Presidential Primary Brief: 175 days until Election Day

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Primary Brief_9 May 2016

175 days until Election Day

Convention Dates: Republican July 18-21 2016, Democratic July 25-28 2016

Weekly Headlines:

Primary Brief_GOP Polls_16 May 2016

Primary Brief_Dem Polls_16 May 2016

Press Clips:

America’s Speed Date with Bernie Sanders (Washington Post 5/15/16)

When Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont announced his candidacy last spring, he trailed Hillary Clinton by 56 points in national polling. He had the support of less than 6 percent of Democrats. How many of those Democrats were residents of Vermont is hard to say, but it’s pretty safe to assume that part of Sanders’s low poll numbers were the fact that, to most Americans, he was one of the vast majority of the United States of whom they’d never heard. That changed.

Quickly. Gallup conducts regular polling on how Americans view presidential candidates, asking respondents whether they view politicians favorably or unfavorably. There’s a third option, too; people can tell Gallup whether they’ve never heard of the candidate. And using that metric, we can get a good sense for how quickly (or slowly) awareness of presidential candidates spread across the country.

State GOP leaders crush ‘Never Trump’ rebellions (Politico 5/14/16) 

Republican activists chose party unity over “never Trump” resistance Saturday, with party leaders in one state after another pressuring their members to fall in line behind the presumptive nominee — and even punishing those who refused. Eleven states held annual Republican conventions or party leadership meetings Saturday, offering a platform for those who still object to Donald Trump as their party’s standard-bearer a prime opportunity to make mischief. But at almost every turn, they slammed into state leaders who closed ranks around a candidate who many once said they’d never support.

A GOP senator just compared the 2016 election with 9/11 (The Week 5/15/16) 

Speaking at the Wisconsin Republican Party Convention on Saturday, Sen. Ron Johnson likened the 2016 presidential election to Sept. 11’s Flight 93, which crashed after the passengers decided to fight the hijackers and keep the plane from hitting its target. “We’re going to be encouraging our fellow citizens to take a vote,” said Johnson, who has endorsed Donald Trump. “It may not be life and death, like the vote the passengers on United Flight 93 took, but boy is it consequential.”

If it ends up Trump vs. Clinton, over 25% of born-again Christians are ready to skip voting (Christian Today 5/15/16)

An ongoing interactive “polling explorer” by Reuters news agency indicated that as of Friday, May 13, 25.9 percent of “born again Christians” will neither vote for Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton, and will vote for a third candidate or abstain from voting instead. With the “born-again Christian” filter applied for the May 13 Reuters polling, Trump was favored by 43 percent of 422 respondents while Clinton registered 30.8 percent. However, without any filter, the polling results showed Clinton getting the vote of 38.1 percent of the respondents while Trump had 34 percent. The “Other/wouldn’t vote/refused” sector registered 27.9 percent.

Poll predictor Nate Silver gives Trump 25% chance of beating Clinton in November (Washington Times 5/15/16) 

Political prognosticator Nate Silver said Sunday that he gives Republican Donald Trump a 25 percent chance of winning the 2016 presidential election, while noting that he has been wrong before. Mr. Silver admitted that he initially gave Mr. Trump only a 5 percent chance of capturing the Republican nomination, saying he would peak early and “flame out” like 2012 presidential contender Herman Cain. “This is one of the crazier things we’ve seen in politics for a long time. I think it was fair for us to be skeptical early on about the odds this could occur,” Mr. Silver told CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”

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