Early Iowa Caucus results show Cruz leading 28% to Trump’s 25%. Given the huge lead in free coverage and buzz Trump enjoyed the last eight months, that has to count as a big victory. Marco Rubio was running third, at 22%.
Cruz also lead in the particular district caucus National Review attended.
On the Democratic side, results also have Hillary Clinton barely edging Bernie Sanders 51% to 49%.
Keep in mind these results are very preliminary, and the usual caveats apply.
The Iowa Caucuses are today! Why they’re Monday rather than the usual Tuesday, I couldn’t tell you. (And speaking of elections, today is your last day to register to vote in the March 1 Texas primary.)
Here’s a LinkSwarm with more than a dollop of presidential election news:
Back in 2015 the CBO estimated 21 million Obamacare enrollees in 2016. They are now estimating 13 million will sign up this year. How many will actually sign up is not going to be known for another year or so, but I wouldn’t particularly bet on it being more than 21 million, and I wouldn’t particularly counsel against thinking that it’ll be less than 13 million.
Oh, the news gets better. The original claim that 11 million people signed up for Obamacare in 2015 has likewise been revised by this report, which now apparently reports 9.5 million. And here’s something that will really reassure folks worried about our deficits: the original assumption was that there would be 15 million subsidized plans and 6 million unsubsidized ones in 2015, or 71%/29%. The actual totals were 11 million subsidized, 2 million unsubsidized, or 85%/15%. Let me put it a different way: the Obama administration has managed to somehow simultaneously drastically miss their signup goals AND do so in a way where there won’t even a commensurate savings for taxpayers.
Bernie Sanders was already up over Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, but not by this much:
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has opened up his widest lead yet over rival Hillary Clinton in the crucial state of New Hampshire, according to a new poll released Tuesday.
The new WMUR/CNN poll out this afternoon shows the Vermont lawmaker with a whopping 27-point lead over the former Secretary of State — 60-33 percent. That’s a climb of 10 percentage points for Sanders since mid-December and a drop of 7 points for Clinton. It marks Sanders’ highest support and widest lead in any poll in any state so far.
The usual poll caveats and the fact that Sanders hails from neighboring Vermont applies. But that sort of result would have looked positively loony six months ago. Now? It’s just another data point in Hillary’s catastrophic collapse.
Hillary can surviving losing to Sanders in New Hampshire, but I’m not sure she can survive getting walloped by that much…
The way things are unfolding, it’s almost like the fates themselves have stepped in to stop Hillary from grabbing the Democratic Presidential nomination.
Hillary’s national lead is slipping faster than it did in 2016.
The plan to hide Hillary from the prying eyes of voters seems to be backfiring. “The irony is that it would be in her interests rather than those of [Bernie] Sanders to have the debates at times when more people would tune in. She has performed better than he has in debates, which has allowed her to make up for his far greater appeal on the stump.”
Well, that is until last night’s debate: “Bernie mopped the floor with Hillary.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.) Ditto the Washington Post, which tabbed Sanders as the winner and Clinton as the loser. “She did nothing in the debate to slow the momentum that Sanders is building in Iowa and New Hampshire.”
It also doesn’t help that the most Googled question ruing the debate was “Will Hillary Clinton get prosecuted?”
On on top of all this, out comes 13 Hours, Michael Bay’s movie about Benghazi. “This movie is a massive, gaping wound in Hillary’s campaign.”
Instead of Iowa being the first step in Hillary’s coronation, it looks increasingly likely her campaign’s derailment will start there in earnest. Just like in 2008…
Could the facade of inevitability that Hillary Clinton built up crack wide open?
First comes word that Clinton is almost even with Bernie Sanders nationwide, leading a mere 43% to 39%. (Hat tip: Push Junction.)
Add to that the fact that the most recent polls in Iowa show the race there tied after Hillary being up some 40 points a few points ago.
In New Hampshire, recent polls have Sanders up anywhere from 3 to 14 points.
And even though Clinton has raised more money, Sanders has done very well in fundraising, bringing in $33 million in the final quarter and $73 million for all of 2015. That’s not the fundraising total of someone running a token campaign. A huge number of Democrats (more than 2.3 million of them, a number which surpasses Obama’s 2011 reelection efforts) believe in Sanders enough to donate to his campaign.
Finally, Sanders just got endorsed by MoveOn.org. The irony here, of course, is that MoveOn was created entirely as a medium for attack proponents of Bill Clinton’s impeachment for lying under oath and obstruction of justice. Given their genesis as an extension of the Clintons, it’s a surprise that MoveOn has moved on from them.
Hillary’s campaign was always predicated on her supposed inevitability, her fundraising prowess, her supposed viability, and voter familiarity with her due to her extremely high profile. But with a myriad array of ongoing scandals dogging her (Benghazi, her email server, the Clinton Foundation “pay for play” donations, etc.), familiarity seems to have bred contempt among a large number of Democratic Party faithful.
And one additional scandal not her own, rape and sexual assault allegations against Bill Cosby, have brought renewed scrutiny to Bill Clinton’s serial sexual assault and rape allegations, bringing up Hillary’s complicity in smearing Bill’s accusers, as well as turning one of Hillary’s biggest potential assets (having the once-popular 42nd President campaign for her) into a potential liability.
