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Michigan Rock Star Kid Rock leads Democratic opponent Sen. Debbie Stabenow in the states 2018 U.S. Senate election according to a poll released Monday.

The singer earned 30percent of support in the poll, compared to Stabenows 26 percent support, according to the poll conducted by Delphi Analytica. The remaining 44 percent remained undecided.

Kid Rock teased his potential challenge July 12, by tweeting a picture of a sign that read Kid Rock for USSenate, including a link to his official campaign website.

He hit the incumbent Democrat in the official statement, asserting that he knows more about the concerns of Michigan voters than Stabenow.

I concede she is better at playing politics than I am so Ill keep doing what I do best, which is being a voice for tax paying, hardworking AMERICANS and letting politicians like her know that We the People are sick and tired of their bullshit! Kid Rock wrote in an official statement at the time.

The star isin a decent position to run. He has very high name recognition in the state of Michigan and hasa loyal fan base that enjoys his brash approach to life. He also has a net worth between $80 and $120 million, according to the Federalist, so he could easily fully fund his own campaign without outside party funds.

Stabenow has occupied the seat since she narrowly defeated Republican incumbent Spencer Abraham in the 2000 election with 49.5 percent of the vote. Her lead has grown much higher in the years since, ballooning to 58.8 percent of the vote during the 2012 election.

She also has a strong fundraising history. Shes raised $35,027,401 so far during the course of her Senate career, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and $14,376,142 of that total was raised and spent during the course of the 2012 campaign bid.

Delphi surveyed 668 Michigan residents. The pollster didnt include a margin of error or the dates the survey took place.

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Kid Rock Leads Democrat In New Poll - The Daily Caller

President Donald Trump angrily lashed out at unnamed Republican lawmakers on Sunday, saying they should protect him as repayment for his 2016 election coattails.

It's very sad that Republicans, even some that were carried over the line on my back, do very little to protect their President, Trump tweeted at 4:14 p.m., EDT. That was just over an hour after he arrived back at the White House after spending around four hours at Trump National Golf Club in nearby Sterling, Virginia.

The eyebrow-raising tweet comes amid the ongoing scandal and multiple federal and congressional probes of Russias 2016 election meddling, including whether Trumps campaign and the Kremlin colluded to undermine Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Republican lawmakers are increasingly voicing their views that the president should stop tweeting about the matter, especially during theJustice Department investigation being led by former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller.

By launching a public attack on his fellow Republicans, Trump could open the door to an all-out revolt among some members of his own party. Whilesome Democrats talk about possible impeachment proceedings over the Russia allegations, legal and political experts agree that is unlikely as long as the president has the support of Republican leaders and rank-and-file members, who control both the House and Senate.

But if Trump loses his own party mates and Mueller finds damning evidence, experts of all political stripes say the presidentcould find himself in legal and political quicksand.

Some Republicans in recent days and weeks have advised Trump to stop calling the Russia probes a collective "witch hunt." But Trump frequently uses the term, as he did in a tweet he sent minutes before he slammed fellow Republicans.

It was unclear to whom Trump was referring Sunday.

Earlier in the day, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., was on CNN and sided with Trumps legal analysis which he tweeted out Saturday morning that any president possesses the power to pardon himself.

I think, in all likelihood, he does, Paul said of Trump. I think that some of this hasnt been adjudicated.

But he advised caution in handing out pardons.

I think in a political sphere, I would caution someone to think about pardoning themselves or family members, or et cetera, Paul said. In a tweet Saturday that instantly lit up the internet and cable news before making the front pages of major Sunday morning newspapers, the president opined that all agree the U.S. President has the complete power to pardon.

It was not immediately clear why Trump chose to openly talk of pardons before any law enforcement official has even mentioned possible charges against his campaign advisers, family members, White House staff, or himself. His incoming new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, said Sunday that Trump is not thinking about pardoning anyone his first major public contradiction of his boss since accepting the job on Friday morning.

So far, there is no clear evidence of a Trump campaign-Russia collusion. His eldest son Donald Trump Jr., son-in-law and senior White House adviserJared Kushner, and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort did meet in June 2016 with a Russian lawyer, who Trump Jr. was told would deliver Kremlin-supplied dirt on Clinton.

