Biden’s team takes a page from Trump: Pushing back on poor poll numbers

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Donald Trump’s self-worth has long been defined by numbers. His net worth (which he would often inflate). The ratings for “The Apprentice.” And once he entered politics, polling. …

In June 2020, Trump offered one of his more unusual responses to a bad poll. CNN and its polling partner SSRS found Trump trailing Joe Biden in the presidential election by 14 points, a wider margin than any other poll in the same period. …

But then Trump tweeted out a poll from his preferred pollster, John McLaughlin. In it, McLaughlin disparaged not the poll’s methodology but the pollsters’ integrity. … McLaughlin’s complaints about intent and Trump’s odd suggestion that pollsters were trying to suppress turnout in an election that wouldn’t see votes cast for another three months were just shouting. But, you know. Very Trump.

So it was unexpected when, on Thursday, the Biden White House deployed a similar tactic, though with a much more Biden-y approach. CONTINUED

Philip Bump, Washington Post

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The Inescapable Backdrop of Gavin Newsom’s Parole Decision

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Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, one of the nine surviving children of the late Robert F. Kennedy, was at the family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, with a gaggle of his relatives and siblings last August when the California Board of Parole Hearings unexpectedly recommended the release of the man who assassinated his father, Sirhan Sirhan. …

Yesterday afternoon, most of RFK’s surviving children finally exhaled when California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has described the former attorney general, senator from New York, and anti-war 1968 presidential candidate as his political hero, announced he had exercised his authority to reverse the board’s ruling and deny parole to Sirhan. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed explaining his decision, Newsom highlighted Sirhan’s role as a “potent symbol of political violence” and his refusal “to accept responsibility for the crimes.”

The possibility of parole for Sirhan has always been intensely emotional and painful for most of RFK’s surviving children. Yet the real issue Newsom confronted had less to do with what parole would mean for the family than what it might mean for the country. The United States now faces a grim trend in which violence, threats, and intimidation rooted in former President Donald Trump’s political movement are spiking in communities across the country. …

Reuters recently cataloged more than 800 threats of violence from Trump supporters against election officials in 12 states. Not just Democrats have been targeted: Multiple elected Republicans who criticized Trump or voted to impeach him have reported similar intimidation. Threats have multiplied as well, again predominantly from the right, against public-health officials, school-board members, and municipal officials over masking, shutdowns, and other policies related to controlling the coronavirus pandemic. CONTINUED

Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic

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President Biden’s overall approval rating remains stable

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As the COVID-19 omicron variant surges throughout the United States, this week’s Ipsos’ Core Political finds that COVID-19 remains one of the top issues that Americans want President Joe Biden to prioritize. President Biden’s overall approval rating remains stable, but his approval rating on COVID-19 has dropped.

Americans are most likely to name the economy (22%) and public health (15%) as the top issues facing the U.S. today. CONTINUED

Ipsos

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Can Democrats Fall In Love With the 2022 Senate Map?

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… As our politics has become more and more nationalized, it’s gotten harder for an individual Senate candidate to perform much better (or worse) than the presidential nominee from his/her party. That’s both good news and bad news for Democrats. Democrats don’t need to ‘outperform’ Biden’s showing in order to hold the Senate. But, they also can’t underperform the president by even the smallest margin. And, if Biden’s job approval ratings are as anemic in November as they are today, that’s going to be a much bigger undertow for even blue state candidates to manage. CONTINUED

Amy Walter, Cook Political Report with Amy Walter

The Gender Gap Is Taking Us to Unexpected Places

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In one of the most revealing studies in recent years, a 2016 survey of 137,456 full-time, first-year students at 184 colleges and universities in the United States, the U.C.L.A. Higher Education Research Institute found “the largest-ever gender gap in terms of political leanings: 41.1 percent of women, an all-time high, identified themselves as liberal or far left, compared to 28.9 percent of men.” …

Along parallel lines, a Knight Foundation survey in 2017 of 3,014 college students asked: “If you had to choose, which do you think is more important, a diverse and inclusive society or protecting free speech rights.” Male students preferred protecting free speech over an inclusive and diverse society by a decisive 61 to 39. Female students took the opposite position, favoring an inclusive, diverse society over free speech by 64 to 35. …

The data on college students reflects trends in the electorate at large. The Pew Research Center provided The Times with survey data showing that among all voters, Democrats are 56 percent female and 42 percent male, while Republicans are 52 percent male and 48 percent female, for a combined gender gap of 18 points. Pew found identical gender splits among voters who identify as liberal and those who identify as conservative. CONTINUED

Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times

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Abortion grows as priority issue for Democrats

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With Roe v. Wade facing its strongest threat in decades, a new poll finds Democrats increasingly view protecting abortion rights as a high priority for the government.

Thirteen percent of Democrats mentioned abortion or reproductive rights as one of the issues they want the federal government to address in 2022, according to a December poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That’s up from less than 1% of Democrats who named it as a priority for 2021 and 3% who listed it in 2020. CONTINUED

Hannah Fingerhut, Associated Press

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