How Could Trump Possibly Get Re-Elected?

The new Quinnipiac poll looks fairly dire for Republicans preparing for the 2020 election cycle, especially the bozo at the top of the ticket. Most Americans now consider Trump a criminal and less than a third of voters think he's honest. Here are some highlights:

• 38% of voters (34% of independents) approval of the way Trump is handling his job while 55% disapproval (57% of independents)

• 27% of voters (24% of independents) approval of the way congressional Republicans are handling their jobs while 66% disapprove.

• 30% of voters think Trump is honest. 26% of independents do. 65% of voters think Trump is not honest (including 26% of Republicans and 69% of independents). His dishonest numbers are the worst since Quinnipiac started polling that question.

• Just 39% of voters think Trump has good leadership skills, while 58% think he doesn't.

• Asked if Trump is a good role model for children, 22% of voters-- may they rot in hell-- say Trump is, including 54% of Republicans, 3% of Democrats and 17% of independents. 71% of Americans say he is NOT a good role model, including 37% of Republicans, 97% of Democrats and 75% of independents.

• Asked who they believe more, Trump or Michael Cohen, 35% of Americans say Trump (79% of Republicans, 4% of Dems and 31% of independents) and 50% say Cohen (11% of Republicans, 86% of Dems and 51% of independents).

• 64% of Americans think Trump committed crimes before he was elected and just 24% don't.

• 45% of Americans think Trump has committed crimes as president and 43% don't. Significantly, just 38% of independent voters say Trump hasn't been committing crimes while in office.

Early this morning, a poll of Florida voters was released by Bendixen & Amandi International showing that just 40% of Sunshine State voters think Trump deserves to be reelected. 53% oppose a second term for him. This is no path to reelection for Trump that doesn't include Florida. And, by the way, Florida voters identified Climate Change as the number one issue facing the country, an issue Trump still calls a "Chinese hoax."

Tim Wu is a law professor at Columbia University who ran for Lieutenant Governor New York with Zephyr Teachout a few years ago. Yesterday he wrote an OpEd for the New York Times, The Oppression Of The Supermajority which makes the important point that, on many of the big issues of the day, Americans are not nearly as divided as a "divide and conquer" establishment would have us believe. In fact, he wrote "The defining political fact of our time is not polarization. It’s the inability of even large bipartisan majorities to get what they want on issues like these. Call it the oppression of the supermajority. Ignoring what most of the country wants-- as much as demagogy and political divisiveness-- is what is making the public so angry.

• higher taxes for the ultra-wealthy- 75%
• guaranteed paid maternity leave- 67%
• strong net neutrality laws- 83%
• stronger privacy laws- 60%
• Medicare should be able to negotiate lower drug prices- 92%
• consumers should be able to import cheaper drugs from Canada- 71%

Thwarting the will of the American public is a long anti-democratic tradition that the establishment has honed into a science. Wu wrote that "During the first decades of the 20th century, the American public voted for politicians who supported economic reforms like maximum-hour work laws and bans on child labor. But the Supreme Court struck down most of Congress’s economic legislation, deeming it unconstitutional. In our era, it is primarily Congress that prevents popular laws from being passed or getting serious consideration. (Holding an occasional hearing does not count as 'doing something.') Entire categories of public policy options are effectively off-limits because of the combined influence of industry groups and donor interests. There is no principled defense of this state of affairs-- and indeed, no one attempts to offer such a justification. Instead, legislative stagnation is cynically defended by those who benefit from it with an unconvincing invocation of the rigors of our system of checks and balances." And that brings us to why it is so crucial to elect Bernie president, not Status Quo Joe or Bloomberg or any of the other corporate candidates being dubbed "moderates" by the corporate media.

The president, because he is representative of more voters, might be thought an important remedy to this problem. And when running for office, Mr. Trump did gesture at his support for popular policies, promising to control drug prices, build public infrastructure and change trade policy to favor dispossessed workers. Yet since coming to power, Mr. Trump, with a few exceptions, like trade, has seemed to lose interest in what the broader public wants, focusing instead on polarizing issues like immigration that are not the public’s main concerns but the obsessions of a loud minority faction.

As the United States begins the process of choosing the next president and Congress, we need to talk more openly about which candidates are most likely to deliver the economic policies that the supermajority wants. Yes, the people can be wrong about things, but so too can experts, embedded industry groups and divisive political factions. It is not a concession to populism, but rather a respect for democracy, to suggest that two-thirds of the population should usually get what they ask for.

