that he was willing to consider supporting articles of impeachment over the president’s attempts to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rivals, but he said on Saturday that his decision to retire was unrelated. (He emphasized to reporters that the allegations did not rise to the level of the Watergate scandal.)
BTW, saying that what Trump did with Ukraine “does not rise to the level of the Watergate scandal” is pure B.S. It’s far, far worse. Watergate involved breaking into a campaign office here in the U.S. while Trump’s impeachable offenses are rooted in a traitorous act – extorting a foreign government to interfere in our elections. The Democrats need to hammer home this message. I think it should simply be abbreviated to something like “Ukraine is worse than Watergate.” That’s not very articulate, but it gets the message across.
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Good time to repost this. For a feel good boost this weekend, give it a quick look.
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Ballotpedia
List of U.S. Congress Incumbents who are not running for re-election in 2020
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Check out this chart. Ha! 
Some of the Republicans retiring are from “safe” districts, but even so, their retirement weakens the national Republican push to recapture what they lost in 2018. Wherever an incumbent is not running, Republicans must expend additional resources in time and money to guard against an upset. Take the latest retirement, for example. Rep. Francis Rooney, from Florida’s 19th District, is retiring after two terms. According to Ballotpedia, he received a comfortable 66% (2016) and 62% (2018) of the vote in those elections and could have been expected to repeat the performance in 2020. But a fresh face running will be an unknown quantity and could lose to a strong contender. As recently as 2010 (again according to Ballotpedia), this district was blue. In that election, the Democratic candidate won by 63%. So a flip here is always possible. The Republican coffers will be depleted as they divert resources to avoid that.
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I wanted to thank you for posting this, as it inspired me to use it and other info to make this for others:
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- Pete Buttigieg has jumped 7 percentage points since a June Suffolk/USA TODAY poll.
- Joe Biden was by far the candidate seen as doing worse than expected in last week’s debate.
- Support for impeaching President Donald Trump has risen significantly since the June poll.
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A significant portion of Trump’s Republican supporters are open about their belief in his infallibility: 42 percent of Republicans said there is virtually nothing the president could do to lose their approval. Among Republicans who cited Fox News as their primary news source, this number was even higher, at 55 percent. And Trump’s most steadfast supporters are also most likely to condone his behavior: Nearly two-thirds of white evangelicals said Trump has not hurt the dignity of the presidency. By contrast, majorities of all other religious groups said Trump has damaged the image of the office.
These numbers reinforce the idea that some of Trump’s supporters have come to see American politics as an all-out war. Whatever reservations they may have had about Trump when he first ran for office have apparently been soothed, either by his full-throated defense of his supporters’ priorities or because these voters resent what they see as unrelenting attacks against him and his administration. Trump’s evangelical surrogates have said as much. The Texas megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress recently said that Democrats were inviting a “civil war” by pursuing impeachment proceedings.
Hard-core Trump supporters are not representative of America, and they’re not the only voters who have hardened their political position in the past few years. Only 29 percent of registered voters told PRRI that they would vote for Trump in the 2020 election, no matter who becomes the Democratic nominee. By comparison, 40 percent of registered voters said they would support the Democratic candidate no matter who it is, while 29 percent said their ballot remains up for the taking.
Regardless of how impeachment plays out in the coming months, the proceedings are not likely to bring any semblance of political unity or compel committed Trump supporters to change their mind. Even if the president goes down, some Americans have apparently decided that they’re willing to go down with him.
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A sad, if expected, ruling:
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Momentum is building. It will be a long, hard fought battle, but we are positioned to win if we doggedly pursue the goal. Seize the day!
The political world’s focus on the possible impeachment of President Donald Trump by the House has obscured a critical shift in the battle for control of the Senate: Democrats now have a genuine chance at retaking the majority come November 2020.
…So why are Democrats now in a better position to make that scenario a reality? A combination of a continued decline in the national political environment for Trump coupled with strong fundraising numbers by a slew of Democratic challengers.
The 2020 map was always a bit of a challenge for Republicans. The party has to defend 23 seats next November as compared to just 12 for Democrats, the result of a 2014 election that delivered GOP wins across the Senate map. It’s never an easy road when you are defending almost twice as many seats as your opponents.
