Evan McMullin's odds are improving

Evan McMullin’s star is rising. The insurgent candidate has only been on the campaign trail for two and a half months, an unbelievably short time for a presidential campaign, but he is already poised to win a state, a feat not accomplished by the Libertarian Party in its 44-year history (although the party has received one electoral vote from a faithless elector).

McMullin received some welcome publicity earlier in October when the FiveThirtyEight political blog rated his chances of winning the White House as high as three percent. Since then, McMullin surged to the lead in one Utah poll and a statistical tie in two others.

Due to extreme interest in McMullin’s campaign, FiveThirtyEight recently revisited the few Utah polls available. The analysis found that McMullin actually has a better chance of winning Utah than the average of polls indicates.

The problem with the polls is that several pollsters treat third party candidates differently than the main party candidates. Two polls that heavily favor Trump had issues that might have hurt the outcome for McMullin. A YouGov poll that gave Trump a 17-point lead only allowed respondents to select McMullin if they first selected “someone else.” Another poll by Monmouth gave Trump a 14-point lead over McMullin and six over Clinton. This poll listed third party candidates as an initial choice, but not as a secondary choice for undecided voters.

Another poll may have given McMullin an unfair boost. A poll by Rasmussen that showed McMullin one point behind Trump listed McMullin’s political affiliation as “independent conservative” when he will actually be listed on the Utah ballot as “unaffiliated.” FiveThirtyEight noted that the description as a conservative may have helped McMullin in the deeply conservative state.

The analysts at FiveThirtyEight make predictions on two models, one using polls and the “nowcast,” an estimate of what would happen if the election were held today. Using all available polls, McMullin has an estimated 14 percent chance from the polls-only forecast and 22 percent from the nowcast. When polls that didn’t treat McMullin the same as the major party candidates were excluded, his chances rose to 23 and 38 percent respectively.

The bettors on the political betting site, Predict It, seem to agree with the FiveThirtyEight assessment. Bets that McMullin will win Utah are currently trading at 36 cents. Bets that he loses are 67 cents. This is very close to the FiveThirtyEight estimate of McMullin’s chances of success.

Winning Utah is only part of McMullin’s overall strategy to deny the presidency to Trump and Hillary though. To win the election, McMullin must throw the Electoral College into a tie by denying both Trump and Hillary 270 electoral votes. FiveThirtyEight rates that possibility at less than one percent.

The blog doesn’t provide an estimate of McMullin’s chances of going all the way to the White House. They say that what would happen if the election were forced into the House of Representatives by an Electoral College deadlock “is entirely speculative.” Nevertheless, they do say that pollsters should “treat him like a candidate who has a chance to win. Because he does.”

McMullin has even earned a spot on Predict It’s market for who will win the presidential election. A bet on McMullin can currently be placed for one cent compared to 81 cents for Hillary Clinton and 21 cents for Donald Trump. In a year in which rules seem made to be broken, a one cent bet that pays a dollar if McMullin becomes president might be a good investment.

Originally published on The Resurgent

President Obama knew about Hillary's private server

New revelations from Wikileaks seem to prove that the White House knew about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server. President Obama previously denied that he had any prior knowledge of Clinton’s “homebrew” server, but Wikileaks documents suggest that the president used a pseudonym to correspond directly with Clinton’s private email address and then lied about it.

Back in March 2015, as the email scandal was breaking, President Obama said, in essence, that he did not have textual relations with Hillary’s private server. Obama told CBS News that he learned of the server at “the same time everybody else learned it through news reports.”

Obama’s denial seems to have triggered a crisis in the Clinton campaign. Andrew McCarthy at National Review points out that the same day that Obama made his comments, Josh Scherwin, the Clinton campaign secretary, emailed an alert to several Clinton staffers including Jennifer Palmieri: “Jen, you probably have more on this but it looks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it in the news.”

McCarthy then traced the email from one of the original recipients, Nick Merrill, to Clinton attorney and aide, Cheryl Mills. Mills then emailed John Podesta, chairman of Hillary’s campaign. Mills told Podesta, “We need to clean this up — he has emails from her — they do not say state.gov.”

The Mills email is damning evidence that President Obama received emails from Hillary’s private email account. It would have been impossible for the White House to not be aware that Clinton was using a private server if she had used the private email account to conduct state business with the president.