The Blue America 2020 congressional thermometer above will help guarantee that if a progressive president is elected-- whether Bernie or Elizabeth Warren or anyone else with a plan to enact real change-- there will be more members of Congress ready to back them up. That's crucial. Please consider contributing what you can to any or all of the candidates.

Trumpanzee Brags About A Poll He Didn't Read That Finds Most Americans Say He's Unfit To Be In The White House

The Swamp Revisited by Nancy Ohanian

Yesterday both Trumpanzee and Huckabee's unfortunate daughter were tweeting a stat from the new Quinnipiac poll that "66% of people feel the economy is 'Excellent or Good.' That is the highest number ever recorded by this poll." What they didn't note was the question that asked if Señor T's policies are helping or hurting the economy? Only 39% thought they were helping. and when asked you was more responsible for the current economy, 49% said Obama and only 40% said Trumpy-the-Clown.

Perhaps whoever suggested Trump blog about the Quinnipiac poll should have examined it more closely. The headline was that most Americans feel that Trump is unfit to be president and that his first year in office was a chaotic disaster. Perhaps Trump has been used to report cards like this-- we'll never know because he's threatened to sue any school that releases his records-- but grading Trump's first year in office, 39% of voters give him an "F," while 17% give him a "D." Trump gets an "A" from 16 % of voters, a "B" from another 16% and a "C" from 11% of voters.

Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll said it's been "a very tough Freshman year" for Señor Trumpanzee. "Considered an intelligent person with a really bad report card, filled with far more 'F's' than 'A's' or 'B's', the president is a long way from the Dean's list in the eyes of voters."

• 63 -34% that he is not honest;
• 59 -39% that he does not have good leadership skills;
• 59 -38% that he does not care about average Americans;
• 59 -39% that he is a strong person;
• 65 -32% that he does not share their values.

I bet none of the sycophants in the White House Trump has surrounded himself with dared show him the way voters described him when they were not given a multiple choice but encouraged to pick any word they wanted:

A majority of Americans (51%) are pessimistic about the future for as long as Trump is in the White House. 45% feel optimistic. 60% of Whites with college degrees are pessimistic. 66% off whites with college degrees say Trump is dishonest. Blacks are more perceptive, 83% recognizing he's a liar. The trend has been clear-- there the voters see of Trump, the more certain they've become he's full of shit. When Quinnipiac first started asking about his honesty in November, 2016, 52% said he was a liar and it's risen steadily, with today's 63% being the highest even of Americans knowing Trump's a lying sack of shit. And here's the stats for teh fitness to serve question:

Journalists' Unique Role In Resisting The Fascist Take-Over

Team Trump is going around the world telling people to ignore what Trump himself says. When the cameras are rolling, the Trumpists are just delivering an alternative message-- the opposite of what Trump says on a wide range of topics. When the cameras aren't rolling, they've been letting European leaders know that what Trump says for domestic consumption is just to placate or arouse his feeble-minded and drugged up fans and that most of it isn't related to actual American policy goals. It would be wise for us to be very skeptical of these pronouncements disavowing any of the basic tenets of Trumpism.

It's true that when Trump offered the VP job to John Kasich, he had Donald, Jr. define the role as a kind of de facto presidency. Kasich would be in charge of domestic policy and foreign affairs, Freddo told Kasich. "What would Trumpy-the-Clown do," they asked. "He'd spend his time making America great again," was the response." He's certainly spending a lot of that time at his gawdy mansion in Mar-a-Lago and... how long does it take to play 8 holes of golf? But as lazy and afflicted with attention deficit disorder as he is, Trumpy-von-Thin-Skin isn't about to let anyone run his show, other than implementation of his grand fascist vision. People who have signed on to work for him-- the collaborators-- are all part of the kakistocracy.

Over the weekend, Time published a lecture Pulitzer Award-winning journalist Bret Stephens gave at UCLA, dedicated to the memory of Daniel Pearl and other journalists killed for their work as journalists. He started by talking about how professional journalists revere, as a matter of course, truth. "We honor the central idea of journalism-- the conviction, as my old boss Peter Kann once said, 'that facts are facts; that they are ascertainable through honest, open-minded and diligent reporting; that truth is attainable by laying fact upon fact, much like the construction of a cathedral; and that truth is not merely in the eye of the beholder.' And we honor the responsibility to separate truth from falsehood, which is never more important than when powerful people insist that falsehoods are truths, or that there is no such thing as truth to begin with."

