For the Record: Slowly depleting our reserves of GOP candidates
Bad news for the undercard debate's continued existence: Lindsey Graham has ended his 2016 campaign, leaving just 13 candidates on the GOP side. Good news for the remaining candidates: They still qualify for group pricing at The Melting Pot Orlando. Try the spinach artichoke fondue; we can't recommend it enough. In today's For the Record: More fallout from Graham's departure; another Donald Trump/Megyn Kelly showdown, and the latest from the Trump-Putin campaign.
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Stop trying to make Lindsey happen
Sen. Lindsey Graham dropped out of the race for the presidency Monday, sending shock waves through the campaign. "He was still running?" said one pundit. "I'm shocked, I thought he quit in October." Graham wrapped up his campaign while polling at 0.5%, making him approximately as popular as Crohn’s disease. He hasn’t endorsed another candidate just yet, although he mentioned Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio as having similar views on defense and national security.
Also free to make an endorsement in the race is 2008 Republican nominee John McCain, who had endorsed Graham earlier in the campaign. “There were probably 50 reasons why he didn’t succeed,” McCain told the Arizona Republic’s editorial board Monday (we can think of at least 11). Several of his rivals mentioned Graham in the media and on Twitter as an asset to the GOP, though the kindest reaction arguably came from Donald Trump, who didn’t bother to eviscerate him on Twitter.
Perhaps Sanders thinks he's joined a debate club of some sort
Aides and politics watchers are waiting for Bernie Sanders to make aggressive moves to chip away at Hillary Clinton's double-digit lead, but time is rapidly running out — and Sanders spent most of the third debate apologizing to Clinton and noting that she made some good points. Clinton, for her part, is training her firepower toward the general election because screw Sanders and O'Malley, neither one of them is worth her time right now. Among the recent missed opportunities for Sanders:
- Pulling digital ads linking Clinton to Wall Street
- Single-handedly defusing the Clinton email server controversy
- Apologizing when staff suggested Clinton would make a good VP (an outrageous insult!)
Sanders may be in line to steal Iowa and win New Hampshire, but the campaign then turns to pro-union, pro-Clinton Nevada and the decidedly pro-Clinton South. If he's not changing things up by the next debate (Jan. 17 in South Carolina), then when? Thirty-one percent isn't that bad of a number at this point, although he's in the wrong primary with those numbers.
Trump vs. Megyn, Round 2
It's like Christmas in January! Fox News announced the details of its Jan. 28 GOP debate, and they're sticking with the same panel as the Aug. 6 debate: Bret Baier, Chris Wallace and Donald Trump's Lex Luthor, Megyn Kelly. The feud between Trump and Kelly is closing out its fifth month, and odds are good that it will last for another few months — after the January debate, Fox News has one more debate on the schedule for sometime in March. Get your popcorn ready.
More from the campaign trail
- Missouri Republicans deem Rubio “electable,” which is one notch above “eh, why not” on the enthusiasm scale (Springfield News-Leader)
- Christie calls Trump's Muslim ban "ridiculous," then basically agrees with every facet of it (Asbury Park Press)
- Huckabee: We're going to live in Iowa in January, and start training for RAGBRAI (The Des Moines Register)
Article 2, Section 1 is for losers
Someone was going to do it; it might as well be a candidate. John Kasich turned the Trump-Vladimir Putin lovefest into a faux Trump-Putin ticket, with the slogan "Make tyranny great again."