Mitch Perry
All summer, we’ve heard blowhards like Joe Scarborough inform the supposedly stuffy talking heads that they just don’t get it about the phenomenon that is Donald Trump. He likes to remind viewers that his brother, an alleged sophisticated Republican voter, really loves The Donald, and thus that explains why about 25 percent of Republican voters say they like him too in most polls. He says that the message is a potent one.
Yes, perhaps to as much as a quarter of the third of the population — but nowhere close to the majority.
Trump’s immigration plan released on Sunday is a political loser. Maybe not in Iowa next February, but as The Washington Post reports, looking at a Gallup poll taken earlier this summer 65 percent of all Americans favor some sort of path to citizenship. The next-most-popular option was deportation, but just 19 percent favored that option, while 14 percent wanted to let them stay for limited amount of time.
Tuesday night MSNBC’s Chris Matthews challenged his guests who might be prone to criticize Trump, saying that with his immigration proposals he was the only one “doing something” about the issue.
I’m not really sure what he’s talking about; Two years ago the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration bill that House Speaker John Boehner sat on, never bringing it up for a vote. But if he’s saying that no candidate has spoken so honestly and openly about stopping illegal immigration and deporting millions of people, has he forgotten that Colorado’s Tom Tancredo ran for president in 2008?
Sure, nobody remembers Tancredo. He was considered a one-issue candidate, and not a very good one at that. But his stances on immigration were just as much as provocative and appealed to those “frustrated ” voters. The difference was that he wasn’t a celebrity who gets a pass in the media.
In other news …
Thanks to Trump, several GOP presidential candidates all seem ready to dump the 14th Amendment, reversing the automatic rights of U.S. citizenship to those born on American soil as a way to limit undocumented immigration. Florida GOP senate candidate Todd Wilcox feels the same way, but it doesn’t appear as if his opponents agree.
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Alan Grayson is feeling very confident about his chances in next year’s U.S. Senate race next year. Grayson and fellow Congressman and Democratic Senate aspirant Patrick Murphy continue to battle it out in regards to who has been the most effective member of Congress while serving in the minority.
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CD 13 Democratic candidate Eric Lynn picks his campaign team as he attempts to (probably) go up against Charlie Crist next in the Democratic Primary.
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HART CEO Katharine Eagan has been nominated for a White House “Champion for Change” honor.
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Tim Schock ran for a Hillsborough County Commission seat a year ago, and he may put his hat in the ring again, this time against Jim Norman in the GOP District 6 race.
