Once again we're going to take another deep dive into the polling for the Democratic presidential field. We were inspired to do so because this weekend we passed a milestone -- we are now less than a full year away from the 2020 general election. And we're only about three months away from when the first voters get to have their say on the frozen tundra of the Iowa plains.

So let's just dig in to the numbers, to see where things stand, shall we?

Campaign News

Two candidates have exited the contest since the last time we examined the full Democratic field. First, Tim Ryan left the race, surprising many who hadn't even been aware he was in the running in the first place. The second exit was a little more prominent, as Beto O'Rourke hung up his spurs last week in dramatic fashion (his announcement was totally unexpected by anyone on his staff, reportedly). While it does seem like a lot of folks have now left the race, we are still left with 17 (!) candidates -- which, even without all the candidates who have already dropped out, still equals the biggest field the Republicans ever had back in 2016.

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Does President Trump's phone even have a spell-checker? One has to wonder, when he tweets so many idiotic misspellings on such a regular basis. This week's gem came directly after the House voted on impeachment inquiry procedures, which Trump wasn't exactly happy about:

Republicans are very unified and energized in our fight on the Impeachment Hoax with the Do Nothing Democrats, and now are starting to go after the Substance even more than the very infair Process because just a casual reading of the Transcript leads EVERYBODY to see that.....

.....the call with the Ukrainian President was a totally appropriate one. As he said, "No Pressure." This Impeachment nonsense is just a continuation of the Witch Hunt Hoax, which has been going on since before I even got elected. Rupublicans, go with Substance and close it out!

Rupublicans? How infair!

Sigh.

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It's time once again to enter the Crypt, shine a flashlight up onto our face in the dark, and spin two ghastly tales of horror and mayhem for both sides of the aisle.

Gather 'round and prepare to quiver in fear, kiddies, because Hallowe'en comes but once a year. Think things are bad now? Hah! Think they couldn't possibly get any more spine-chilling or frightful? Think again!

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Today, Nancy Pelosi released the text of the House Resolution on the impeachment inquiry that the full chamber will vote on this Thursday. Because this is an important milestone, it's worth a deep dive into the text to understand exactly how the process is going to play out in the next few weeks. Republicans are not going to like certain parts of it, but that was pretty much a foregone conclusion anyway. However, it gives them -- almost -- exactly what they've been demanding, so they'll be left making ever-more-technical arguments about why the process isn't all rainbows and unicorns for the president. Pelosi is betting that this will be enough to allow Democrats to claim a fair and transparent process to the American people, while the facts uncovered in the case will overwhelm all the technical nitpicking.

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Nancy Pelosi, in a surprising move, has now indicated that the House of Representatives will indeed hold a floor vote on the impeachment inquiry this Thursday. So far, few details have been released. The big question, however, is not what will be in the motion, but why it is happening now at all.

Up until this point, Pelosi has been staunchly resisting calls to hold such a vote, even from within her own party. She seems to have already weathered much of the storm over the issue, which arose a few weeks back. She insisted that: (1) there was no constitutional requirement for such a vote, (2) the House had previously impeached other officials (but not presidents) without such a vote, and (3) an impeachment inquiry was already underway, making a motion to begin one moot. She stood firm in this position, as she almost always does when she's made her mind up on an important issue.

Her political and legal position was even bolstered at the end of last week, when a federal judge ruled that the House could indeed see all the grand jury evidence that Robert Mueller had collected, as well as an unredacted copy of his report. The judge specified in his ruling that an impeachment inquiry had indeed already begun and there was never any need for the House to hold a floor vote for that to have happened. This was a vote of confidence from the judiciary, which strengthened Pelosi's position in a big way. So why hold such a vote now?

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Remember when Republicans were the party that stood squarely for law and order? Or for that matter, remember when they used to be the party of fiscal responsibility, chock full of deficit hawks? Yeah, those were the days....

This week it was announced the annual deficit scraped the trillion-dollar ceiling last year -- figures not seen since the depths of the Great Recession. Republicans' reaction to this news? Sounds of crickets chirping. In the same week, Republicans "stormed" a secure facility, illegally carrying in and using their cell phones, in an attempt to intimidate both the committees conducting an impeachment inquiry and the witness scheduled to appear. Republicans also had to twist their pretzel logic a few more turns to explain why their previous go-to response ("There was no quid pro quo") is now, as Richard Nixon would have said, "no longer operative." Meanwhile, President Trump played the victim card once again, saying the constitutionally-sanctioned impeachment process was nothing short of a "lynching," in addition to referring to a clause in the Constitution as "phony." Trump also took the time this week to hold his very own "Mission Accomplished" moment, announcing that Syria was now a wonderful paradise, and that everyone should thank him personally for this splendiferous outcome. Nobel committee, please take note.