…
In Colorado, Democrats convinced former Gov. John Hickenlooper to drop out of the 2020 presidential race and challenge Sen. Cory Gardner who was already among the most vulnerable GOP incumbents in the country.In Arizona, astronaut Mark Kelly (D) has proven to be a dynamite fundraiser, ending September with $9.5 million in the bank – more than Joe Biden had on hand at the same time for his presidential bid. And Republicans continue to worry about Arizona Sen. Martha McSally’s ® abilities as a candidate.
In Maine, Sen. Susan Collins ® looks to be in for the most serious race of her two-plus decade career as former state House Speaker Sara Gideon reported raising more than $3 million dollars over the past three months – outpacing the incumbent by more than $1 million.
In North Carolina, Sen. Thom Tillis has to deal with a self-funder running to his right in the GOP primary and then the prospect of a race against a Democratic military veteran in a state that has become a genuine tossup.
And then there are a slew of other races in states – Georgia, Texas, Iowa – where Trump won by single-digits in 2016 and where Democratic challengers are likely to be well-funded enough to be in a position to capitalize if a) the national political environment goes even more south for Republicans or b) the GOP incumbents make a major mistake or slip-up between now and next November.
As Gonzales noted in his recent overview of the state of the Senate playing field:
“Individually, each of those races has its challenges, whether it be a strong incumbent, unproven Democratic candidates, or the political lean of the state. But when taken collectively, that Democrats need to win (or Republicans need to find a way to lose) less than 20 percent of those competitive contests, Democratic odds look much better.” …
As the article points out, fundraising by Democrats is providing crucial leverage in the close races. If the Senate seats in your state are not in play (either because they are not up for a vote in this election cycle or they are solidly Red or Blue), you could consider using ActBlue to donate to the leading Democratic candidate in one of the pivotal states mentioned above (Colorado, Arizona, Maine, North Carolina). Every dollar makes a difference!
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An interesting analysis with possible implications for DC counter measures – definitely a thread worth reading.
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He was still running?
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An internal memo on cybersecurity, obtained by Axios, warns that “the White House is posturing itself to be electronically compromised once again.”
The state of play: That’s after at least a dozen top- or high-level officials have resigned or been pushed out of a cybersecurity mission that was established under Barack Obama to protect the White House from Russian hacking and other threats, according to conversations with several current and former officials.
Why it matters: Warnings by officials from the former Office of the Chief Information Security Officer (OCISO) — which in July was folded into the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) — suggest new intelligence vulnerabilities. One White House official familiar with the developments said the consolidations could lead to a “Wild West” atmosphere.
Details: Many of the concerns are detailed in an Oct. 17 internal memo written by a senior White House cybersecurity director who is among the officials who have left the mission.
- The memo doubled as a formal resignation letter by its author, Dimitrios Vastakis, who was the branch chief of the White House computer network defense. Vastakis did not respond to requests for comment.
- Vastakis worked in the OCISO, established after Russian hackers breached some White House computers in 2014.
- OCISO was created to “take on the responsibility of securing the Presidential Information Technology Community (PITC) network,” per the internal memo.
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
- A White House source familiar with the plans told me: “You have an entire section who’s dedicated to providing counter threat intelligence information” and “if you remove that, it’s like the Wild West again.”
The president’s team is trying to force out the career staff, especially the expert staff hired under Obama, according to another source familiar with the changes. They said the effects could leave the White House vulnerable to a “network compromise.”
The organizational structure for the cybersecurity mission going forward also raises questions about the continuity, oversight and retention of records that had been covered by the Presidential Records Act (PRA).
- “It is highly concerning that the entire cybersecurity apparatus is being handed over to non-PRA entities,” the memo says.
- “This is a significant shift in the priorities of senior leadership, where business operations and quality of service take precedence over securing the President’s network,” the memo says. “As a career cyber security professional, this is alarming.”
Some cybersecurity officials feel they’re being pushed out.
