Thursday's Campaign Round-Up, 6.21.18

Today's installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.

* In CNN's new national poll, Democrats lead Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, 50% to 42%. That eight-point advantage is up from a three-point lead Dems had in the same poll last month.

* In West Virginia, a Monmouth University poll found Sen. Joe Manchin (D), a top GOP target this year, leading state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey (R), 49% to 42% in a head-to-head match-up.

* In West Virginia's 3rd congressional district, the same poll found Richard Ojeda (D) narrowly leading Carol Miller (R), 43% to 41%, which wouldn't be especially notable were it not for the fact that Donald Trump won this same district by literally 50 points two years ago.

* In North Dakota's U.S. Senate race, Rep. Kevin Cramer (R) yesterday defended the Trump administration's policy of keeping immigrant children in chain-link pens, arguing, "Chain link fences are around playgrounds all over America, all over North Dakota. And chain link fences allow line-of-sight visual connectivity with children and families.... You know, there's nothing inhumane about a chain link fence. If it is, then every ballpark in America is inhumane."

* Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has reportedly approved "a plan to pour at least $80 million" into the 2018 election cycle, with the hopes of helping elect a Democratic majority in the U.S. House.

* That will be excellent news to officials at the DNC, who find themselves in a difficult financial spot. The Washington Post  reported today, "The Republican National Committee entered the summer with nearly twice the fundraising power of its Democratic counterpart."

* Voters in Michigan will have an opportunity to vote this year on an anti-gerrymandering measure.

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Trump is under the false impression he 'actually beat Obamacare'

A few hours before his campaign rally last night, Donald Trump hosted a roundtable in Duluth, Minnesota, on "protecting American workers." Much of the event was forgettable, though the president did make an interesting claim about his approach to health care. From the official transcript:

"So we've done a real job and we just got association healthcare approved which is going to be incredible. You associate as companies, as people. And you're going to get great healthcare — highly competitive -- at a much lower price than you've been paying. It's all kicking in right now. We actually beat Obamacare."

What Trump referred to is a newly finalized rule on something called "Association Health Plans" (AHPs), which he's talked about with varying degrees of coherence for quite a while.

It's worth revisiting the issue, because the real-world impact of the policy is likely to be pretty significant.

AHPs have actually been around for decades. The original idea was that small businesses and trade associations would pool their resources and offer cheap, thin coverage. The Affordable Care Act raised these plans' standards, requiring them to cover the same essential benefits as other plans, and imposed strict new safeguards to make sure the plans weren't ripping people off.

This, naturally, made AHPs more expensive, but it also meant better and more comprehensive coverage for many American consumers and their families.

What the Trump administration has done is roll back the clock.

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Confused about his brand of populism, Trump wants to be 'the elite'

Most of Donald Trump's remarks at a campaign rally in Minnesota last night were predictable -- the president shared his usual grievances -- but towards the end of his speech, the Republican shared a thought I haven't heard him make before.

"You ever notice they always call the other side 'the elite.' The elite! Why are they elite? I have a much better apartment than they do. I'm smarter than they are. I'm richer than they are. I became president and they didn't."

For a quite a while, prominent voices in Trump World considered "the elite" to be their rivals, and perhaps even their enemies. Shortly after the 2016 election, for example, Kellyanne Conway, Trump's third campaign manager, insisted that her boss' success represented a rejection of the "elites." In fact, she said her own Republican Party was "veering dangerously close to being the party of the elites" until Trump campaign came along.

Soon after, in the Time cover story naming Trump "Person of the Year," Conway argued, "You cannot underestimate the role of the backlash against political correctness -- the us vs. the elite."

In this sense, the "elite" doesn't describe wealth or status; it describes attitude. The "elite" care about niceties such as science, diversity, and the rule of law. Trump and his acolytes thumb their nose at the "elite" and their pointless principles.

It's why, we're told, a billionaire television personality, who lives in a gold penthouse, who cuts taxes on the rich, and who fights to protect Wall Street, can be a "populist," while his critics are the "elite."

Except as of last night, Trump isn't satisfied with this dynamic -- because he wants to be the elite, too.

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Trump administration puts the Education Department in its sights

Nearly every modern president has taken on government "reorganization" initiatives, exploring ways to streamline the federal bureaucracy and eliminate unnecessary overlap between agencies. At face value, these are worthwhile goals.

But as is often the case, when Donald Trump's team takes on a task, there's reason for some skepticism.

Mick Mulvaney, who is, among other things, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, has been working on a broad plan to reorganize much of the federal bureaucracy, which will reportedly include "consolidation" of safety-net programs. But as Politico  noted, the most ambitious aspect of the blueprint appears to be the proposed merging of two cabinet agencies.

The Trump administration plans to advocate a merger of the Education and Labor departments as part of a sweeping government overhaul, according to two individuals familiar with the proposal who declined to be named because it's not yet public. [...]

The plan, if undertaken by the administration, would pose a heavy political and legislative lift. Past attempts to eliminate the Education Department haven't proven popular in Congress.

As if this White House didn't have enough on its plate, Team Trump is picking a new fight, laying out a plan to combine two agencies that have very little to do with one another.

As the Washington Post's report explained, the Education Department oversees "federal student loans, distributes K-12 education funding, and enforces federal civil rights laws at public schools and colleges," while the Labor Department has "a broad portfolio that includes programs to train workers, enforcement of minimum-wage laws, the Bureau of Labor Statistics -- which produces economic data -- and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration."

If we're being generous, we could note that the Labor Department may tackle some job-training initiatives that the Education Department could oversee, but to think that the two cabinet agencies should merge into one big, new entity is a stretch.

It's also wildly unrealistic: there's no way lawmakers will want to tackle such an endeavor this year, especially with so little time remaining before the midterm elections, and in the next Congress, the plan's odds of success will almost certainly be worse.

So why bother?

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