FiveThirtyEight: New Polling Shows Trump’s Electoral College Advantage Is Slipping

The Times/Siena is one of the most highly-rated pollsters in FiveThirtyEight’s Pollster Ratings — one of six with an A+ mark — so these new surveys did adjust our averages a bit, most notably in Pennsylvania. There had been few high-quality polls conducted in the Keystone State, so our polling average did shift roughly 1.5 points in Biden’s favor because of the Times/Siena survey, which found Biden up by 10 points.

It wasn’t just the Times/Siena survey that found Biden up, either. We got two more polls of Pennsylvania today that showed Biden with double-digit leads. One from GOP pollster Hodas & Associates gave Biden a 12-point lead, and one from Redfield & Wilton Strategies put him up 10 points. [...]

But perhaps what’s even more significant about this batch of recent polls is that Trump’s possible Electoral College advantage is slipping. Biden doesn’t lead by as much in most of the battleground states as he does nationally, but his leads are big enough — anywhere from 5 points in Arizona to 9 points in Nevada — that it won’t matter that many battleground states lean to the right of the country.[...]

And the fact that Biden now has multiple paths to the White House is the biggest problem facing Trump. He needs a notable shift in voter sentiment that makes the national environment less favorable for Biden. With four months to go, that’s quite possible, but at the moment, our polling averages suggest that he’s in a lot of trouble.

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TLDR News: Bernie Wins Nevada: What That Means for the 2020 Race

At the weekend Senator Bernie Sanders won his third Primary of the 2020 process in Nevada. In this video, we discuss the winners and losers in Nevada as well as the impact this will have on the rest of the contest.

Politico: Bernie breaks out of the pack

While few expect that Sanders can carry more than a third of the vote in Nevada, nearly everyone believes that will be enough to win in a field where the moderate vote remains splintered. It is becoming a source of celebration for Sanders' supporters and an urgent problem for those who want to prevent him from claiming the nomination. [...]

Pete Buttigieg, who topped the field with Sanders in Iowa and finished less than 2 percentage points behind him in New Hampshire, is not polling well in Nevada or in the next voting state, South Carolina. Amy Klobuchar surged in New Hampshire but is starting from behind in Nevada. Biden is the opposite — humiliated in Iowa and New Hampshire but with better prospects here. [...]

The dim prospects of anyone beating Sanders in Nevada were laid bare last week, when the state’s powerful Culinary Workers Union elected not to endorse in the presidential primary. Despite its criticism of Sanders’ signature policy proposal, Medicare for All, the union was not convinced that any other Democrat could defeat Sanders, even with the union’s endorsement, according to a source familiar with the union’s deliberations.

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The Daily Wire: Will Trump Win? The Latest On Trump’s National And State-By-State Approval Ratings

Historically, presidents have fared well in re-election campaigns when they maintain approval ratings above 50%. This president, to be sure, has never had such an approval rating at any point throughout his presidency. But President Trump oversees a soaring economy, with record-low unemployment rates, and has a hardened base of core supporters. One must also never forget the sheer power of incumbency: Since FDR, only Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were elected and then subsequently not re-elected four years later. [...]

The Daily Wire will be tracking Trump's state-by-state approval rating as the general election nears. Here is the latest Trump approval rating information from across all the various swing states.

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Vox: The Gilroy, California, shooting highlights a big hole in Trump’s logic about gun violence

It wasn’t as though officers were lucky to be in the area of the gunman when he started shooting. According to CNN, security at the festival was “present and conspicuous.” It included a police compound on site, officers on horses and motorcycles, bag searches, and metal detector wands. But none of that was enough to stop the gunman, who gained entry to the festival by cutting through a back fence before opening fire at random. [...]

But none of those proposals would’ve helped in this case. A San Francisco Chronicle report finds the shooter had no criminal record, and he circumvented California’s strict gun laws by obtaining his WASR 10 legally in neighboring Nevada. [...]

