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Republican Ron Estes defeated his Democratic rival in a high-profile special congressional election in Kansas Tuesday that had been seen as a referendum on President Donald Trump. But the narrower-than-expected outcome may worry Republicans across the country as they try to decipher how much Trump's low approval ratings might hurt his party's candidates. Trump and former Rep. Mike Pompeo, who vacated the seat to become CIA director, had both won the district by nearly 30 percentage points in November. But Estes appears to have dramatically underperformed that margin, with early returns showing him leading Democrat James Thompson by just about...

Even if Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had won last year’s Democratic presidential primary, he wouldn’t have defeated Donald Trump in the general election, says former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D). “I don’t believe so,” O’Malley speculated Friday on DC/BS, a political podcast hosted by Jon Allen and Peter Ogburn. O’Malley was one of Sanders’ presidential primary challengers, and he didn’t get very far. His campaign fizzled out after the Iowa caucuses. The Huffington Post was there for his final event, when he stood on a chair in a cramped campaign office in Des Moines and urged the 100 or so...

The Democrats and some Republican NeverTrump bitter-enders are still so addled by losing the election that they have lost themselves in a political Area 51. Like peddlers of space-alien autopsies and earthling abductions, they are spinning preposterous conspiracy theories straight out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, while the real story––the illegal leaks of classified intelligence involving American citizens––is ignored. We all know the lurid scenario: Vladimir Putin, filled with hatred of Hillary for criticizing and sanctioning him for his invasions of his neighbors’ territories, “hacked” the election in order to tilt the outcome to Donald Trump. Trump, after all,...

Almost four months after her stunning defeat, Hillary Clinton on Thursday primarily blamed her loss to President Donald Trump on four factors that were beyond her control. The former Democratic presidential candidate cited Russian meddling in the election, FBI Director James Comey's involvement toward the end of the race, WikiLeaks theft of emails from her campaign chairman, and misogyny. Clinton's comments came during her first post-election interview at Tina Brown's eighth annual Women in the World Summit in New York City. She was questioned by Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times. She largely cited these factors for her defeat....

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/04/john-kasich-donald-trump-gop-2020

Donald Trump supporters are not racist “deplorables” and Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party are to blame for November’s shock election defeat: So said Clinton’s defeated primary challenger Sen. Bernie Sanders during a rally in Boston Friday night. In a comment seized upon by the Trump campaign, Clinton famously said in September that half of Trump’s supporters were “deplorables,” a comment which she almost immediately said she regretted....

While the majority of the mainstream media focuses all of their energy on reporting every item they can find which looks like “bad news” for the Trump administration, they’re clearly generating something of a sense of false optimism among Democrats. There still seems to be some sort of (primarily delusional) hope that if these investigations into Russian meddling bear fruit, then last November’s elections can be swept under the rug and Hillary Clinton can be carried on the shoulders of the adoring crowds and installed at the White House. (Or at least Trump could be swapped out for someone else.)...

A few days before the Women's March in January, congressional candidate Wendy Carrillo was getting friends together to head to the protest in her hometown of Los Angeles. Then she got a phone call that would change her life. The organizers wanted her to speak in Washington in front of a massive crowd, in one of the biggest protests in U.S. history. The opportunity gave her an unprecedented platform: She would be the only political candidate to speak at the Women's March in Washington. Now she's the first person running for national office to receive the outspoken support of the...

President Trump’s attacks on conservative members of his own party come as his allies beef up an array of groups to promote his agenda, amassing firepower that could end up trained on fellow Republicans. At least four separate organizations are now seeking to drive public support for Trump and his priorities — a marked shift from the first two months of his administration, when the White House had limited outside air cover. The immediate goal: to lean on Democratic senators in the run-up to a vote expected this week on Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. But down the road, some...

Hillary Clinton’s staff covered just about everything having to do with her daily life and that included being asked to help make funeral arrangements for the former secretary of state, according to newly released emails. Judicial Watch has released another batch of emails today and while there’s no great scandal bubbling up so far, some very strange emails are worth taking a gander at. Anyone who has followed Hillary Clinton is acquainted with the name Huma Abedin. She is a long-time trusted aid, or rather right-hand person of Hillary Clinton. She recently revealed that her marriage breakup had a lot...

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has some advice to help bridge the current political divide: Don’t make fun of those who voted for Donald Trump. Sanders, who spoke Friday at Boston’s Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, has been vocal about opposing the political views of the current president. But, the former Democratic presidential candidate said he doesn’t want Americans to dislike their fellow countrmen who put Trump in office. “If you sit at home and think, well, Trump won because all the people who voted for him are racist or sexist or homophobes, I think you got...