Trumpsvenomous social media post came after he spent several weeks appearing to go out of his way to publicly praise Republican senators as they try to reach consensus among themselves on the details of a measure to repeal and replace President Barack Obamas 2010 health care law.

Doing so was a major Trump campaign pledge, and he has made clear the details matter little to him; he and top aides say he would sign whatever the Senate GOP caucus can agree on.

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Trump Lashes Out at Republicans, Saying They Won't 'Protect' Him - Roll Call

Jul. 24, 2017 at 6:00 AM

Since modern polling began, no president has been as unpopular at this point in his first term as Donald Trump is today. So should Republicans worry that Trump will hurt their prospects of keeping control of the House in the 2018 midterm elections? In a word, yes if Trump remains as unpopular on Election Day 2018 as he is now.

It might seem like Republican congressional candidates should be able to escape Trumps unpopularity. Trump, after all, was the least liked major-party presidential candidate on record. Yet Republicans in 2016 won the national House vote by a percentage point and took 241 out of the chambers 435 seats for a net loss of only six seats. And even though Trump is historically unpopular as a president, he was even more unpopular as a candidate: Trumps current disapproval rating in the FiveThirtyEight aggregate is 56 percent, while 2016 general election exit polls put his unfavorable rating at 60 percent. No wonder some Republican House members might be reluctant to distance themselves from Trump, no matter how unpopular he might appear in polls.

That logic, however, misses a key distinction: Midterm elections are different from those that take place in presidential election years. And midterm elections that take place with an unpopular president in office are very different from presidential election years that have two historically unpopular candidates at the top of the major-party tickets.

Republican congressional candidates in 2016 may not have gotten much help from Trump, but they got a big boost from someone else: Hillary Clinton. Clinton, its easy to forget, was only modestly more popular than Trump. According to Gallup, Clinton had the second-worst unfavorable rating of any major-party presidential candidate in modern history, behind only Trump. In the 2016 exit polls, 55 percent of voters had an unfavorable view of Clinton.

Clintons unpopularity turned out to be a key factor in 2016 congressional races. Unsurprisingly, people who had a favorable view of Clinton primarily voted for Democrats in House races, while people with a favorable view of Trump primarily voted for Republican candidates. But among the 19 percent of voters who had an unfavorable view of both presidential candidates, House Republican candidates won by a margin of 30 percentage points. (Some voters may have cast a ballot for a Republican House candidate in the belief that a House controlled by the GOP would balance Clintons power after what most Americans thought would be a Clinton win.)

Next year, though, Clinton wont be on the ballot (although Trump continues to tweet about her). That could be a big problem for House Republican candidates, especially if Trump remains unpopular. Thats because realistically, the only way for Democrats to take back the House is to run up huge margins among voters who dont like Trump.

In part because of Clintons unpopularity, Democrats in 2016 won among voters who had an unfavorable view of Trump by only 50 percentage points. That may seem like a lot, but Democrats will need to do much better if they want to take back the House. Based on Trumps current approval rating, House Democratic candidates probably need to win Trump disapprovers by something close to a 70- or 75-point margin in 2018.

Two surveys conducted this spring by SurveyMonkey for FiveThirtyEight suggest that Democrats may get the margin they need among Trump disapprovers to take back the House. In these polls, SurveyMonkey asked voters (among other questions) whether they approved of the job Trump was doing as president and whether they planned to vote for the Democratic or Republican candidate for Congress in their district in 2018. On average, the surveys found that Democratic House candidates would win 82 percent to 7 percent (a 75-point margin) among respondents who disapproved of the job that Trump was doing. (The two surveys found very similar results.) Meanwhile, House Republican candidates won by an average of 78 points among respondents who approved of the job Trump was doing. Thats slightly worse than Republicans did among those who had a favorable view of Trump in 2016, according to the exit polls.

Overall, the SurveyMonkey polls gave Democrats a 9-point lead on the congressional ballot. Thats very close to their average 10-point edge in the FiveThirtyEight congressional ballot tracker. Its also much better than the 1-point margin Democrats lost the House by in 2016 and the 1-point lead they had in the final national congressional ballot polls before the election. And although we cant be sure of how exactly the vote share margin will translate to a seat margin in 2018, a 9- or 10-point win for the Democrats in the national House vote would put Democrats in a good position to take back the House.