Eventually, 18 emails between Clinton and Obama were identified. On January 29, 2016 at the daily press briefing, Josh Kirby announced that the emails were “being withheld to remain confidential, to protect the President’s ability to receive unvarnished advice and counsel. And they ultimately will be released in accordance with the Presidential Records Act.” Kirby didn’t cite executive privilege, but it amounted to the same thing.

The 18 emails not only prove that Obama lied about his ignorance of Hillary’s private server, they also provide a motive for his administration to interfere with the FBI investigation of Hillary’s handling of classified information. If Hillary was guilty of mishandling classified information and had engaged in email exchanges with the president, then the president would be guilty as well.

McCarthy noted that executive privilege could not shield the president if Hillary was indicted or was the target of a grand jury investigation. “In its famous Watergate ruling, United States v. Nixon,” McCarthy wrote, “the Supreme Court held that an invocation of executive privilege to secure the confidentiality of presidential communications will not shield those communications from disclosure if they are relevant evidence in a grand-jury investigation or a criminal trial.

With President Obama linked to the private server and complicit in the cover up, Rep. Trey Gowdy’s (R-S.C.) grilling of FBI Director James Comey comes to mind. On CNBC, Gowdy said, “In your old job you would prove intent as you referenced by showing the jury evidence of a complex scheme that was designed for the very purpose of concealing the public record and you would be arguing in addition to concealment the destruction that you and i just talked about or certainly the failure to preserve.”

Now there is evidence that the president was involved in the same scheme to conceal Clinton’s purposeful mishandling of classified information. That means that President Obama is as guilty as Hillary Clinton. Not indicting Hillary was not for the benefit of the Clintons. It was to protect Barack Obama.

Originally published on The Resurgent

How Evan McMullin's strategy has already worked

This may be the year of the independent candidate. Evan McMullin seems to be taking large parts of the country by storm. Unlike many third party candidates, McMullin has both a popular message and strategy that could actually make him president. It’s a longshot, but it is a strategy that has already been proven to be workable.

The McMullin strategy is a plan in three phases. He is well on his way to completing the first phase, winning at least one electoral vote. If McMullin can win Utah, he will be the first third party candidate to win electoral votes since 1968. He will also win the possibility of becoming president, even though he will fall far short of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the Electoral College election.

The next phase of the McMullin strategy is to deny both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton 270 electoral votes. This phase depends on the Trump campaign not imploding in red states like Arizona, Texas and Georgia. Trump must also marshal his voters in the swing states to deny Hillary Clinton an outright electoral college victory. This is looking unlikely. Even Fox Business admitted yesterday that Hillary Clinton is likely to win 307 electoral votes, far more than are required to win the presidency.

Assuming that phases one and two fall into place, McMullin will have won Utah’s six electoral votes and Trump and Clinton will be deadlocked with less than 270 electoral votes each. At that point, the Constitution stipulates that the election will go to the House of Representatives, which will choose from among the top three winners of electoral votes. Each state gets one vote in the House election.

It is easy to assume that the majority Republicans would simply rubberstamp the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, but the situation isn’t that simple. The election would take place after the new Congress is seated so it is likely that there will be fewer Republicans than there are today. The fact that Donald Trump is not popular within his own party must also be considered. Finally, McMullin was a House staffer who has friends among the House Republican caucus. Some of these friends are the people who encouraged him to run in the first place.

It is unlikely that Democrats would support Donald Trump or that Republicans would break toward Hillary Clinton in a House election. It is possible that anti-Trump Republicans might forge a bipartisan majority to elect McMullin president.

If this sounds like a long shot, it is. If it sounds impossible, it isn’t. In fact, it has already happened in American history.

In the election of 1824, the Democratic-Republicans, the forerunner of today’s Democratic Party, were on a winning streak. They had won the previous six presidential elections as the Federalist party declined. James Monroe, the incumbent, was ending his second term and declined to run for a third.

Four candidates, all Democratic-Republicans, vied to succeed Monroe. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, Secretary of the Treasury William Crawford of Georgia, Speaker of the House Henry Clay of Kentucky and Gen. Andrew Jackson of Tennessee all won electoral votes. None of the candidates, however, won the majority of electoral votes required to win the election.

