Welcome to The Lid, your afternoon dose of the 2016 ethos… Edward Snowden joined Twitter on Tuesday, meaning he now has an outlet to call the NSA total low-energy lightweight losers who he never really liked anyway.
Get The Lid straight to your inbox each afternoon -- click here to sign up.
’16 AT 30 THOUSAND
Though Marco Rubio has mostly polled in the middle of the crowded GOP field throughout the 2016 campaign, he has consistently been near the top when it comes to who Republican primary voters say they could see themselves supporting. Our latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds that 63 percent of primary voters COULD support the Florida senator. That puts him in second in that category, slightly behind Ben Carson, who is on leads with 69 percent.
A political eternity ago, way back in March, the candidate who had the highest net possible support was Scott Walker (okay, so THAT didn’t turn out that well.) But Rubio was in second place even back then, which means that he’s held a remarkably stable position of wide acceptability to a broad swath of GOP primary voters throughout the Summer of Trump and beyond. Even more than his recent uptick to the top-ish tier in national polls, his durability throughout a time of a lot of political upheaval shows that his campaign’s slow-and-steady approach is paying off so far.
POPPING ON NBC POLITICS
- NBC’s Danny Freeman reports on a slate of big Iowa donors who are backing Chris Christie.
- An outside tax group says that Trump’s tax plan would cost a whopping $12 billion.
- Will Congress go big or go home this October? NBC’s Luke Russert reports. (Spoiler: Probably home.)
- Political Unit intern Elissa Nunez looks at Hillary Clinton’s attempts win over #millennial females.
- The head of Planned Parenthood faced off with Congressional Republicans on Tuesday, saying she was “proud” of her organization's work supporting fetal tissue research and that the secretly recorded videos of employees discussing the practice are part of a "smear campaign."
CAMPAIGN QUICK READS
From the New York Times: Big donors are no longer willing to sit on the sidelines and write checks -- they want in on the action.
CRUZ: The Texas Tribune’s Abby Livingston notes that Ted Cruz’s primary strategy is focused not on states, but on delegates - particularly in the SEC primaries.
PAUL: POLITICO reports that one of his super PACs has stopped raising money, blaming Paul’s pivot away from libertarian views.
FOR THE RECORD…
“I don’t even know what the issues are. I haven’t paid attention to politics in a long time. It’s actually not something that I really even enjoy.”
- Tom Brady, clarifying his previous comments in support of Donald Trump.
TOMORROW’S SKED
Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, and Donald Trump campaign in New Hampshire.
John Kasich and Bobby Jindal are in Iowa.
Funding for the federal government will expire at midnight.