Students and residents in Charlottesville, Virginia, protested Republican Rep. Tom Garrett’s first town hall Friday with a massive sign stating “no dialogue with white supremacy” and chants including “say it loud, say it clear: immigrants are welcome here.” Garrett met with protests both inside and outside of the building at the University of Virginia where he hosted the town hall, reports NBC 29. Both Showing Up for Racial Justice and UVA Students United organized the protests. (VIDEO-AT-LINK) “[W]e refuse to give him a platform to spout his politics of racial terror and white supremacy,” the Charlottesville chapter of Showing Up...

Former Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday indirectly knocked Hillary Clinton's failed 2016 campaign at a Thursday event, suggesting that the former secretary of state failed to talk to middle-class voters. "What happened was that this was the first campaign that I can recall where my party did not talk about what it always stood for -- and that was how to maintain a burgeoning middle class," Biden said during an appearance at the University of Pennsylvania. "You didn't hear a single solitary sentence in the last campaign about that guy working on the assembly line making $60,000 bucks a...

It hasn’t been a good few months for the Democratic Party, and if its activists’ reaction to the Congressional Black Caucus meeting with President Donald Trump is any indication, it’s not going to get better. Under former President Barack Obama’s stewardship, Democrats lost the 2016 presidential election, House, Senate, governorships and state legislatures across the country. Now they’re dealing with an identity crisis with no clear solution — one that is primed to cause more intraparty conflict than the tea party caused the Republican Party. Despite all this failure, they succeeded at one thing: throwing away the old and creating...

As they investigate the forces behind the party’s stunning losses in November, Democrats are coming to a troubling conclusion. The party didn’t just lose among rural white voters on Election Day, it may have failed to capture them in its pre-election polling as well. Many pollsters and strategists believe that rural white voters, particularly those without college degrees, eluded the party’s polling altogether — and their absence from poll results may have been both a cause and a symptom of Donald Trump’s upset victory over Hillary Clinton in several states. . . Determining what exactly happened is one of the...

It's a given that Newton liberals have little patience for anyone or anything Republican. If candidates are Republican, they must be stopped. If policies are Republican, they must be stopped. If their neighbor, colleague or parents of their kids' friends are Republican, they must be stopped from entering their liberal safe space. They'll sometimes tolerate Republican politicians if they at least appear to bend over backwards to accommodate Democrats. Charlie Baker can be tolerated, for now, and for as long as the Boston Globe approves of him. But their tolerance will stop at his re-election bid next year when they'll...

Saturday marked a day full of Presidential and Vice Presidential motorcades traveling back and forth across Palm Beach County. For the first time since taking office, President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence are visiting Palm Beach at the same time. Supporters gathering to watch the President's motorcade return from his golf course to Mar-a-Lago got the surprise of a lifetime Saturday afternoon. A small group had lined up on Bingham Island with signs and flags. "We waved to him, the cars went by really fast, and we were just sitting down talking about the events of the day,"...

Some of President Trump's supporters expressed a more favorable view of him following a number of recent controversies surrounding his administration, according to an online poll released Thursday. In a handful of cases, while most registered voters expressed a negative view of Trump after the controversies, a plurality of Trump voters felt more favorably toward him, according to the Politico/Morning Consult poll. Nearly 20 percent of respondents said the polled controversies did not change their opinions of the president. Some of the controversies in the poll include the resignation of Trump's first national security adviser Michael Flynn last month, Attorney...

Just over 3 percent of those who backed Donald Trump for president now regret their vote, according to a Mood of the Nation poll from Penn State's McCourtney Institute of Democracy. "Of the 339 poll participants who originally voted for Trump, only 12 (3½ percent) said they would do something different," Michael Berkman, director of the institute and Eric Plutzer, who directed the poll, wrote in The Washington Post. Here are some of the reasons given by those surveyed, according to Berkman and Plutzer: •"I don't like his decisions so far." •"Trump's actions since the inauguration." •"… Trump cannot get...

President Donald Trump's core supporters are staying with him in his hour of need. Polls by Gallup and other survey researchers indicate that at least 80 percent of fellow Republicans approve of his job performance, even though the latest Gallup tracking survey finds that Trump has poor ratings with the general electorate. Only 39 percent of Americans approve of his job performance and 55 percent disapprove. But because his core supporters remain committed to him, it's unlikely that his overall job approval rating will decline much more, political strategists of both major parties say. This is particularly important now because...