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79%
Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “Democrats start the cycle favored to hold the House majority, but a GOP presidential victory would open the door to Republicans restoring total control of Washington. … Overall, roughly equal numbers of Democratic (47) and Republican (46) districts begin the cycle listed in our ratings in the Toss-up, Leans, and Likely categories. That means that more than three of every four House districts (79%) begin the cycle as rated Safe for the incumbent party.”
$50,000
President Trump’s former fixer and personal attorney Michael Cohen paid a technology expert to rig online polls in Trump’s favor, the Wall Street Journal reports. John Gauger, the owner of Red Finch Solutions and chief information officer at Liberty University, said Cohen offered him $50,000 to rig two online polls. Cohen handed Gauger a Walmart bag loaded with about $12,000 in cash during a 2015 meeting at Cohen’s Trump Organization office, but he never paid him the remainder of the promised $50,000.
7 points
A new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll finds President Trump’s approval rating down by a net 7-point change to 39% to 53% over the last month. The movement has come from within key portions of his base: He’s down significantly among suburban men, a net-positive approval rating of 51% to 39% to a net-negative of 42% approve, 48% disapprove. That’s a net change of down 18 percentage points. He’s also down a net of 13 points among white evangelicals and down a net of 10 points among Republicans.
57%
PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll. “Another 30% of voters said they would cast their ballot to support Trump, and an additional 13% said they had no idea who would get their vote.”
40.2%
Nate Silver: “The partial government shutdown is beginning to drag on President Trump’s approval rating, which is at its lowest point in months. As of early Wednesday evening, his approval rating was 40.2 percent, according to our tracking of public polling, down from 42.2 percent on Dec. 21, the day before the shutdown began. It’s his lowest score since last September. And Trump’s disapproval rating was 54.8 percent, up from 52.7 percent before the shutdown. His net approval rating, -14.6 percent, was at its lowest point since February 2018.”
“That’s stupid. How can the president of the United States be an agent of another country? Just think about that.”
— Yuri Ushakov, Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy aide, dismissing as “nonsense” claims that President Trump has been working on Russia’s behalf, Bloomberg reports.
5
New York Times: “Mr. Trump has adamantly insisted there was ‘no collusion’ with Russia during his 2016 presidential campaign. But each of the five times he has met with Mr. Putin since taking office, he has fueled suspicions about their relationship. The unusually secretive way he has handled these meetings has left many in his own administration guessing what happened and piqued the interest of investigators.”
“A revolving door of deeply flawed individuals — amateurs, grifters, weaklings, convicted and unconvicted felons — who were hustled into jobs they were never suited for, sometimes seemingly without so much as a background check via Google or Wikipedia.”
— Former Gov. Chris Christie, writing about the Trump White House in “Let Me Finish.”
“He gets frustrated when there is a plan. He’s not a guy who likes a plan… There’s an animosity towards planning, and there’s a desire to pick fights that have nothing to do with us.”
— An unnamed adviser to President Trump, quoted by Axios.
