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The great fear of those who did not support Donald Trump's election in 2016 was that if America hit a crisis point -- a virtual certainty, over a span of four years -- Trump would prove to be dangerously unstable and not know how to deal with it. The consequences could be alarming, as Ted Cruz joked about on the campaign trail at the time:
The mainstream media does a good job on some things, I'd be the first to admit. But admitting they were wrong is simply not one of them.
Case in point is Elizabeth Warren's DNA test. Back when she revealed the results of the test, the inside-the-Beltway punditocracy jumped to a rather overblown conclusion: Warren's DNA test had been such a monumental and fundamental error that her campaign for the presidency was over before it began. Warren's chances were completely written off by just about every pundit banging on a keyboard. She was toast, they all told each other at their cocktail parties, and they shared this conventional wisdom with their readers and viewers, confident that it was an accurate read of the situation.
This week, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Donald Trump, for some strange reason, now wants to try to buy Greenland again. The Washington Post later followed up on the story:
The 2020 Democratic presidential field shrunk today, as John Hickenlooper dropped out of the race. He becomes the fourth such candidate to do so (after Richard Ojeda, Eric Swalwell, and Mike Gravel), but even with four gone there are still a whopping 23 candidates left in the running.
Will anything actually change this time around? Will these mass shootings finally spur the politicians to act, when all the others didn't? While it's easy to be pessimistic, since it is rare indeed that anything happens after such tragedies, perhaps this time is different. We couldn't say why this time seems to have had more of an impact than the other 250 times it has happened this year, but so far it has. Perhaps it was the fact that there were multiple mass shootings in a single day or perhaps it was the high body count or perhaps it was the El Paso gunman's obvious racist motivation, but for whatever reason this time could be different.
A real Twitter war has now erupted. This is not a mere "tweetstorm," where people snipe at each other through Twitter messages, this is a dispute between Twitter itself and what looks to be the entire Republican Party election machine. How it all ends nobody knows, but it was almost inevitable that Twitter would eventually get sucked in to the partisan divide in one way or another. In this growing conflict, Twitter fired the first shot, by locking up Mitch McConnell's election site for posting a threatening video (the video was of protesters outside Mitch's house threatening him, so it wasn't like the campaign was threatening anyone else, in all fairness). The Republicans have returned fire by announcing they are pulling all election Twitter ad spending. So far, neither side has blinked.
Over 200 House Democrats just signed a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell which demands he allow Senate votes on the universal background check bills that have already passed the House with bipartisan support. Democrats are also saying McConnell should call the Senate back from their August recess to hold a special session devoted to passing these bills. This seems unlikely, seeing as how Mitch doesn't want to pass these bills in the first place. But perhaps shaming him into doing something might eventually bear fruit, if Democrats keep the pressure on McConnell until the Senate does reconvene.
We're beginning to see some polling which reflects the impressions the voters got in the second round of Democratic debates. It's still early and these trends won't become really solid until we see at least another week's worth of polling, but it's still worth taking a look to see where the Democratic field apparently now stands. So far, there hasn't been a whole lot of dramatic movement in the polls. There are really only three mini-trends to watch, and two of them really began before the debates even got started.
Well, the second round of the Democratic debates is over, which means we are now smack in the middle of the debate about the debates. This is a window where we don't yet have an accurate picture of whether this week's debates will change anything in the polling (likely outcome: not very much), so instead of hard data all we have to argue about is sheer speculation and opinion. And, from what's being said, some are wringing their hands with worry.
Whew! The second Democratic presidential debates are now officially in the history books. Thankfully, this will likely be the last marathon two-night debate round, as the third debate is likely to cut the field so significantly that those who qualify might all be able to fit on a single stage.