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Following her recent claims that she had the 2016 election “stolen” from her, Hillary Clinton is now indicating that Vladimir Putin may have determined the election outcome. Clinton took her tin-foil hat conspiracy theory on stage to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire Wednesday. "If you are an American, the idea that our election is being trifled with, being impacted and may be determined by Putin and the Kremlin and his intelligence service and military and all of their assorted allies and agents. That should give us heartburn because we cannot have a strong relationship with Russia for good or ill...

With a robust economy, most people would think it would be nearly impossible to defeat an incumbent president – and it should be under normal circumstances. But circumstances we are living under today are unfortunately far from normal. President Trump – whose frequently criticized conduct and lies have become part of our daily lives – and his administration are giving Democrats a gift like we’ve never seen. That gift is something that was lacking during the 2016 election cycle, when Hillary Clinton got over 3 million more votes than Trump but lost the election as a result of his victory...

Trump’s success story in the Midwest will be hard for Democrats to top.Regardless of who wins the Democratic nomination for president one year from now, the party’s deep pockets already are prepping the groundwork to make sure that history—or herstory, if you will—does not repeat itself in 2020. The Democratic presidential candidate’s path to the White House doesn’t run along the Acela Corridor or the Pacific Coast Highway, but rather across Interstate 94 in the upper midsection of the country. Democrats learned this the hard way in 2016. For all her excuses—Russian social media bots, former FBI Director James Comey,...

About Ranked-choice voting (RCV) is a type of ranked preferential voting method used in single-seat elections with more than two candidates. How it works Ballots are initially counted for each voter's top choice. If a candidate has more than half of the vote based on first-choices, that candidate wins. If not, then the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. The voters who selected the defeated candidate as a first choice then have their votes added to the totals of their next choice. This process continues until a candidate has more than half of the votes. When the field is...

Greetings from Houston, where in barely 24 hours on the ground, I’ve already experienced four flash flood warnings and a Vietnamese-Cajun crawfish restaurant. Sometimes I have bad ideas, and we’re going to talk about one of them in this edition of Silver Bulletpoints, in which we cover three topics related to the 2020 primary, each in 300 words or less. Bulletpoint No. 1: Here are the four major meta-messages for 2020 With so many presidential candidates — now 20, by FiveThirtyEight’s count — you could almost sort the Democrats into an NCAA Tournament bracket, with the various candidates seeded into...

Former Vice President Joe Biden made his first visit to Los Angeles as a presidential candidate Wednesday, spending part of the day chatting with voters about border security, and issues specific to California -- over tacos. Biden mixed it up with donors at two campaign fundraisers. In a 20-minute speech to around 250 people, Biden said he was running to “restore the backbone of this country” and drew on his experience as a qualification to lead the nation. A small group of protesters from the National Union of Healthcare Workers gathered nearby to raise concerns with event host Dr. Cynthia...

PANAMA CITY BEACH, Fla.-President Trump, speaking at a rally hours after the White House invoked executive privilege to block the release of special counsel Robert Mueller's full report, predicted congressional Democrats' investigations would propel him to a reelection victory in 2020. Trump did not directly address his administration's decision to defy a subpoena from House Democrats, a move that raised the specter of a constitutional crisis, but he said the party's desire to probe his administration, campaign and businesses would backfire politically. "They want to do investigations instead of investments," the president told a crowd of supporters at an outdoor...

Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) said Wednesday that President Trump's attempts to block Congress from performing its oversight function is indicative of his growing authoritarianism. "They’re throwing every obstacle in our way because the president has in many respects become a dictator," Speier said on CNN. "He is trying to prevent Congress from doing its oversight action, and we won’t accept that." Speier's comments came as tensions continue to escalate between Democrats and the Trump administration over special counsel Robert Mueller's report into Russia's election interference and whether Trump committed obstruction of justice.

“There was a $2 trillion tax cut last year. Did you feel it? Did you get anything from it? Of course not. … All of it went to folks at the top and corporations.” That was Joe Biden at a Pittsburgh union workers’ rally ten days ago. C’mon, Joe. You know better. It was an ironic kickoff from the guy who promised the Summer of Recovery in 2010. But the former vice president finds himself in the same politically awkward place as most of the Democratic presidential field and their congressional leaders. Though they try to maintain the false narrative,...

Susan Cropper cast her vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Two years later, on a Friday afternoon in October, she traveled to Bloomington, Indiana, to tell her story to Bernie Sanders. Seated in a small conference room, with cameras rolling and reporters watching, she explained that after 31 years at United Technologies Corp., a manufacturing company Trump promised to save, she lost her job. Now, Cropper said, she lives off credit cards. And every now and then, she’ll pick up free 10-pound bags of potatoes at the local food bank. “It's humiliating,” she said. “I’ve spent my whole life being...