Sigh. In other words, it was just another week in Trumpland.

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Republicans are getting increasingly more desperate to distract everyone's attention from the continuing revelations of President Donald Trump's corruption and abuse of power by the impeachment inquiry. In fact, they've reached the "pound the table" stage, as evidenced by yesterday's rather juvenile stunt which shut down a planned House committee hearing for five hours. For those unfamiliar with the old legal adage, here are two versions of it, the first from Alan Dershowitz: "If the facts are on your side, pound the facts into the table. If the law is on your side, pound the law into the table. If neither the facts nor the law are on your side, pound the table." Earlier, Carl Sandberg went at it from a more defensive angle, but his end result is the same: "If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like Hell." This is precisely where the Republicans now are, since the both the facts and the law are (to put it politely) not on their side. So they're deploying their last-ditch mode, pounding the table and yelling as loudly as possible.

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Today was one of those days when the inside-the-Beltway punditry drew way too many conclusions from a single poll. So I thought it be a good time to once again provide a little more context to the state of the Democratic presidential race. Because, generally, one outlier poll does not a trend make.

As usual, the polling we see now is really reflective of what was going on last week. What was going on last week in the Democratic race, of course, was the fourth debate. We're just now beginning to see any post-debate movement in the polls, which always lags reality by roughly a week. An event (such as a debate) happens, then it takes a day or so for reactions to really sink in, then polls take another couple of days to run, then the data must be crunched. We've now had time for that to happen, post-debate, but the real trends won't become obvious until at least next week, when we get enough data points from individual polls to show any real sustained movement in the electorate.

The poll that caught the punditry's attention today came from CNN, and it showed Joe Biden with a commanding 15-point lead. Biden was at 34 percent, Warren was way down at 19 percent, and Bernie Sanders pulled in 16 percent. All the other candidates were in single digits.

So has Biden trounced the recent surge from Warren? Well, maybe, but then again maybe not. A poll also released this week (by The Economist/YouGov) put Biden at only 24 percent with Warren close behind at 23 percent (while Bernie scored exactly the same 16 percent). That's only a one-point difference, which is inconsistent with all the storylines being told at the Beltway cocktail parties right now.

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The Latin phrase quid pro quo simply means "something for something." That's a literal translation, and the concept is much older than even the Roman Empire: I have something you value, you have something I value, so let's exchange the two. Whether it be a chicken, a bolt of cloth, a ferry ride across a river, some gold, or whatever else, the quid pro quo concept goes back even before money existed. You give me something, and I'll give you something, and we'll both walk away satisfied with the deal. It's really not hard to understand at all, because this basic system of bartering is the bedrock of all commerce today.

President Donald Trump, however, seems to have a rather thin grasp on the concept. In his mind, as long as nobody actually says the phrase, then no quid pro quo can ever have happened. This, of course, is not true in the real world. In the real world, deals get made all the time without anyone uttering any Latin. If I go down to the coffee shop and get a donut and a cup of Joe and exchange some legal tender for these things, the only Latin that will be involved is the Annuit Coeptis, the Novus Ordo Seclorum, and the good old E Pluribus Unum engraved on the dollar bills. But a quid pro quo will have taken place nonetheless. Even if I state loudly while passing the money over: "This is not a quid pro quo," it doesn't change the fact that it is indeed a quid pro quo.

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I read today an excellent article in Salon which took on the utter shallowness of the current frenzy of making Elizabeth Warren admit she's going to have to raise taxes to pay for Medicare For All. This article impressively paints the bigger picture and offers up several soundbites that I wish we had heard from both Warren and Bernie Sanders in last week's debate. Warren and Sanders are the ones defending Medicare For All, but so far they have struggled to do so in a way which directly answers some of the inane criticism not only from the pundits but also from several centrist Democratic presidential candidates as well.

But while the article does a great job addressing the tax issue, there were two other attacks on Medicare For All which were made last week (notably by Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar) which really demand a much stronger response than either Warren or Sanders gave. The first is the charge that Medicare For All would "kick 160 million Americans off their health insurance," and the second is that "people love the health insurance they have now." Both need knocking down, and while Warren and Sanders have attempted to do so in the first four debates (all of which have spent a large amount of time on the healthcare reform issue), they still need to drive the point home in a way they so far have failed to do.

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