The Democrats momentum shouldnt come as a big surprise. Midterms are usually more about a referendum on the president than a choice between the two parties. Since exit polls first started asking voters about their opinion of the president in 1982, those who disapprove of the presidents job performance going into a midterm election have overwhelmingly voted for the party that is not in control of the White House.

How those who disapprove of the presidents job performance have voted, by party, in midterm U.S. House elections since 1982

Excludes those who voted for third-party candidates in the midterm elections from 1982 to 2006.

Sources: Fox News, The New York Times

On average, the party out of the White House has won by 67 percentage points among those who disapprove of the presidents job performance. In the past five midterm elections, the opposition party has won that group by an average of 71 points. Thats close to the margin that the average SurveyMonkey poll has the Democrats winning by among those who disapprove of the job that Trump is doing. In other words, the SurveyMonkey poll suggests a 2018 midterm election that is in line with history.

Of course, Trump has well over a year to increase his approval rating before Election Day. And its not as though the Democrats are exactly popular: A May Gallup poll, for example, shows the Democratic Party with just a 40 percent favorable rating and a 53 percent unfavorable rating, both of which are on par with the presidents and the Republican Partys ratings. Then again, the Republican Partys low favorability ratings didnt help the Democrats hold the House in 2010 or win it back in 2014, both years when Republicans were about as unpopular as then-President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.

Republicans still might not choose to distance themselves from Trump. The 2016 election taught us that the lessons of history dont always apply to modern politics. Maybe the Democratic Partys unpopularity will be a difference-maker in 2018 like Clintons unpopularity was in 2016. Maybe Democrats wont turn out to vote in 2018. Still, these are risky bets to place with a House majority on the line. Trump is more likely to be a liability than an asset in the 2018 general election. Presidents tend to get more unpopular in the lead-up to midterms, and people who dont like the president tend to vote against the presidents party.

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Bad News For House Republicans: Clinton Won't Be On The Ballot In 2018 - FiveThirtyEight

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Executing an idiosyncratic about-face, the White House suggested Sunday that the president would be willing to accept new legislation limiting his authority to lift sanctions on Russia, following a cross-party revolt over Donald Trumps concerning reluctance to chastise Vladimir Putin for meddling in the 2016 election. Currently, the decision to lift sanctions leveled by the executive branch reside solely within the White House, and presidents from both parties have typically resisted Congress weighing in on such matters, as it curbs their ability to conduct foreign policy. The West Wing had previously resisted the sanctions bill, working behind the scenes to weaken its strictures on Trumps power.

Despite the presidents attempts to scuttle the bill, which concerns Russia, North Korea, and Iran, it is expected to pass Congress on Tuesday. As a result, sanctions will become much harder to lift, even after the circumstances that sparked them have changed. To overturn sanctions related to the Ukraine, for example, Trump would have to prove that the catalyzing conditions have been reversed. To lift sanctions over Russian cyberattacks, he would need to provide evidence that Russia had tried to reduce such transgressions. Congress would then have at least 30 days to vote on any changes he sought.

It is not just Trump who is unhappy with the bill. Europe has significant reservations, and Brussels is reportedly preparing to retaliate if Washington pushes ahead with sweeping new sanctions on Russia that hit European companies. According to a note prepared for a commission meeting on Wednesday, seen by the Financial Times, Brussels should stand ready to act within days if the U.S. measures were adopted without E.U. concerns being taken into account.

Skidding over the fact that strong, cross-party support for the bill means that a presidential veto would encounter strong resistance in Congress, newly promoted White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders framed Trumps acceptance of the widely disputed legislation as consensual. The administration is supportive of being tough on Russia, particularly in putting these sanctions in place, she said on ABCs This Week. The original piece of legislation was poorly written, but we were able to work with the House and Senate, and the administration is happy with the ability to do that and make those changes that were necessary, and we support where the legislation is now.

Her explanation, already reedy, was inconveniently undercut by the president himself, who was overcome by an outbreak of Twitter-fueled petulance. As the phony Russian With Hunt continues, two groups are laughing at this excuse for a lost election taking hold, Democrats and Russians! he posted Sunday. Its very sad that Republicans, even some that were carries over the line on my back, do very little to protect their president.