The Democratic-controlled House has passed a number of gun control bills this year, only to see them wither in the Republican-controlled Senate. So unless some Republican senators change their minds, it’s unlikely the loophole exploited by the Gilroy shooter will be closed anytime soon.

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The Guardian: Criminalisation of sex work normalises violence, review finds

The review, by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, found that sex workers suffering repressive policing – including arrest, imprisonment and extortion by officers – were three times more likely to experience sexual or physical violence from a client and were twice as likely to have HIV or another sexually transmitted infection as those who lived in countries where sex work was tolerated. [...]

Their health and safety were at risk not only in countries where sex work was criminalised, but also in Canada, which has introduced the “Nordic model” pioneered by Sweden, under which the client can be arrested for a criminal offence, but not the sex worker. [...]

France, Iceland, Northern Ireland, Norway, the Republic of Ireland and Sweden also criminalise the client. Guatemala, Mexico, Turkey and the US state of Nevada have regulated sex work, which allows better conditions for some, but worse for the many who operate outside the regulated arrangements. [...]

New Zealand is the only country to have decriminalised sex work, in 2003, although it is not legal for migrants. Sex workers said they were more able to refuse clients and insist on condom use, while relationships with police were better. “We always have police coming up and down the street every night,” said one woman. “We’d even have them coming over to make sure that we were all right and making sure … that we’ve got minders and that they were taking registration plates and the identity of the clients. So … it changed the whole street, it’s changed everything.”

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99 Percent Invisible: Bundyville

By his own account, Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy never wanted to start a war with the federal government. To hear him tell the story, he is a folksy, rural Nevada rancher trying to eke out a living on a piece of land near Bunkerville. But in 2014, on the same piece of land Bundy claims is so peaceful, armed militias showed up and pointed guns at Bureau of Land Management agents who had come to round up his cattle because of Bundy’s unpaid grazing fees.

During the chaotic events that were broadcast on national television, Bundy took to the stage and gave a list of demands. He wanted federal parks officers to turn over their weapons to the crowd. He wanted federal buildings demolished. He wanted all public lands in Clark County, Nevada, turned over to local control. It was a stark contrast to the image Bundy paints of himself. Far from peaceful, Bundy was calling for an armed rebellion if he didn’t get his way.

And that’s essentially what happened. Militia members pointed their guns at BLM agents, and those agents backed off after being surrounded in a river wash near the ranch. Bundy got his cattle back and for years faced no consequences for his actions. He had, it seemed, beaten the federal government.

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The New York Review of Books: What’s the Right Way to Legalize Prostitution?: An Exchange

As in most service jobs, the women working in Nevada’s brothels endure better and worse bosses, good and bad customers, and selling sexual services is not for everyone. But the thirty-eight women we interviewed in one multiyear study told us these jobs had far more advantages than their previous straight jobs in restaurants, office management, or medical services. One woman came to the brothels to pay for medicine for her autistic child; another was the first in her family to own a house. One third of the women we interviewed had previously sold sex in underground markets, and they found Nevada’s system to be a far safer option, and were happy to have the police on their side. One woman told us she was able to leave an abusive pimp thanks to the legal brothels. [...]

Peer-reviewed research certainly does not find that all prostitution is “empowering.” But the overwhelming body of global evidence shows that workers are better protected from exploitation and trafficking in systems, like Nevada’s, where prostitution is decriminalized and/or regulated. Health professionals in the British Medical Journal and The Lancet and organizations including Amnesty International, the United Nations, and the World Health Organization have recommended decriminalization. A wide range of scholars, sex workers, and politicians in Bindel’s home country also support decriminalization, including the Liberal Democrats (a mainstream political party) and a parliamentary report co-authored with the English Collective of Prostitutes. In New Zealand, where prostitution is not a crime and brothels are regulated, bad behavior by brothel owners is subject to disciplinary action, and one brothel worker won a sexual harassment case against her employer. [...]

