Since I've spent so much time this week examining the Democratic presidential race, I thought I'd balance things out today by taking a look at how the Republicans are doing. It's been enough time since their first debate for any effects to gel in the poll numbers, so we can now answer the question of who was helped most by their debate performance and who saw their support go down as a result. I should mention that all of the data below comes from the Real Clear Politics tracking page.

Overall, of course, Donald Trump continues to dominate the field. He's got twice the support of his nearest competitor, in fact (22.0 percent to Bush's 10.7 percent). His numbers slipped a little due to one outlier poll, but they should bounce back up again when it drops out of the rolling average. He seems to have a ceiling of about 25 percent support in the Republican base, at least for the time being. Can he break through to 30 percent support or more? Or will he just plateau where he is now? We'll have to wait and see.

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Could the next presidential election be one where both sides get the candidate who inspires the most passion among the base? It would have seemed almost ridiculous to suggest as recently as last month, but the possibility that America could be given the choice of Donald Trump versus Bernie Sanders doesn't seem so far-fetched nowadays. If these are the choices the two major parties coalesce behind, it'll certainly be one of the most unique presidential elections ever.

Of course, it's still way too early to assign any sort of probability for this particular matchup ever coming to pass. We're only in the dog days of August, and Iowa won't kick off the primary voting until next February. We've got a lot of debates to go, and a lot of campaigning remains before we get to that point. But, putting probabilities aside, it's certainly now within the realm of possibility.

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Yesterday, I wrote some advice for Hillary Clinton and her campaign. Political pundits are wont to do this sort of thing, of course, but today I'd like to shift gears somewhat and give Clinton some credit for handling a situation perfectly. Hey, I calls 'em as I sees 'em.

Hillary Clinton had a private meeting with some Black Lives Matter protesters who showed up at one of her town hall meetings. The protesters were shut out of the meeting because the building's capacity had been reached, so Clinton graciously set up a private meeting so they could air their views. A video of this meeting was just released, and the transcript of the exchange shows that Clinton answered questions about as well as any politician could, given the same circumstances. I'm going to post the full transcript below (thankfully provided by Politic365), because it is so instructive, so I'll keep my own comments brief (I'll have more to say on this issue in the future, though).

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Deep into the political silly season, it seems the pundits are getting rather tired of being so very, very wrong in predicting the imminent demise of Donald Trump's candidacy, so instead they all seem to have turned to a new summertime storyline: predicting the imminent demise of Hillary Clinton's candidacy. This is what passes for conventional wisdom inside the Beltway in the dog days of August, but it's likely going to turn out to be just as wrong as the endless refrains of "surely this will sink Trump!" which preceded it. For anyone so disconnected from reality to understand what I'm saying here, a handy reminder that we have over fourteen months before the 2016 election. Even the first primaries are still a half a year away. And anything can happen in that amount of time in politics.

Hillary's campaign, to read the headlines, is in such a sorry state that it's a wonder she hasn't just hung up her hat and gone home. If you just woke up from a coma and read only the past week's headlines, you'd be wondering when Clinton will be scheduling her concession speech, as she prepares to exit the race. That this is patent nonsense seems to have escaped everyone.

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We're going to begin today with a wrapup of the week that was in the presidential campaigns, and as befitting his status as the Republican frontrunner, we're going to start with Donald Trump (if you're sick of hearing about Trump, just skip down eight or ten paragraphs and continue reading).

Trump is helicoptering in to the Iowa State Fair today, so perhaps he'll have said something even more outrageous by the time you read this. Hey, it's a pretty safe bet, at this point. Trump once again proved this week that he can say just about anything -- even stuff the Republican base violently disagrees with him on -- and walk away unscathed. This time around, Trump actually said (at least at first) some fairly nice things about Planned Parenthood. Right now, in Republicanland, this is heresy of the first order (more on this in a moment). But, so far, it doesn't seem to have hurt Trump.

In the "Trump fighting with other Republican candidate" news, we have an amusing quote from Lindsey Graham: "Donald Trump is an out-of-control car driving through a crowd of Republicans, and somebody needs to get him out of the car. I just don't see a pathway forward for us in 2016 to win the White House if we don't decisively deal with this." Hoo boy. That's bad enough, but a bigger fracas happened between Trump and Rand Paul. It started with an ad the Paul team created, which hammered Trump for essentially being a Democrat up until he decided to run.

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Legalizing both medicinal and recreational marijuana will be on the ballot in Ohio this November. But this news is actually dividing marijuana activists once again, which might have some political repercussions for the entire movement. Because of the way the proposed law was drafted, it would create an official oligopoly of only ten growers for the entire state. Ohio has over 11 million people, so each official farm would serve the needs of over one million people. That's pretty unbalanced, to put it mildly, since the other 75,000 farmers in the state would be out in the cold.