No one could have doubted at that moment that his lecture was going to be an attack on Trump, who thrives on lies, confusion, chaos, fear and ignorance. To Trump, Stephens reminded his audience, journalists as "the disgusting and corrupt media."

Some of you may have noticed that we’re living through a period in which the executive branch of government is engaged in a systematic effort to create a climate of opinion against the news business.

The President routinely describes reporting he dislikes as FAKE NEWS. The Administration calls the press “the opposition party,” ridicules news organizations it doesn’t like as business failures, and calls for journalists to be fired. Mr. Trump has called for rewriting libel laws in order to more easily sue the press.

...[T]he question of what Mr. Trump might yet do by political methods against the media matters a great deal less than what he is attempting to do by ideological and philosophical methods.

Ideologically, the president is trying to depose so-called mainstream media in favor of the media he likes-- Breitbart News and the rest. Another way of making this point is to say that he’s trying to substitute news for propaganda, information for boosterism.

His objection to, say, the New York Times, isn’t that there’s a liberal bias in the paper that gets in the way of its objectivity, which I think would be a fair criticism. His objection is to objectivity itself. He’s perfectly happy for the media to be disgusting and corrupt-- so long as it’s on his side.

But again, that’s not all the president is doing.

Consider this recent exchange he had with Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly asks:

Is there any validity to the criticism of you that you say things that you can’t back up factually, and as the President you say there are three million illegal aliens who voted and you don’t have the data to back that up, some people are going to say that it’s irresponsible for the President to say that.

To which the president replies:

Many people have come out and said I’m right.

Now many people also say Jim Morrison faked his own death. Many people say Barack Obama was born in Kenya. “Many people say” is what’s known as an argumentum ad populum. If we were a nation of logicians, we would dismiss the argument as dumb.

We are not a nation of logicians.

I think it’s important not to dismiss the president’s reply simply as dumb. We ought to assume that it’s darkly brilliant-- if not in intention then certainly in effect. The president is responding to a claim of fact not by denying the fact, but by denying the claim that facts are supposed to have on an argument.

He isn’t telling O’Reilly that he’s got his facts wrong. He’s saying that, as far as he is concerned, facts, as most people understand the term, don’t matter: That they are indistinguishable from, and interchangeable with, opinion; and that statements of fact needn’t have any purchase against a man who is either sufficiently powerful to ignore them or sufficiently shameless to deny them-- or, in his case, both.

...If you can sell condos by claiming your building is 90% occupied when it’s only 20% occupied, well, then-- it’s 90% occupied. If you can convince a sufficient number of people that you really did win the popular vote, or that your inauguration crowds were the biggest-- well then, what do the statistical data and aerial photographs matter?

...Today we have “dis-intermediating” technologies such as Twitter, which have cut out the media as the middleman between politicians and the public. Today, just 17% of adults aged 18-24 read a newspaper daily, down from 42% at the turn of the century. Today there are fewer than 33,000 full-time newsroom employees, a drop from 55,000 just 20 years ago.

When Trump attacks the news media, he’s kicking a wounded animal.

But the most interesting conversation is not about why Donald Trump lies. Many public figures lie, and he’s only a severe example of a common type.

The interesting conversation concerns how we come to accept those lies.

...I personally think we crossed a rubicon in the Clinton years, when three things happened: we decided that some types of presidential lies didn’t matter; we concluded that “character” was an over-rated consideration when it came to judging a president; and we allowed the lines between political culture and celebrity culture to become hopelessly blurred.

But whatever else one might say about President Clinton, what we have now is the crack-cocaine version of that.

If a public figure tells a whopping lie once in his life, it’ll haunt him into his grave. If he lies morning, noon and night, it will become almost impossible to remember any one particular lie. Outrage will fall victim to its own ubiquity. It’s the same truth contained in Stalin’s famous remark that the death of one man is a tragedy but the death of a million is a statistic.

...Shameless rhetoric will always find a receptive audience with shameless people. Donald Trump’s was the greatest political strip-tease act in U.S. political history: the dirtier he got, the more skin he showed, the more his core supporters liked it.

Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, called on Americans to summon “the better angels of our nature.” Donald Trump’s candidacy, and so far his presidency, has been Lincoln’s exhortation in reverse.

Here’s a simple truth about a politics of dishonesty, insult and scandal: It’s entertaining. Politics as we’ve had it for most of my life has, with just a few exceptions, been distant and dull.

Now it’s all we can talk about. If you like Trump, his presence in the White House is a daily extravaganza of sticking it to pompous elites and querulous reporters. If you hate Trump, you wake up every day with some fresh outrage to turn over in your head and text your friends about.

Whichever way, it’s exhilarating. Haven’t all of us noticed that everything feels speeded up, more vivid, more intense and consequential? One of the benefits of an alternative-facts administration is that fiction can take you anywhere.

Earlier today, at his press conference, the president claimed his administration is running like a “fine-tuned machine.” In actual fact, he just lost his Labor Secretary nominee, his National Security Adviser was forced out in disgrace, and the Intelligence Community is refusing to fully brief the president for fear he might compromise sources and methods.

But who cares? Since when in Washington has there been a presidential press conference like that? Since when has the denial of reality been taken to such a bald-faced extreme?

At some point, it becomes increasingly easy for people to mistake the reality of the performance for reality itself. If Trump can get through a press conference like that without showing a hint of embarrassment, remorse or misgiving—well, then, that becomes a new basis on which the president can now be judged.

To tell a lie is wrong. But to tell a lie with brass takes skill. Ultimately, Trump’s press conference will be judged not on some kind of Olympic point system, but on whether he “won”-- which is to say, whether he brazened his way through it. And the answer to that is almost certainly yes.

So far, I’ve offered you three ideas about how it is that we have come to accept the president’s behavior.

The first is that we normalize it, simply by becoming inured to constant repetition of the same bad behavior.

The second is that at some level it excites and entertains us. By putting aside our usual moral filters-- the ones that tell us that truth matters, that upright conduct matters, that things ought to be done in a certain way-- we have been given tickets to a spectacle, in which all you want to do is watch.

And the third is that we adopt new metrics of judgment, in which politics becomes more about perceptions than performance-- of how a given action is perceived as being perceived. If a reporter for the New York Times says that Trump’s press conference probably plays well in Peoria, then that increases the chances that it will play well in Peoria.

Let me add a fourth point here: our tendency to rationalize.

One of the more fascinating aspects of last year’s presidential campaign was the rise of a class of pundits I call the “TrumpXplainers.” For instance, Trump would give a speech or offer an answer in a debate that amounted to little more than a word jumble.

But rather than quote Trump, or point out that what he had said was grammatically and logically nonsensical, the TrumpXplainers would tell us what he had allegedly meant to say. They became our political semioticians, ascribing pattern and meaning to the rune-stones of Trump’s mind.

If Trump said he’d get Mexico to pay for his wall, you could count on someone to provide a complex tariff scheme to make good on the promise. If Trump said that we should not have gone into Iraq but that, once there, we should have “taken the oil,” we’d have a similarly high-flown explanation as to how we could engineer this theft.

...Overall, the process is one in which explanation becomes rationalization, which in turn becomes justification. Trump says X. What he really means is Y. And while you might not like it, he’s giving voice to the angers and anxieties of Z. Who, by the way, you’re not allowed to question or criticize, because anxiety and anger are their own justifications these days.

Watching this process unfold has been particularly painful for me as a conservative columnist. I find myself in the awkward position of having recently become popular among some of my liberal peers-- precisely because I haven’t changed my opinions about anything.

By contrast, I’ve become suddenly unpopular among some of my former fans on the right-- again, because I’ve stuck to my views. It is almost amusing to be accused of suffering from something called “Trump Derangement Syndrome” simply because I feel an obligation to raise my voice against, say, the president suggesting a moral equivalency between the U.S. and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The most painful aspect of this has been to watch people I previously considered thoughtful and principled conservatives give themselves over to a species of illiberal politics from which I once thought they were immune.

In his 1953 masterpiece, The Captive Mind, the Polish poet and dissident Czeslaw Milosz analyzed the psychological and intellectual pathways through which some of his former colleagues in Poland’s post-war Communist regime allowed themselves to be converted into ardent Stalinists. In none of the cases that Milosz analyzed was coercion the main reason for the conversion.

