The National Restaurant Association is coming to Washington this week for a lobbying push and in advance of it they did some internal polling to figure out where the public is on some of the issues that matter most to its bottom line. Chief among them, of course, is the fight to raise the minimum wage.
So they tasked GOP pollster Frank Luntz of CNN fame to take a private national survey. They can't have liked what he found: 71% of Americans said restaurants should raise the minimum wage to at least $10/hour even if it means the price of a meal out goes up.
The American people are much more progressive than politicians in both parties think, and this is just one example of this. And apparently there's somebody progressive inside the National Restaurant Association because somebody leaked the private poll to The Intercept. We published it here.
Republicans this cycle are taking a crack on knocking out Walter Jones, the congressman from the third district in North Carolina, one of the few independent-minded GOP lawmakers left in the House who reliably votes against leadership on key issues. Lee Fang has a good look at that race.
And speaking of Republicans, in California, we've been covering the primary in Republican Duncan Hunter's district. There are two Democrats vying to challenge them. One of them, Josh Butner, certified to the Secretary of State that he was an independent from 2008 to 2016, when he registered as a Democrat before announcing his bid for Congress. Turns out that's not true: we requested his voting record and he was a Republican for part of that time.
An update to our story about the DCCC intervention in the Syracuse primary: the party's chosen candidate, Juanita Perez Williams, had her petitions challenged by her progressive opponent, Dana Balter, and might be thrown off the ballot. She was named today to the DCCC's Red to Blue program, which is tantamount to an endorsement. Would be awkward if she gets the boot.
In both cases, the left is playing hardball against the establishment. That's kind of new.
And thanks to everybody who bought a copy of Strong Arm Press's latest book by Morris Pearl on the tax bill. It's had a really nice run so far -- Patriotic Millionaires threw a book party for it and Nancy Pelosi and a bunch of other members of Congress showed up.
Our next book should be out within a few weeks and it's going to be a good one, a compact look at the 40-year GOP war on government. (You can
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This email grows by word of mouth. If you enjoy getting it, please forward this note to friends and tell them to sign up to start getting their own copy here. I'm the Washington bureau chief at The Intercept, and I send this several times a week. If you want to contribute directly to help keep the thing running, you can do so here, though be warned a donation comes with no tote bags or extra premium content or anything. Or you can support it by buying a copy of Schoolhouse Wreck: The Betsy DeVos Story, Out of the Ooze: The Story of Dr. Tom Price or Wall Street's White House, the first three books put out by Strong Arm Press, a small progressive publishing house I cofounded. See upcoming titles here.
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