Andrew Jackson won the most electoral votes at 99 with John Quincy Adams running a close second at 84. Henry Clay, who finished fourth, decided to use his influence as Speaker of the House to support Adams. On February 9, 1825, the House of Representatives elected John Quincy Adams the sixth president of the United States in spite of the fact that he had received fewer electoral votes and popular votes than Andrew Jackson.

It is possible, but by no means certain, that history will repeat itself this year. The three hurdles than the McMullin campaign must clear are all long shots in and of themselves. FiveThirtyEight gives McMullin a 22 percent chance of winning Utah, but rates the chance that no one will win the Electoral College at less than one percent.

The one certainty is that Evan McMullin’s popularity hinges largely on the unpopularity of the two main candidates. If either of the two major parties had nominated a fairly honest, moderately likeable candidate that person would be winning a landslide victory. Instead we have Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

And Evan McMullin has a chance to become president.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Breitbart worked with liberal activists against Republicans

The conservative website Breitbart has been very critical of reports that a pro-Hillary group paid liberal activists to incite violence at Trump rallies. The reports, based on an undercover video by investigative filmmaker James O’Keefe, were explosive and resulted in the dismissals of at least two Democrat activists from the group Democracy Partners. Now it appears that Breitbart may have used similar tactics to disrupt the campaign events of Trump opponents in the Republican primary.

A report from Politico cites an unnamed source who said that Aaron Black, one of the Democracy Partners activists featured in O’Keefe’s videos, worked with Breitbart during the primary. According to the source, Black, who was also an organizer for Occupy Wall Street, had an informal alliance with Breitbart, “tipping it off about his stunts, exchanging raw video and coordinating coverage” of Black’s antics at events for Republican candidates.

“He [Black] worked directly with Breitbart’s political team on the ground in the primary states to sabotage Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, and elect Trump as nominee of [the Republican] party,” the source told Politico. “[Black] was coordinating with [Breitbart’s] top staff to rabble rouse against Rubio at rallies.” The source says that Black was friendly with the Breitbart staff and that contacts were made by phone, email and in person.

In one widely circulated picture, Black, dressed in a silver robot costume, confronted Rubio in a hallway. Video from New Hampshire shows Black and other activists heckling Rubio supporters last February. A Breitbart “exclusive” from February details a physical confrontation between a robot-costumed protester and the chairman of Rubio’s New Hampshire campaign. The Breitbart story identifies the protester as Aaron Black.

Breitbart supported Donald Trump early in the primary and was particularly critical of Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. The relationship between the website and the Trump campaign became even more cozy when Paul Manafort was forced to leave the campaign due to his close ties to Vladimir Putin. Trump replaced Manafort, his campaign manager, with Steven Bannon, Breitbart’s chairman.

After the death of founder Andrew Breitbart, Bannon’s leadership turned the website from a respected conservative news source to a transparent, laughable propaganda page. Former Breitbart editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro wrote in the Daily Wire that Bannon “has shaped the company into Trump’s personal Pravda…the facts are undeniable: Breitbart News has become precisely the reverse of what Andrew would have wanted.”

It is unconscionable that a conservative website like Breitbart would work with a radical liberal activist against other conservative Republicans. To condemn Hillary’s campaign for the same tactics that Breitbart used only underscores Steve Bannon’s hypocrisy.

Originally published on The Resurgent.

Trump trails in Florida

Donald Trump always had a narrow path to the presidency. The Democrat electoral base comes with heavily populated urban states that give a natural advantage to any Democrat candidate. Any Republican must nearly run the table of the traditional swing states. Ohio, North Carolina and Virginia, with their large numbers of electoral votes, are must-win states for any Republican who hopes to become president. Florida, with 29 electoral votes, is the big prize among the swing states.

Throughout the spring and summer, Donald Trump hotly contested Florida. In the Republican primary, Trump beat local candidate Senator Marco Rubio by nearly 20 points. According to New York Times coverage of the results, Trump won every county in Florida with the exception of one. Miami-Dade County went to Rubio.

Throughout the summer, Trump kept the race for Florida’s electoral votes in a deadlock. Although he never firmly established a lead in the state, Trump kept the race in a statistical tie. For about a month, from the middle of August to the middle of September, Real Clear Politics shows that Trump may have held a small lead.