They wanted to believe. They were willing to adapt. They thought they could do more good from the inside. They convinced themselves that their former principles didn’t fit with the march of history, or that to hold fast to one’s beliefs was a sign of priggishness and pig-headedness. They felt that to reject the new order of things was to relegate themselves to irrelevance and oblivion. They mocked their former friends who refused to join the new order as morally vain reactionaries. They convinced themselves that, brutal and capricious as Stalinism might be, it couldn’t possibly be worse than the exploitative capitalism of the West.

I fear we are witnessing a similar process unfold among many conservative intellectuals on the right. It has been stunning to watch a movement that once believed in the benefits of free trade and free enterprise merrily give itself over to a champion of protectionism whose economic instincts recall the corporatism of 1930s Italy or 1950s Argentina. It is no less stunning to watch people who once mocked Obama for being too soft on Russia suddenly discover the virtues of Trump’s “pragmatism” on the subject.

And it is nothing short of amazing to watch the party of onetime moral majoritarians, who spent a decade fulminating about Bill Clinton’s sexual habits, suddenly find complete comfort with the idea that character and temperament are irrelevant qualifications for high office.

The mental pathways by which the new Trumpian conservatives have made their peace with their new political master aren’t so different from Milosz’s former colleagues.

There’s the same desperate desire for political influence; the same belief that Trump represents a historical force to which they ought to belong; the same willingness to bend or discard principles they once considered sacred; the same fear of seeming out-of-touch with the mood of the public; the same tendency to look the other way at comments or actions that they cannot possibly justify; the same belief that you do more good by joining than by opposing; the same Manichean belief that, if Hillary Clinton had been elected, the United States would have all-but ended as a country.

This is supposed to be the road of pragmatism, of turning lemons into lemonade. I would counter that it’s the road of ignominy, of hitching a ride with a drunk driver.

So, then, to the subject that brings me here today: Maintaining intellectual integrity in the age of Trump... We each have our obligations to see what’s in front of one’s nose, whether we’re reporters, columnists, or anything else. This is the essence of intellectual integrity.

Not to look around, or beyond, or away from the facts, but to look straight at them, to recognize and call them for what they are, nothing more or less. To see things as they are before we re-interpret them into what we’d like them to be. To believe in an epistemology that can distinguish between truth and falsity, facts and opinions, evidence and wishes. To defend habits of mind and institutions of society, above all a free press, which preserve that epistemology. To hold fast to a set of intellectual standards and moral convictions that won’t waver amid changes of political fashion or tides of unfavorable opinion. To speak the truth irrespective of what it means for our popularity or influence.

The legacy of Danny Pearl is that he died for this. We are being asked to do much less. We have no excuse not to do it.

In case you haven't seen it yet, Quinnipiac released their latest survey on Trumpanzee job approval. As you would have probably guessed, it's continued to sink. Trumpy-The-Clown disapproval fell from 51% on February 7 to 55% today. Of the 55% who disapprove of the idiot-- almost all-- 49%-- strongly disapprove. It gets worse:

• Not honest- 55-40%
• Bad leadership skills- 55-42%
• Doesn't care about average Americas- 53-44%
• Not level-headed- 63-33%
• Doesn't share our values- 60-37%
• More a divider than a uniter- 58-36%

Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said "Trump's popularity is sinking like a rock. He gets slammed on honesty, empathy, level headedness and the ability to unite. And two of his strong points, leadership and intelligence, are sinking to new lows. This is a terrible survey one month in."

Is the Sestak campaign (and reality) finally catching up with poor old Arlen Specter?

The congressman finally has some news to smile about.

"U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak is within striking distance of U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, trailing the long-time incumbent 47 - 39 percent among likely primary voters, compared to his 53 - 32 percent gap April 7, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today."

-- from a Quinnipiac University release today

by Ken

I'm not normally a poll-obsessive kind of guy, but I took notice of two polls whose results were released today, the Quinnipiac one referenced above (one of the most respected of the polling concerns), done among likely Pennsylvania Democratic primary voters from April 28 to May 2, which has Specter leading 47 percent to 39 percent, down from 53-32 on April 7, and a Muhlenberg/Morning Call tracking poll, which accords well with the Quinnipiac result for May 2 and for two days later shows the Specter-Sestak race rightening to 46-42. In other words, at the very least these results show the race narrowed to single digits.

