Month: May 2015

GOP Race has No Frontrunner

Buck Banks

10%

Percentage of the vote that Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio and Scott Walker share, according to a new Quinnipiac poll that highlights how there is no frontrunner in the GOP presidential race. Said pollster Tim Malloy: “Safe to say, the 2016 Republican presidential primary is anyone’s race. With no frontrunner and identical numbers for the top five contenders, it’s a horserace which can only be described as a scrambled field – at least so far.”

Blumenthal Was on Clinton Foundation Payroll While Advising State Department

Buck Banks

$10,000

Monthly salary Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime confidant of Bill and Hillary Clinton, earned as a full-time employee of the Clinton Foundation while he was providing unsolicited intelligence on Libya to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Politico reports. “Blumenthal was added to the payroll of the Clintons’ global philanthropy in 2009 — not long after advising Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign — at the behest of former president Bill Clinton, for whom he had worked in the White House, say the sources.”

Walker Thinks Mandatory Pre-Abortion Ultrasounds Are Cool

Buck Banks

We just knew if we signed that law, if we provided the information, that more people if they saw that unborn child would, would make a decision to protect and keep the life of that unborn child.

— Gov. Scott Walker (R), defending his decision to sign a law in Wisconsin mandating ultrasounds for women before they get abortions, calling ultrasounds “just a cool thing out there,” Politico reports.

Rubio Says Mainstream Christianity Is Threatened by Gay Marriage

Buck Banks

We are at the water’s edge of the argument that mainstream Christian teaching is hate speech, because today we’ve reached the point in our society where if you do not support same-sex marriage, you are labeled a homophobe and a hater. … So what’s the next step after that? After they’re done going after individuals, the next step is to argue that the teachings of mainstream Christianity, the catechism of the Catholic Church, is hate speech.

— Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), telling the Christian Broadcasting Network that Christianity faces a “real and present danger” from same-sex marriage supporters who cast opponents as intolerant.

The GOP’s Math Problem Will Only Get Worse

Buck Banks

If the 2016 GOP nominee gets no better than Romney’s 17 percent of the nonwhite vote, he or she would need 65 percent of the white vote to win, a level achieved in modern times only by Ronald Reagan in his 1984 landslide. Bush’s 2004 winning formula — 26 percent of the nonwhite vote and 58 percent of the white vote — would be a losing formula in 2016, given population changes. … The 2016 electorate, demographically speaking, will be worse for Republicans than 2012. And unless Republicans can begin winning more of the nonwhite vote, the 2020 election will be worse for the party than the 2016 election. And 2024 will be worse than, well, you get the idea.

— The Fix

Liberals Now Equal Conservatives

Buck Banks

31%

For the first time since Gallup began tracking it in 1999, there are now as many Americans who describe their views on social issues as “liberal” as there are who describe them as “conservative,” the Washington Post reports. “It’s been a long and slow crawl, but Americans have steadily become more liberal on social issues without much interruption — except for a brief dip when President Obama first took office in 2009. Today, it’s tied at 31 percent. Back in 1999, it was about two-to-one conservative over liberal.”