The only way that the women in Nevada brothels are safer is that they are not arrested by law enforcement for prostitution. That is a good thing. Brents dismisses Farley’s study as self-published, but her survey, which involved interviewing forty-five women, remains one of the largest surveys to date of Nevada’s legal brothels. Farley found that 81 percent of the women interviewed said they wanted to escape prostitution but could not, often because of poverty or homelessness (almost half reported having been homeless); nearly a quarter had entered prostitution as children. [...]

Brents’s insistence upon the prevalence of condom use is also misleading. In Nevada, and everywhere else, men who buy sex pay extra for sex acts without a condom. Several Canadian studies found that about 50 percent of all sex buyers report non-condom use with women in prostitution, endangering the women’s health. Women from the Lyon County brothels reported that it is common to agree not to use a condom in exchange for a generous tip, according to Melissa Holland of Awaken in Reno, an agency that offers services to women exiting and thinking about exiting prostitution. The State Department of Public Health may never see a positive test for a sexually-transmitted disease, since the brothels can use private labs for testing and are essentially on an “honors system” to let the licensing boards know if they have prostituted women who have tested positive.

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The Atlantic: More and More States Are Outlawing Gay-Conversion Therapy

In the U.S., state governments are beginning to outlaw conversion therapy in growing numbers. California became the first to do so in 2012. Eight other states have banned it in some form since. In 2017 alone, Nevada, New Mexico, and Connecticut have signed their own bans into law. And two weeks ago, a long-anticipated bill passed the Rhode Island Senate. [...]

While one can imagine a clear moral argument against this practice, the ruling in the JONAH case stemmed from the simple fact that it does not work. Research supports this point. A decade after the psychiatrist Robert Spitzer published a controversial and refuted study in 2003 of 200 men and women who claimed to have changed their sexual orientation to “predominantly heterosexual” after some form of “reparative therapy,” he apologized, saying there was no way to verify his participants’ responses. [...]

During his presidency, Barack Obama called for an end to “therapies” that aim to change sexual orientation or gender identity, but a bill introduced to ban conversion therapy at the federal level stalled in Congress last year. The 2016 GOP platform drew the ire of activists as well as the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay conservative group, for including “the right of parents to consent to medical treatment for their minor children,” which some both in and outside of the party interpreted as a tacit endorsement of “conversion therapy.” And, according to McCoy, the understanding of conversion therapy as a threat to children has helped marshal Republican support for these bills at a state level. [...]

Still, the laws in many states are limited. Most states that have enacted bans restrict the actions of licensed mental-health practitioners like psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers, and are focused on minors. These laws don’t affect unlicensed practitioners or adults who seek their services. This will be the case for Rhode Island in the very likely event that the newly passed bill is signed into law. In contrast, New Jersey’s JONAH case declared conversion therapy completely illegal in the state on the basis of consumer fraud. Even an adult who wants to undergo treatment with a life coach, a clergy member, or other provider not subject to the rules of a licensing board can’t do so legally, because of the lack of evidence that conversion therapy works.

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Business Insider: The 2016 electoral map looks very similar to 2012 — but already a few big differences are forming

The 2016 Electoral College map is looking very similar to the map from 2012, but already a few major differences are evident.

As of Monday, four states have flipped from 2012, when President Barack Obama faced off against Republican nominee Mitt Romney: Nevada, Iowa, and Ohio from blue to red, and North Carolina from red to blue. In addition, the 2nd Congressional District in Maine flipped from blue to red, providing an extra electoral vote.

If that map were to hold, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton would top Republican nominee Donald Trump by a 312-226 total - a slightly tighter race compared with Obama's 332-206 victory in 2012.

But it's not so safe for Clinton just yet. In Colorado and Pennsylvania, Clinton is polling slightly below where Obama finished in 2012 - with Colorado amounting to a virtual toss-up, and Pennsylvania not too far behind. In North Carolina, where Romney won by 2 points in 2012, Clinton's lead is as slight as can be over Trump. [...]

The best piece of news for Trump is his semisubstantial lead in Ohio. That state has voted for the winner of every presidential election since 1964; the last time the state voted against the national winner was in 1960, when it went in favor of then Vice President Richard Nixon instead of former President John F. Kennedy.

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