Regular readers will recall the fascination and admiration I've voiced for the powerfully issues-based campaign the former admiral, now U.S. representative, has waged. I described it as the campaign you'd design from your Civics 101 class. The only thing missing, I kept thinking, was any indication that Pennsylvania primary voters were getting it.

Which is why I'm passing on poll results, which suggest that Pennsylvania primary voters are starting to get it. As Quinnipiac University Pollling Institute's assistant director, Peter A. Brown, says, "The Senate race is closing and could be headed for a close finish."

In part that's changed because the cash-conscious Sestak campaign has only recently begun spending significantly on TV. In part it's changed because, well, at this stage in his career Specter is too exposed a target to be able to withstand attacks on his attack-worthy career indefinitely. If there were a month more to the campaign than there is, and the Sestak campaign had enough financial resources, I think he'd be a dead duck.

Here's a comment from Quinnipiac's Peter Brown:

Sen. Specter switched parties because he was worried about losing in the Republican primary. His big lead among likely Democratic primary voters has disappeared and although he remains ahead, momentum is clearly on Sestak's side at this point. As a Republican, Specter did well among Democrats, but large majorities of Democrats have been voting against him for 30 years and that might be a tough habit for many of them to break. In addition, Specter's big lead in name identification has begun to erode as Sestak television commercials introduce him to the voters outside his suburban Philadelphia base.

I guess what still flabbergasts me is that Quinnipiac still finds voters giving the abominable Arlen a 57-31 percent favorability rating, though even that's down from 60-26. But still, what are those 57 percent thinking? Can they really be oblivious to Senator Specter's autocratic high-handedness (perhaps he's so accustomed to thinking of himself as a citadel of principle that even he doesn't notice that his line-in-the-sand stands rarely have anything to do with principle), the almost invariable craven retreat that follows any of his self-importantly trumpeted stands that actually do reflect principle of some sort (you always want to be sure to check how he finally votes, paying no attention to the stern speeches that preceded), the double dealing and willingness to be bought by anyone who's buying.

Maybe voters are finally tuning in to the strong, principled stands the Sestak campaign has been staking out on scores of real-world issues, and maybe not so much liking what they're hearing from the guy they thought they knew so well, like his shocking attempt to smear his opponent's military record.

If we go back to the Muhlenberg/Morning Call tracking polls, its May 2 result actually gibes well with the Quinnipiac result, showing Specter ahead 48-42. But the tracking poll also has numbers for May 3 and May 4: 49-40 and (are you ready for this?) 46-42 (okay, I know I already revealed this above, but still, are you ready for it?), with undecideds up from 11 to 12!

You can contribute to Joe's campaign directly through ActBlue.

MEANWHILE IN THE PA GOVERNOR'S RACE

What PA governor's race, you say? You and me both, and perhaps the voters of Pennsylvania as well.

In what Quinnipiac describes as "a field of unknowns" to replace term-limited Gov. Ed Rendell, Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato, who has done the most serious TV spending, has jumped out to what looks like a commanding lead, polling at 36 percent, as against 9 percent for Montgomery County Commissioner Joe Hoeffel and 8 percent each for Auditor General Jack Wagner and State Sen. Tony Williams. Quinnipiac notes that in April, Onorato was at 20 percent, Hoeffel 15 percent, Wagner 13 percent and Williams 5 percent. Even though "37 percent are undecided and 60 percent of likely primary voters who express a choice say they might change their mind," the Onorato margin looks awfully hard to beat.

Says Quinnipiac's Peter Brown:

Onorato has outspent his opponents on the campaign trail, especially on television, and it shows in the results. Although only slightly more than half of likely voters know enough about him to have an opinion, 46 - 5 percent favorable, 73 to 77 percent of Democrats don't know enough about any of the other three to have an opinion about them. At this point, less than 20 percent of likely voters have a favorable opinion of Wagner, Hoeffel or Williams. That is a big advantage for Onorato entering the home stretch of the campaign.

Brown's overall reading of the results announced today: ""With only two weeks until the May 18 primary, Onorato can feel somewhat confident, while Sen. Specter should be more concerned."

On the Republican side, Attorney General Tom Corbett appears to have a lock on the gubernatorial nomination, and at present is polling well ahead of Onorato. But of course Onorato remains largely unknown to state voters, a condition that could change between now and November.

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