The initiative's backers, ResponsibleOhio, issued a statement upon learning their measure had qualified for this year's ballot:

It's time for marijuana legalization in Ohio, and voters will have the opportunity to make it happen this November -- we couldn't be more excited. Drug dealers don't care about doing what's best for our state and its citizens. By reforming marijuana laws in November, we'll provide compassionate care to sick Ohioans, bring money back to our local communities and establish a new industry with limitless economic development opportunities.

This last bit is almost Orwellian in phrasing, since the "limitless economic development opportunities" will indeed be limited to only ten farms. These ten farmers will have "limitless" chances to make money for themselves, which is pretty much the entire complaint against the proposed law.

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Donald Trump is unique. Let's start off with that. He's an outsider to the political process, he's got name recognition other candidates would die for, and he makes his own rules out on the campaign trail. He is (to use a word I coined a while back) a "celebritician" -- a celebrity who decided he'd become a politician. This horrifies many, mostly because he's been so successful (so far). But he's certainly not the first celebrity to toss his hat into the political ring, although he is the first big one to emerge on the Republican side in a while (ever since the days of Senator Fred Thompson, by my reckoning). But since each celebritician is unique, can anything be learned from the past history of quixotic celebrity political campaigns?

I've been fascinated by the overlap of celebrity and politics for years, I have to admit. In fact, I initially wrote about it nine years ago, right in the midst of a California race which ended up re-electing Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. I provided a list of celebrity candidates and officeholders stretching back to the 1940s, and concluded that Republicans were far more successful at making the leap from acting to political office. Since that time, Democrats have actually evened the score quite a bit (think: Senator Al Franken), which I wrote about last year, while applauding Clay Aiken for making a longshot bid for a House seat. But I think the two most interesting cases to compare to Donald Trump's run are California's initial election of "The Governator" and Minnesota's election of Governor Jesse Ventura.

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I am no different than most other political commentators, in at least two respects. I love a good presidential race, and I mostly only pay attention to the frontrunners on both sides. To put this another way, I don't write many articles about Jim Webb's campaign or how Lindsey Graham is fairing. So today, in the midst of the political dog days of August, I thought I'd concentrate on the bottom end of the polls, in an attempt to answer the question: "Who will drop out first?"

So far, we have 22 major candidates in the race for the Democratic and Republican nominations. We may even get another one, if Lawrence Lessig is successful in his just-announced gimmicky bid to run for president. This is a full field -- the fullest in anyone's memory, in fact. But because it is such a large field, it is inevitable that some of them are going to fade away fairly quickly. Both Rick Santorum and Rick Perry seem to be out of money already (Perry reportedly just put all his campaign staffers on volunteer basis, since he couldn't make the payroll). But while running out of money usually stops a candidacy in its tracks, this is not always true. Some candidacies are closer to crusades than anything else -- true-believers in one cause or another that won't quit no matter what happens (at least, until the primaries get underway). And in the new Citizens United world, super PACs mean even a technically-broke candidate can still be out there running television ads. So picking the early exits isn't as easy as it might seem.

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The entire political punditry world has been holding its collective breath since last Thursday night, waiting for some polling numbers to interpret. As usual, polling takes longer than most people think. The first Republican debate, after all, was held Thursday night. Most pollsters take at least two days to conduct a poll, then maybe another day of number-crunching, before the results are made public. Due to this process, a lot of new polls will likely appear in the next two or three days. NBC beat them all to the punch, though, and released their first poll results over the weekend. The numbers -- if they prove to be valid, and not outliers -- show a remarkable shakeup happening in public opinion as a direct result of the debates, at least in the field right below the frontrunner. One question in particular from this poll seems to show some very bad news for the Republican Party, but before we get to that let's take a look at the whole field.

Before the debates, Donald Trump was in first place with 22 percent. After the debates, Trump is still in first place with 23 percent. But the standings just below Trump got shaken up in a fairly big way. Before the debates, Jeb Bush and Scott Walker were tied for second with 10 percent each. Tied for fourth were Ben Carson and Marco Rubio, each with 8 percent. Tied for sixth place were Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, both with 6 percent. None of the other candidates had even 5 percent support.

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Well, that was entertaining, wasn't it? We refer, of course, to the grand spectacle of the first Republican presidential debates, held last night on Fox News. Since this is all anyone's talking about in the political world today, we are going to follow suit and devote most of this column (with the exception of the awards) to our reactions to seeing all the Republican candidates under one roof for the first time.

Of course, all 17 of them weren't actually on the same stage at the same time. The big event was limited to the top 10 in recent polls, which meant the others had to make do with a "kids' table debate" -- given to a cavernously empty auditorium, much earlier in the day. The consensus from the punditocracy is that Carly Fiorina won the earlier debate, but for the life of me I can't see why. She did her usual shtick, alternating smoothly from viciously snarky all the way to snarkily vicious. It's what she does, and what she's always done. Maybe some of the national pundits hadn't seen her before, that's the only explanation that springs to mind (full disclosure: I live in California, where we were subjected to "demon sheep" ads from Carly years ago).

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