- OCISO staff are “systematically being targeted for removal from the Office of the Administration (OA) through various means,” the memo says. Those included “revocation of incentives, reducing the scope of duties, reducing access to programs, revoking access to buildings, and revoking positions with strategic and tactical decision making authorities.”
- Several sources described growing internal resentment after it was announced two months ago that staff would no longer be receiving their annual bonuses on Oct. 1.
- Others have left voluntarily for different opportunities. Joe Schatz, the former White House Chief Information Security officer, left the team in August for a technology consulting firm, according to a news release.
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More kinks for Giuliani’s relentless pursuits to find dirt on Hunter Biden.
WASHINGTON — Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, signaled this month that he planned to open a new front in his attacks against former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. — work done by Mr. Biden’s son Hunter Biden for a wealthy Romanian business executive facing corruption charges.
But there’s a problem with that strategy: Mr. Giuliani participated in an effort that would have helped the same executive, and was in fact recruited to do so by Louis J. Freeh, a former F.B.I. director who had been brought onto the matter by Hunter Biden.
In effect, Mr. Giuliani and Hunter Biden were on the same team, if not at the same time. And their work to help the business executive, along with that of Mr. Freeh, stood in contrast to efforts by the United States, including Vice President Biden while he was in office, to encourage anti-corruption efforts in Romania.
The dynamic in Romania underscores how Mr. Giuliani has done a brisk international business with clients who sometimes seem to be seeking to capitalize on his connections to Mr. Trump even as he has accused Hunter Biden of seeking to capitalize on his father’s name while doing business in other countries. And the disclosure of the connection between his role in Romania and Mr. Biden’s comes at a time when Mr. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, is under investigation by federal prosecutors in New York for possible violations of foreign lobbying laws.
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As a person from outside the US I’m a bit reluctant to make a comment on your forth-coming elections, however it has always perplexed me as to why the most wealthiest country on Earth struggles to provide adequate Health Care for all its citizens. Yet on a per capita basis, US the US pays far more for Health Care than ay other country.
Below is a list of the countries that spent more than $US3,000 on healthcare per capita in 2017:
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United States – $US10,209
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Switzerland – $US8,009
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Luxembourg – $US6,475
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Norway – $US6,351
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Germany – $US5,728
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Sweden – $US5,511
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Ireland – $US5,449
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Austria – $US5,440
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Netherlands – $US5,386
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Denmark – $US5,183
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France – $US4,902
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Canada – $US4,826
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Belgium – $US4,774
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Japan – $US4,717
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Iceland – $US4,581
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Australia – $US4,543
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United Kingdom – $US4,246
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Finland – $US4,173
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New Zealand – $US3,683
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Italy – $US3,542
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Spain – $US3,371
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/cost-of-healthcare-countries-ranked-2019-3?r=US&IR=T
I was interested to read this opinion piece in the Guardian today by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman
The debate about healthcare has been at the center of the Democratic primaries, yet it is hard to make sense of the conversation. For some, public universal health insurance – such as Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All bill – would involve massive tax increases for the middle class. For others, it’s the opposite: Medicare for All would cut costs for most Americans. Who is right?
On TaxJusticeNow.org, any interested reader can simulate the effect of replacing private health insurance premiums by taxes – progressive income taxes, wealth taxes, consumption taxes, or broad taxes on consumption or all of national income. This simulator that we developed is open-source, user-friendly, and based on a systematic exploitation of all available statistics about who earns what and pays what in taxes and health insurance in America.
As one illustration, it’s possible to see how the tax plans of the leading Democratic primary candidates would affect tax rates for each group of the population. For instance, Bernie Sanders’s tax proposals would be enough to replace all existing private insurance premiums, while leaving 2.6% of national income to cover the uninsured and spend on other programs. Under such a plan, the 9 bottom deciles of the income distribution would gain income on average, as would the bottom of the top 10%. With smart new taxes—such as broad income taxes exempting low wages and retirees—it is possible to make the vast majority of the population win from a transition to universal health insurance.
Supporters of Medicare for All are right. Funding universal health insurance through taxes would lead to a large tax cut for the vast majority of workers. It would abolish the huge poll tax they currently shoulder, and the data show that for most workers, it would lead to the biggest take-home pay raise in a generation.