Now it looks as though Clinton has surged and Trump is firmly behind in the state that can be considered home territory for him since it is the location of his famous Mar-a-Lago mansion. For over a month, since the beginning of September, Donald Trump has led in only two of 17 polls listed by Real Clear Politics. Both of these polls showed a one-point lead, which is a statistical tie, due to the polling margin of error. The last time Trump led in Florida was an Emerson poll that was taken from October 2-4, before the debates and the release of the “Access Hollywood” sex tape.

In contrast, Hillary Clinton not only is winning the polls in this must-win state, but her advantage seems to be very consistent across a large number of polls. Since Florida is such an important state in presidential elections, it is polled frequently and by many different organizations. Every poll in the past three weeks shows at least a three-point advantage for Clinton. While three points is within the margin of error for most polls, the fact that all the polls are consistent gives them credibility as a whole.

Florida is always a close state and this year will be no exception. Twice, in 2000 and 2012, the difference between victory and defeat was less than one percent according to archived results on 270ToWin.com. The only election in the past 20 years where Florida was won by more than five points was 1996 when Bill Clinton (D) beat Bob Dole (R) and Ross Perot (I). Perot pulled votes from Dole and allowed Clinton to win by six points.

This year, third party candidates seem to make little difference. Libertarian Gary Johnson is on the ballot, but independent candidate Evan McMullin was denied a spot on the ballot as the candidate of the Independent Party of Florida by the Republican administration of Gov. Rick Scott. Politico noted that many consider the move to deny ballot access to McMullin illegal and unconstitutional, but it almost certainly was beneficial to Trump. Nevertheless, polls conducted with and without Johnson indicate that he has little effect on the race.

Another Florida candidate is having better luck against his Democrat challenger. Marco Rubio, the man that Donald Trump beat by almost 20 points in the primary, is now polling better than Trump. Although Rubio has lost some ground in recent weeks, perhaps due to fallout from the Trump scandals, he maintains a two-point lead over Democrat Patrick Murphy. After Rubio beat Murphy handily in their debate, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee pulled funding from Murphy’s campaign, which should help Rubio going forward.

As Trump’s hopes for Florida fade, his chances for winning the White House become almost nonexistent. Without Florida’s 29 electoral votes, there is no path to victory for Trump. This makes Senate races like Rubio’s all the more important for maintaining the ability resist the liberal agenda of President Hillary Clinton.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Trump turns red states blue

Back in the primary, there were bold predictions that a candidate like Donald Trump could redraw the electoral map. Trump’s mix of populism, protectionism and isolationism could turn Rust Belt states blue the argument ran. Nine months later, as Election Day rapidly approaches, it seems that the predictions of different electoral map were true, but not in the way Republicans expected.

New polling suggests that Trump is on the verge of losing several deep red states. Arizona, Georgia and even Texas have all been moved into the swing state category for the Trump-Clinton race. The Real Clear Politics average shows the race tightening in both Georgia and Texas. In both states, Trump holds a lead within the polling margin of error. In Arizona, the lead has shifted over the past two months. Trump has lost a slim lead and is now trailing Hillary Clinton by a five-point margin in the most recent Arizona Republic poll.

A common thread among these states is the high percentage of nonwhite voters. A Pew survey of the 2016 electorate shows that both Texas and Arizona have high numbers of Hispanic voters. Almost a third of Texas voters are Hispanic while, among Arizona voters, the percentage Hispanic voters is just over a fifth. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump’s anti-Mexico rhetoric and plans to build a wall along the Mexican border seem not to be popular with most Hispanic voters. A recent Wall Street Journal poll found Hispanic support for the Republican at 18 percent.

Georgia has fewer Hispanics, but the state is still ethnically diverse. The Atlanta Journal estimated last year that 40 percent of Georgia’s electorate would be minority voters. At about a third of voters, blacks make up Georgia’s largest minority. In August, a Public Policy poll found Trump’s support among blacks to be effectively at zero.

But what about Alaska, another deep red state with few minority voters? The one poll of Alaskans showed Trump with only a three-point lead over Hillary Clinton. The Moore AK poll found Trump leading with the support of only 37 percent of voters. There are not enough Hispanic or black voters in Alaska to blame Trump’s lack of support on race or ethnicity.