Newly appointed White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, eager to prove his worth, threw himself into the administrations undulant line of cross-communication with gusto. Speaking on CNNs State of the Union, he casually contradicted Sanders by saying that, actually, the president had not decided whether to sign the measure. Youve got to ask President Trump that, he said. Its my second or third day on the job. My guess is that hes going to make that decision shortly. Later, he added: He hasnt made the decision yet to sign that bill one way or another.

Scaramucci also addressed The Washington Posts report that the president has been exploring the possibility of pardoning himself, and his associates, in light of the ongoing, parallel investigations into Russian collusion with his campaign. (The report was neatly supplemented by Trump himself, who, in a boorish demonstration of the scope of his powers, announced via Twitter that all agree the U. S. President has the complete power to pardon.) Im in the Oval Office with the president last week; were talking about that, Scaramucci said, this time on Fox. He brought that up. He said, but he doesn't have to be pardoned. Theres nobody around him that has to be pardoned. He was just making the statement about the power of pardons.

He rounded off his weekend by clumsily confirming the fears that are driving this bill through: that Trump is not taking the Russia threat seriously. If the Russians actually hacked this situation and spilled out those e-mails, you would never have seen it, you would have never had any evidence of them, he quoted the president as saying, noting that, despite U.S. intelligence agencies confirming that Russia state hackers broke into Clinton-linked e-mail accounts, Trumps still not convinced that they interfered in the election. Maybe they did it, maybe they didnt do it, Scaramucci said, enigmatically.

Whether or not allegations of Russian collusion are fake news, the sanctions issue is quite real. Scaramuccis precede a week in which Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Trumps former campaign chairman Paul Manafort are all set to be grilled by congressional investigators about their meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer, which was ostensibly about sanctions, but actually took place in the hope of scoring damaging information about Hillary Clinton. (The committee will presumably be interested in whether the confluence of the two, otherwise unrelated, topics suggested a potential quid pro quo.) The question of U.S. sanctions on Russia also cropped up during Trumps second, undisclosed meeting with Putin at the G20 in Germany, where the two reportedly exchanged pleasantries before turning to the issue of adoptionsshorthand for the restrictions Moscow placed on American adoptions of Russian children in retaliation for U.S. sanctions in the Magnitsky Act. Those and other sanctions have been a sharp point of contention between the two countries for years, particularly after President Obama tightened the screws in response to Moscows annexation of Crimea and intervention in Eastern Ukraine. Before he left office, Obama also expelled 35 Russian diplomats and confiscated two Russian compounds in the U.S. as punishment for intervention in the election.

In the Trump administration, the barbed issue of Russian sanctions has taken on a strange, symbolic weight, alluding not so much to the governments willingness to inflict punishment, but its hesitancy to. This bill will be the first time that Congress, dominated by Trumps own party, have turned on him in a major matter, and can be seen as a measure of the toll Russia has had on his presidency so far. It is also the first time that Democrats and Republicans have joined together in such a public way since Trump took office. Such collaboration should be a troubling sign for a president who has demanded complete loyalty. The G.O.P. may have circled the wagons to defend Trump, but they are not so far gone that they wont curb his powers if they are forced to take sides against Putin. Even partisanship has its limits.

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Trump's Hold on the Republican Party Begins to Break - Vanity Fair

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Update: On Monday morning, Polish President Andrzej Duda surprised virtually everyone by announcing he would veto the proposed legislation, a move likely in reaction to widespread mass protests against the ruling party's efforts to overhaul the judiciary.

The right-wing government in Poland is on a collision course with the European Union.

Over the weekend, a bill overhauling the countrys judiciary passed both chambers of the parliament. If it gets adopted, the ruling Law and Justice Party will be able to fill Poland's Supreme Court with its hand-picked allies. Critics warn it would be a profound step toward authoritarianism.

The measure has led to the biggest street protests since the populist conservative party came to power in 2015. Lech Walesa, the 73-year-old former president, joined demonstrators in the city of Gdansk, where he led landmark strikes in the 1980s that helped topple communism. He warned that the freedoms won by the anti-communist struggle are now under risk.

