Subject: Positive/Negative Clips 5.13.2016
From: "Price, Jenna" <[email-masked]>
To: "Miranda, Luis" <[email-masked]>
Cc: "Palermo, Rachel" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 May 2016 04:56:01 -0700

POSITIVE- DEMOCRATS

Battleground State Registration Gives Democrats Early Edge<http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-05-13/battleground-state-registration-gives-democrats-early-edge>

BLOOMBERG // JOHN MCCORMICK

Democrats hold a registration advantage over Republicans in four of seven battleground states likely to play a central role in the presidential election, even as Republicans and independents have made gains.  The party that now controls the White House is ahead in registered voters in Florida, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, while Republicans hold the lead in Colorado, Iowa and New Hampshire, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Politics. Three other likely battlegrounds -- Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin -- don't register voters by party. Democratic President Barack Obama won nine of those 10 states in 2012, with the exception being a roughly 2-percentage-point loss in North Carolina. As an expected general election contest between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton comes into focus, the states included in the analysis where Democrats hold a registration advantage have a combined 70 electoral votes, while the ones where Republicans have an edge account for 19. None of that suggests the Democrats or Republicans will win any of those states and being registered with a given party doesn't always translate to voting for that party's presidential candidate. Trump, for example, has also argued that he will have a strong crossover appeal and will be able to win over independents and some Democrats, while Clinton has been appealing to moderate Republicans who dislike the billionaire real-estate developer.

NEGATIVE-REPUBLICANS

U.S. foreign policy veteran warns Trump would make world less stable<http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-foreign-idUSKCN0Y32MP?feedType=RSS&feedName=politicsNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Reuters%2FPoliticsNews+%28Reuters+Politics+News%29>

REUTERS // PATRICIA ZENGERLE

Donald Trump's foreign policy proposals would make the world a less stable place, former Secretary of State James Baker told a U.S. Senate hearing on Thursday as the Republican presidential candidate met elsewhere with party congressional leaders. Under questioning from Republican Senator Marco Rubio, a former Trump rival in the presidential race, Baker said the world "would be far less stable" with a weaker NATO or if more countries had nuclear weapons as Trump has proposed. "We've a got a lot of problems today, but we'd have a hell of a lot more if that were the case," Baker told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, adding that U.S. commitments around the world "promote U.S. security." Trump met with Baker on Thursday at Trump's request, said a Baker spokesman, who declined further comment.

No, Donald Trump has not softened his stance on banning Muslims<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/no-donald-trump-has-not-softened-his-stance-on-banning-muslims/2016/05/12/6ec8d514-185c-11e6-aa55-670cabef46e0_story.html>

WASHINGTON POST // JENNA JOHNSON

As headlines popped up this week declaring that Donald Trump had softened his position on banning most foreign Muslims from entering the United States, some Republicans celebrated the news. "Glad h e's walking it back," Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) tweeted on Thursday. Except that Trump has not actually walked anything back. The presumptive Republican nominee still wants to ban nearly all members of the world's fastest-growing religion from entering the United States in an effort to prevent terrorist attacks. As Trump first said in December, such a ban would be temporary and last only until U.S. authorities "find out what's going on." He also said then that the ban will not apply to U.S. citizens, and that there would be exceptions for world leaders, athletes and others. The Muslim ban is one of Trump's most controversial - and popular - proposals, alongside other hard-line steps such as building a U.S.-Mexico border wall and deporting illegal immigrants en masse. A Washington Post-ABC News poll in March found that 54 percent of Republicans supported a ban on foreign Muslims, along with 33 percent of political independents and 15 percent of Democrats.

Donald Trump and the Art of the Tax Loophole<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/13/opinion/campaign-stops/donald-trump-and-the-art-of-the-tax-loophole.html?ref=opinion>

NEW YORK TIMES // STEVEN RATTNER

Type "Trump system rigged" into the Google search bar and you'll get more than 500,000 hits. I didn't inspect all of them but the first 50 were variants of Donald Trump complaining that the Republican primary process was tilted against him. That's beyond ironic. Mr. Trump and his family have been the beneficiaries of a great rigged system: the tax code, which bestows huge advantages on the real estate business. Throughout his career, Mr. Trump has not only grabbed for every loophole and legal lever he could find, he's boasted about it. "I've taken advantage of the laws of this country, like other people," Mr. Trump has said. The Republican front-runner has been dodging releasing his returns on the specious grounds that he was being audited. On Tuesday, he told The Associated Press that he wouldn't release them before the election - period. On Wednesday, he denied saying this, reversed course and said, "Hopefully before the election I'll release." "There's nothing to learn from them," he said in the Associated Press interview. I'll bet there's plenty to learn. More likely, Mr. Trump doesn't want us to know how small his tax hit is, something that he bragged about earlier in the campaign, before realizing that it could come back to bite him.

Donald Trump's unsupported claim that crime is 'through the roof' because of illegal immigration<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/05/13/donald-trumps-unsupported-claim-that-crime-is-through-the-roof-because-of-illegal-immigration/>

WASHINGTON POST // MICHELLE YE HEE LEE

Trump started a recent rally in California by bringing onstage members of The Remembrance Project, which advocates for family members of those killed by undocumented immigrants. Trump asked the father of Jamiel Shaw to share the story of his son, a 17-year-old football star who was killed in 2008 by a gang member who was in the country illegally. Shaw has appeared in an ad for Trump, and supports Trump's proposal to deport all "criminal aliens," who are noncitizens convicted of a crime. Another case Trump often points to is that of Kate Steinle, a young woman in San Francisco who was shot and killed by an undocumented immigrant and a repeat felon who had been deported five times to Mexico. Clearly, stories like this exist. But Trump uses anecdotes as evidence to connect illegal immigration and violent crimes, and to propose deporting the approximately 11 million undocumented believed to be living in the United States. Just how likely are Americans to die from homicide by undocumented immigrants?

Trump insults the voters yet again<https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-insults-the-voters-yet-again/2016/05/12/74fbbbb0-1855-11e6-924d-838753295f9a_story.html>

WASHINGTON POST // EDITORIAL BOARD
Besides his usual brazenness, something unsettling lurks behind Donald Trump's latest statement that - unlike every other nominee in modern times - he will not make public his tax returns before the November election. "There's nothing to learn from them," he told the Associated Press. Earlier, he claimed he could not release his returns because he was being audited. Then he said on Twitter they would be released "when audit is complete, not after election!" To voters considering his fitness to be president, Mr. Trump's response is that he will be the judge and jury, a paternalistic and insulting attitude toward the public. In fact, there would be much to learn from Mr. Trump's tax returns and, more broadly, his years as a businessman. We're not picking this criterion out of thin air; Mr. Trump is the one who repeatedly trumpets his business experience as his qualification for the presidency. His boasting ought to be tested against hard information about how his companies performed, how they were managed and governed, how shareholders and bondholders were treated, how Mr. Trump was compensated, how he managed his tax burden and to what extent he has been a philanthropist. Unfortunately, Mr. Trump's companies have been largely private in recent years, shielding his accounts from public scrutiny.