Aside from race, the gender gap is the other big problem for Trump. A recent analysis by FiveThirtyEight[D1]  found that women support Clinton by a 15-point margin while men support Trump by only five-points. In several recent polls, Clinton has even won male voters outright. In 2012 polls, Obama and Romney’s lead among women and men

More women than men vote. In 2012, 53 percent of the electorate was female while 47 percent was male according to CNN exit polls. Obama won women by 11-points while Romney won men by seven points. The fact that Trump is losing women by a double-digit margin while also doing poorly with men can explain why he is in danger of losing states that are normally safe for Republican candidates.

A bright spot for Republicans is that Trump’s problems do not doom other Republicans. Republican congressional candidates are generally polling better than Mr. Trump. The bad news is that many of them are locked in tight races that must be considered tossups. A few votes lost because of Donald Trump can make a difference.

Originally published on The Resurgent

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Trump's election rigging claims debunked

As Donald Trump declined in the polls, he began making claims that elections are rigged and that the system is stacked against him. Trump even went so far as to say that he may not accept the decision of the voters on November 8.

It is true that there have been recent instances of voter fraud in this country. The 2008 Senate race in which Democrat Al Franken beat incumbent Republican Norm Coleman stands as one of the sleaziest episodes in recent electoral history. Democrats “found” enough votes in recounts to turn a Coleman victory into a Franken upset. A watchdog group later found that enough felons had voted illegally to sway the election.

The electoral system is not foolproof. Even in states with voter ID laws, there are ways to commit voter fraud. People can vote in more than one state. They can abuse absentee ballots. They can buy votes. Elected officials or political groups can suppress or intimidate voters.

There is an easy way to tell if Donald Trump is in danger of losing the election due to a rigged system. If the system is rigged against Republicans, then the Democrats orchestrating the fraud would probably want to elect Democrats to Congress as well as the White House. If Democrats are manipulating the races and polling, then Democratic congressional candidates should be performing as well as Hillary Clinton. Republican candidates should be performing as poorly as Mr. Trump. A quick look at several hotly contested races should determine whether Trump’s charge of election rigging is accurate.

• ·         In Florida, Donald Trump trails Hillary Clinton by four points according to the Real Clear Politics average. In contrast, Senator Marco Rubio leads his Democrat challenger by a five-point average. Marco Rubio performed so well at his debate this week that Democrats have cut off funding to his challenger. Florida is a must-win state for Trump.
• ·         In the blue state of Illinois, Clinton leads by an average of 15 points. Tammy Duckworth, the Democrat challenging Republican Mark Kirk also holds a lead, but by only seven points.
• ·         Trump trails Hillary Clinton by four points in Nevada. Republican Joe Heck and Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto are locked in a close race for Harry Reid’s Senate seat.
• ·         In New Hampshire, Trump trails Clinton by eight points. Kelly Ayotte, the incumbent Republican, is in a close race with Maggie Hassan. Most polling shows the race in a dead heat, but one outlier poll shows Hassan up by nine points.
• ·         In Ohio, another state critical to the Trump campaign, the presidential race is in a statistical tie. On the other hand, Senator Rob Portman, the Republican incumbent is cruising to reelection with a 15-point lead.

The story is the same in other states as well. Trump is running behind Republican Senators in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In Texas, where there is no Senate race this year, Clinton polls within five points of Trump. Mitt Romney won this reddest of red states by 16 points.

In one interesting case, Trump actually trails Clinton by one point, within the margin of error, in Arizona. John McCain, the incumbent Republican who is reviled by many as a “Republican in name only,” leads his Democratic opponent by 15 points. Arizona is not normally a swing state.

In state after state, Donald Trump performs poorly when compared to other Republican candidates. If there was really a conspiracy to rig the vote against Mr. Trump, his Democrat opponents would probably scheme to defraud Republican congressional candidates as well. There is no indication that this is happening.

Trump’s performance seems to be poor across the board. He lags behind other Republicans in red, blue and swing states. Trump is in trouble regardless of whether local voters are conservative or liberal and whether election officials are Democrats or Republicans.  

Since many of the same voters who prefer a Republican congressional candidate over a Democrat choose Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, Trump’s theory of rigged elections can be discarded. If, after watching him for a year, voters, including many Republicans, are rejecting The Donald, he should bear the blame himself and accept responsibility.

Originally published on The Resurgent