Today’s installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.
* Two new national polls show Donald Trump’s approval rating stuck below the 40% threshold. A CBS News poll puts the president’s support at 36%, while CNN’s poll shows Trump slightly better off at 38%.
* With only three months remaining in Virginia’s gubernatorial race, the latest statewide poll from Virginia Commonwealth University shows Ralph Northam (D) with a modest advantage over Ed Gillespie (R), 42% to 37%.
* We don’t know for sure whether Sen. Susan Collins (R) will run for governor in Maine next year, but if she does, she may have some trouble with her party’s base. Public Policy Polling found Collins’ approval rating among likely Republican primary voters is just 33% — less than half the support Trump enjoys among the same Mainers.
* Ahead of Detroit’s mayoral primary, former Vice President Joe Biden raised a few eyebrows by recording a robocall in support of incumbent Mayor Mike Duggan (D).
* To get a flavor of Alabama’s U.S. Senate Republican primary, note that former state Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore showed off a gun his wife keeps in her purse at a local forum last week to prove his family’s support for the Second Amendment. * Hillary Clinton probably won’t be running for anything again, but she’s nevertheless hired a pair of former campaign aides “to help manage Onward Together, the project she founded this spring with former governor Howard Dean to fund and support a coalition of Democratic groups led by activists and organizers.” * Trump insisted twice yesterday that his base of support is actually “getting stronger,” not weaker. Actual evidence appears to point in the opposite direction. * And in West Virginia, Sen. Joe Manchin (D) wants to make it clear he won’t let his 2018 re-election bid force him into casting the wrong votes. “I don’t give a s**t, you understand?” the senator told the Charleston Gazette. “I just don’t give a s**t. Don’t care if I get elected, don’t care if I get defeated, how about that. If they think because I’m up for election, that I can be wrangled into voting for s**t that I don’t like and can’t explain, they’re all crazy.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past." Recommended