Sen. Bernie Sanders has a story for black audiences. They’ve just heard it already. “I was actually at the March on Washington with Dr. King back in 1963,” Sanders likes to remind audiences. “As somebody who actively supported Jesse Jackson’s campaign — as one of the few white elected officials to do so in ’88 — I have dedicated my life to the fight against racism and sexism and discrimination of all forms.” His most recent audience, at a candidate forum in Texas dedicated to women of color, She the People, responded with a round of groans. Four years after...

Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman is challenging two broadly-accepted understandings about Joe Biden and the 2020 presidential race. That Biden’s moderation muddies his chance to lead a left-leaning Democratic Party, while his broad acceptability and blue-collar appeal makes him the strongest Democrat against Donald Trump. But the opposite could be the case - circumstances make his chances of winning the nomination strong, but his age and moderate views could dampen voter enthusiasm in the general election. The Democrats best-equipped to beat Trump, Wasserman says, include a young gay man and a young black woman who make party traditionalists nervous.

Joe Biden did Donald Trump a huge favor when he announced his presidential run with a campaign ad that featured the tragedy of Charlottesville as a central theme. I don’t think he meant to, because the obvious intention was to paint the current occupant of the White House as a racist who thinks some neo-Nazis are good people. While stirring music plays in the background, the former vice president looks somberly into the camera and says: “It was there in August of 2017 that you saw Klansmen and white supremacists and neo-Nazis come out in the open. … And they...

Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the early front-runners in the 2020 Democratic presidential field, said Saturday that President Donald Trump’s handling of North Korea is one area where he doesn’t “fault” the current commander-in-chief. Speaking to ABC News’ Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl in an exclusive interview for “This Week,” the Vermont senator said that Trump meeting face-to-face with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “is the right thing to do.” Karl asked Sanders how he would respond as president to the apparent launch of unidentified short-range projectiles by North Korea into the Sea of Japan Friday night. “You...

Joe Biden is putting his own spin on President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan. On ABC’s “Good Morning America,” the former vice president said his motto would be: “Make America Moral Again.” Biden, who has not been shy about his intention to criticize Trump from the outset of his campaign, ripped into the president's handling of the country while in office. "Make America return to the essence of who we are, the dignity of the country, the dignity of people, treating our people with dignity," Biden said. "End this god-awful, deliberate division that’s being taken in order...

Joe Biden’s long-awaited announcement that he is running for President—in a highly produced video with a distracting piano soundtrack—officially knocked Bernie Sanders out of first place in the Democratic field. That’s a relief for a lot of establishment Dems, who have spent the last several weeks ramping up the hits on Bernie, as it has become increasingly clear that the plainspoken Democratic Socialist from Vermont has a credible shot at becoming the Democrats’ nominee in 2020. Sanders’s socialism is scary for an establishment that worries a lot about electability. More than that, his populist attacks on Wall Street, corporations, and...

Donald Trump cannot win the 2020 election, but the Democrats sure as hell can lose it. That’s why the Democrats have two options for the 2020 presidental race: Make the race a referendum on Trump and Trumpism, or lose. It’s just that simple. So please, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, Joe Biden, if you’re running, and the other dozen people stuffed into the growing field, heed my prayer: Check yourselves before you wreck yourselves, because at the rate you’re going, rushing to the left with reckless abandon, Trump’s reelection is looking more and more likely....

Shortly after Sanders took the stage, Sayu Bhojwani, the founder and president of New American Leaders, asked him a pointed question about fighting white nationalism: “What do you believe is the federal government’s role to fight against the rise of white nationalism and white terrorist acts, and how do you plan to lead on that in your first year as president?” Starting off by saying that the “demagoguery we are seeing from the Trump administration is not what this country is about” and that he would “do everything I can to help lead this country in a direction to end...

I’ve always been a fan of Joe Biden. I admire his authorship of the Violence Against Women Act and his longstanding gravitas as a public servant for decades. I even contributed to the Draft Biden PAC back in 2015 in hopes that the straight talker from Scranton would enter the race for the White House. I was, indeed, “Ridin’ With Biden” as they say. I truly believe that 2016 was Joe Biden’s moment to run for president. Yes, he had run unsuccessfully twice before. And, yes, sitting vice presidents are not usually successful in their bid for the top job....

A senior Trump ally says he expects impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump - despite Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi attempting to steer party members away from the move. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, chair of the senate judiciary committee, made the prediction on Twitter on Tuesday morning. He declared that the ‘radical left’ is now in charge of the Democratic Party, meaning attempts by House Speaker Ms Pelosi to avoid divisive impeachment proceedings will fail. “Nancy Pelosi is not in charge of the Democratic Party. The radical left is in charge. “So, I will expect that there will be impeachment proceedings against...