I hope that this message can be got out to as many people as possible because all people deserve to enjoy the benefits of a Health Service - not just those who can (because of their lifes circumstances) afford it.
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Joe Biden so wants to be president…this profile examines the improbability of this - no momentum, tendency to make gaffs, can’t raise money like the others.
…I’ve attended in a half-dozen states in the six months since Biden announced his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. If he ever does sleep, surely Joe Biden dreams as he proselytizes, of an unbroken America, its ideals and reputation restored, where everybody is folks and folks have everything they need and maybe some of what they want, where the field is just even enough that nobody is ashamed of their own place on it, and where the president isn’t an idiot but where you can easily deal with the idiots by kicking the shit out of them out back in a parking lot or something.
Crucially, in this dream, Joe Biden is the president.
The pitch goes like this : Joe Biden ought to be the nominee because he’s electable, a meaningless concept if recent history is any guide, and presidential, that wonderful word — the thing Donald Trump could never be even though he literally is president — despite the fact that Biden, who appears by almost any measure to be a good man, a man whose lone sin in life is ego (and does that even count anymore?), has spent a half-century grasping for this position and watching it slip through his fingers.
To anyone paying attention — the army of political professionals more wired to observe shortcomings than are those likely to actually vote for him or for anyone else — it looks, unmistakably, like it’s happening again. His vulnerabilities are close to the surface. There’s the basic fact of his oldness and the concerns, explicit or implicit, about his ability to stay agile and alive for four more years. This was true of Biden, who is 76, even more than it was true of Bernie Sanders, who is the oldest candidate at 78, up until Sanders had a heart attack while campaigning in Nevada earlier this month. (It’s not true at all of Elizabeth Warren, who is 70 but seems a decade younger. And it’s not exactly true of Trump, who is 73 and really just seems crazy, not old.)
But it’s not just his age itself. It’s his tendency to misspeak, his inartful debating style, and — most of all — his status as a creature from another time in the Democratic Party, when the politics of race and crime and gender were unrecognizably different. It’s not just that the Joe Biden of yesteryear sometimes peeks out from behind the No. 1 Obama Stan costume. It’s that the Joe Biden of today is expected to hold his former self accountable to the new standards set by a culture that’s prepared to reject him. And though he’s the party Establishment’s obvious exemplar, he can’t seem to raise any money — spending more in the last quarter than he brought in and moving into the homestretch with less than $9 million in the bank (roughly a third of what Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders has on hand). For political reporters, marveling every day at just how well this isn’t going, watching Biden can feel like being at the rodeo. You’re there because on some level you know you might see someone get killed.
Yet Biden is still the front-runner. Volatile and potentially worthless as they may be, it’s what the polls say. Biden leads the field on average by a handful of percentage points, though his lead has trended steadily downward, from a high of 33 in May to 20 in June to 11, and then to 9.9, and 6.6, and 5.4, according to RealClearPolitics. In the whole campaign, there has only been one day — October 8 — when he slipped to second place, an average of 0.2 points behind Warren. He’s also the front-runner in South Carolina, Nevada, California, Texas, North Carolina, and Florida. “There is this sense of hanging on. And perhaps he can. But that’s generally not the way the physics of these things work,” former Obama adviser David Axelrod told me.
“Generally, you’re either moving up or moving down. Warren is clearly moving up. There’s no sign that he is.”
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20th Republican Congressperson will not run for re-election
Rep. Greg Walden (Ore.), the top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, announced Monday he will not run for another term in Congress, making him the latest GOP lawmaker to head for the doors as 2020 approaches.
“I will not seek re-election to the U.S. House of Representatives, nor election to any other office, but instead I will close the public service chapter of my life,” Walden said in a statement.
The announcement adds to the challenges facing House Republicans as they try to win back the majority next year. Walden is the 20th Republican to say he will forgo reelection to the House in 2020, compared with just seven Democrats.
Walden is also the fifth Republican in a top committee post to announce retirement plans this year.
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Trump’s 2020 Campaign Throws A Fit After Twitter Says They Can’t Buy Fact-Free Political Ads
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