Our generation managed, in the most improbable situation, to lead Poland to freedom, he said to the crowd in the city'sSolidarity Square. You cannot let anyone interrupt this victory, especially you young people You must use all means to take back what we achieved for you.

Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council and a former Polish prime minister, described the legislation as anegation of European values and standards that would move us back in time and space backward and to the East. The East was less a geographic signifier than a marker for a different, darker era of Polish politics, when Warsaw was subject to the whims of Moscow and isolatedfrom Europe's liberal democracies.

A statement from the U.S. State Department urged the government to reconsider the bill, which it declared would undermine judicial independence and weaken the rule of law in Poland. Yet the White House seems to have sent a different message.

After all, it was in Warsaw earlier this monththat President Trump championed his vision of the West to a crowd of supporters bused in by the ruling party. Trump said nothing then about the importance of rule of law or the preservation of democratic institutions. Instead, he delivered a paean to blood-and-soil nationalism, anchored in antipathy to Islam and airy appeals to Christian values and the sacrifices of patriots.

Michal Kobosko, the director of the Atlantic Councils Warsaw Global Forum, told The Post that Trump's rhetoric clearly encouraged to move forward with their offensive against the courts.

In giving such a speech in such a place, Trump has confirmed Polands nationalist government in its isolationist and anti-democratic course,wrote Post columnist Anne Applebaum.

Polish President Andrzej Duda vetoed two out of three bills aimed at reforming Poland's judiciary July 24, after five days of protests, with tens of thousands of people on the streets. (Reuters)

That course has been charted by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the Law and Justice Party's co-founder and boss and the de facto leader of Poland. Both the country's prime minister and president are seen as loyal accomplices to Kaczynski's agenda. Protesters were staking their hopes on the latter PresidentAndrzej Duda to veto the widely unpopular legislation, but he is expected to sign it into law aftera few amendments.

Its implications are staggering.Heres the crowning blow in ending judiciary independence in Poland, wrote Monika Nalepa of the University of Chicago.Since the Minister of Justice already simultaneously holds the position of Prosecutor General, the ruling majority may now choose both the prosecutor AND the judge in every single court case.

For Kaczynski and his allies, though, the takeover is part of their project to renationalize Poland. Kaczynskisees the judiciary as infested with crypto-communists and liberals subordinated to foreign forces. He peddles various conspiracy theories, including his belief that Tusk and his liberal colleagues hatcheda plot that led to a 2010 plane crash in which Kaczynski'stwin brother died.

When the incident came up during a parliamentary debate about the judicial reforms last week, Kaczynski exploded. Don't wipe your treacherous mugs with the name of my late brother, he saidto his liberal adversaries.You destroyed him, you murdered him!This sort of polarizingrhetoric has become the stock-in-trade of politicians in nearby Hungary or Turkey, where illiberal conservatives have also set about subverting and transforming democracies in their image.

Kaczynski'spopulist platform built on Catholic piety, anti-cosmopolitannationalismand generous cash handouts won his party the support of close to 40 percent of Polish voters, and he may seek to consolidate that position through elections later this year. The liberal opposition, meanwhile, is floundering, asDer Spiegel observed.

The bedrock of [the liberal] political platform has always been the E.U.," noted the German magazine. Its vision is basically that so long as Poland is a reliable European partner, aid from Brussels will ensure prosperity for all. The trouble is that few people believe in this vision in the remote east of the country, in villages and small towns.

The protests against the new judicial reforms may present a galvanizing moment for the opposition. Last year, the government was forced to back down from an abortion ban after mass protests hit the streets.

We will show that we refuse to live without freedom, said Radomir Szumelda, a 45-year-old liberal activist, to my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker. Young people who didnt live under communism may not know what that was like, but they are also joining us, and together we are saying that we cant go back.

But they may not get much assistance from the European Union. Despite the scolding statements coming from various corners, real punitive measures can only be slapped on Warsaw by a unanimous vote within the bloc. Hungary's illiberal prime minister, Viktor Orban, has already made clear that he would veto such censure.

And, looking further west, it's unlikely the American president another politician at war with liberalism and convinced of judicial plots against his rule will lift a finger toprevent Warsaw's slide away from Europe.

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Poland's war on democracy was aided by Trump - Washington Post