Finally, 2016 is shaping up to be The Year of the Outsider, when voters on both sides of the political spectrum said “Enough!”, embracing the unscripted bluntness of Donald Trump over the poll-focused banalities so beloved by consultants and the chattering classes. Hillary proved less than overwhelmingly popular with Democratic Party voters in 2008, and there’s precious little reason to believe she’s gotten more popular since then. She’s not a bright fresh face, and she lacks both Obama’s personal magnetism and his unique appeal to both black voters and white liberal guilt.
If Democratic Party voters decide that Bernie Sanders is a viable candidate, then he’s a viable candidate for the nomination. It may simply come down to the fact that Democrats wish to cast their votes for a candidate without feeling they need to take a shower afterwards.
I included the DNC data breach story in my LinkSwarm roundup, but the more I look at it, the less the story seems like “data breach by Bernie Sanders team” and more like “dirty tricks by Hillary Clinton’s team.”
Here’s a description by Slashdot poster Chris Johnson that states the case:
NGP-VAN, the company that stores this data, which is run by an old Clinton hand who worked for them in 1992, the company paid $34,000 by Ready For Hillary, was repeatedly dropping their firewall between the two major Dem campaigns, Clinton and Sanders.
A guy who’s now fired from the Sanders team observed this. They complained once and were given assurances by the company that it was a mistake and wouldn’t happen again. Then it happened again. The guy decided to gauge how deeply the Clinton campaign was able to read into the Sanders campaign, by experimenting to see how much of the Clinton data he could get. That’s a bad call but by information security standards it’s not unthinkable: it’d be called a white hat intrusion, seeing how much of the firewall was down by probing the other side and assuming your own data was revealed exactly the same way. It does matter, but you still have to fire the guy.
One thing we can be sure of is, anything open to ‘stealing’ on the Clinton side was just as open on the Sanders side, literally. It’s the same system and the same firewall, and if the firewall keeps mysteriously going down for no good reason you have to wonder what’s up and more relevantly what’s being made available to those on the other side of the firewall, which might explain why the firewall’s going down like that.
The Sanders people did NOT throw a fit the first time this happened. But this time, the Sanders guy got caught crossing the nonexistent firewall. We have no information at all on whether anybody from the Clinton side was doing the same thing. During that time there WAS NO firewall and the guy wasn’t hacking, he was browsing, as anybody on either side could have done during those windows.
I think that’s accurate so far. The behavior of the firewall is important, whether or not it’s suspicious as a planned exploit of the Sanders data run by Clinton people who are at the DNC and at NGP-VAN.
In response to the Sanders guy browsing over and seeing data (how do they know? Because HE TOLD THEM. The Sanders team were the ones reporting this, that’s part of the story), the DNC suspended access by the Sanders campaign to THEIR OWN DATA at a crucial time. In order to get access back, at least as of this morning, the requirement is for the Sanders campaign to prove it has destroyed all data that it didn’t necessarily even download (remember, Sanders guy claims he was exploring the Clinton system because it would mirror the vulnerability of the Sanders system, and he’s not IN the Clinton system to go and browse the Sanders side to see how much is revealed, but he was IN the Sanders side and could look at the Clinton side and reasonably conclude that his own side was equally compromised)
And social media is blowing the hell up, not unreasonably, because it’s a goddamn hatchet job combined with a kneecapping to yank access by the Bernie campaign to its OWN DATA because a guy from the Bernie campaign passively browsed through a firewall he didn’t himself disable, a firewall run by a company controlled by Clinton partisans which had been going down already for reasons unknown.
This seems consistent with the facts, consistent with the DNC being “all in” on the Hillary coronation, and consistent with the Sanders campaign suing the DNC for access to their own freaking data.
by their action, the leadership of the Democratic National Committee is now actively attempting to undermine our campaign. This is unacceptable. Individual leaders of the DNC can support Hillary Clinton in any way they want, but they are not going to sabotage our campaign – one of the strongest grassroots campaigns in modern history.
We are announcing today that if the DNC continues to hold our data hostage, and continues to try to attack the heart and soul of our campaign, we will be in federal court this afternoon seeking an immediate injunction.
What is required here is a full and independent audit of the DNC’s handling of this data and its security from the beginning of this campaign to the present, including the incident in October that we alerted them to.
The incident is also consistent with Hillary’s own repeated Nixonian dishonesty. It’s not enough that she has the weakest slate of primary challengers for a non-incumbent since Nelson Rockefeller decided to bow out and let Nixon have the GOP nomination in 1960. Hillary is so used to winning through lies and dirty tricks she does it even when she doesn’t need to. It’s simply who she is.
Another Friday, another LinkSwarm, heavy on Benghazi and Presidential race news:
The meerkat keeper is a great opening sentence. But this, from the Times, is the best this year. pic.twitter.com/MwG72hn49K
— Stephen Spencer (@sspencer_63) October 15, 2015
Vice President Joe Biden has announced he’s not running for President in 2016.
So it’s Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, the crook or the socialist, as your 2016 Democratic Presidential nominee.
God help us all.
Saturday Night Live did a skit on the Democratic Presidential debate:
On the surface it’s a skit that ostensibly takes a shot at everyone equally (and even touches on Hillary’s email scandal). However, take a look at one central visual fact:
So Sanders is played by someone Hillary Clinton’s age (old), and Hillary Clinton is played by someone half her age (young). The skit is constructed to reinforce the false Sanders old, Clinton young impression, which suggests the reason why SNL choose non-cast-member Larry David to play Sanders. David did write for the show during the 1984—1985 season (where he worked with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who he would later cast in Seinfeld); to put it another way, David worked on SNL the same year McKinnon was born.