RUTHFULLY YOURS

PORTSMOUTH, N. H.—In a Republican primary filled with intense rivalries, none is more personal than the one between Jeb Bush and his one-time lieutenant Marco Rubio.

Mr. Rubio got the better of his former governor in the last GOP presidential debate, undermining Mr. Bush’s standing in the primary and thrusting the Florida senator to the head of the pack of candidates with elected experience.

That raises the stakes heading into a critical week in which they will appear at the next GOP debate in Milwaukee Tuesday and a forum in Florida on Friday before a hometown audience both will eventually need to keep their presidential hopes alive.

“You have two people from the same state, the same county, literally neighbors who have spent so much time together and been on the same page politically, and when one of them starts attacking the other, it becomes personal,” said former state Rep. Gaston Cantens, who served with both men in Tallahassee and is backing Mr. Rubio. “It is the ugly side of politics.”

Two long weeks ago, Hillary Clinton was declared the undisputed winner in her face-off with Republicans on the House subcommittee over the part she played during the Benghazi attacks of September 11, 2012. But that was before an Optimus Prime–sized hole was blown right through her campaign’s and the media’s narrative that Benghazi has finally been put to rest.

The bomb was the release of two new trailers for 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, director Michael Bay’s action-heavy portrayal of events (already labeled “Bayghazi” by the Internet), which hits theaters January 15. Its pop-culture treatment of events that night will have people talking and debating in a way that all the Fox News specials and C-SPAN hearings in the world couldn’t. The recently released trailer has shown that no matter how scarce the names “Hillary Clinton” and “Barack Obama” are in the film, their involvement in what’s depicted is unmistakable. The film is based on the Mitchell Zuckoff bestseller of the same name, which deals primarily with events on the ground that night, and the efforts of a small group of operators and security forces to extract their fellow Americans from the attacks.

Voters roundly rejected Democrats and “progressive” ballot initiatives favored by President Obama in local and statewide elections Tuesday. In many cases it wasn’t close, and in many cases the left failed despite a heavily Democratic local population:

– The transgender “bathroom ordinance” was flushed by voters in liberal Houston, 61 percent to 39 percent, thus “staining the city’s reputation” for tolerance, according to the mayor.

– Anti-ObamaCare and Tea Party favorite Matt Bevin easily defeated Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway (D) to become governor. Bevin is only the state’s second Republican governor in more than 40 years. The race was expected to be close, but Bevin triumphed by nearly nine points.

– In Virginia, where Democrats fought hard to turn some districts blue, the Republican Party retained control of the state Senate. With both of the state’s chambers still controlled by Republicans, Governor Terry McAuliffe will struggle to enact his left-wing agenda, which includes a push for more gun control laws, before his term is up in 2017.

– In Pennsylvania, the GOP will have a 31-19 edge in the Senate. This is the largest majority since 1954.

Democrats outspent and outpolled Republican novice Matt Bevin and expected their candidate, Attorney General Jack Conway, to keep the Kentucky governorship in Democrat hands, where it had been for all but one term of the last half-century. Instead, Tea Partier Bevin, who had previously challenged Mitch McConnell for the GOP nomination for senator and lost big, pulled off a near landslide victory with an 85,000-vote margin.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Alan Blinder of the New York Times:

In beating his Democratic opponent, Attorney General Jack Conway, by almost nine percentage points, Mr. Bevin, 48, shocked people in his own party, who believed that the climate in Kentucky was ripe for a Republican but feared that Mr. Bevin, a charismatic conservative with a go-it-alone style, was too far out of the mainstream and too inexperienced to win.

But in a year when outsiders like Donald J. Trump and Ben Carson have captured the attention of voters in the Republican presidential race, Mr. Bevin’s tendency to thumb his nose at the political establishment — coupled with President Obama’s deep unpopularity here — helped him upend Kentucky’s political status quo.

Richard Baehr emails:

I was in Kentucky 8 days last month and everyone thought Conway would win. Bevin ran against Mitch McConnell in the GOP Senate primary in 2014. Pretty hard right guy. This will be a boost for Cruz backers – that very conservative candidates can win.

The GOP establishment, in the form of the Republican Governors’ Association, wrote off the race until late in the contest. Kevin Robillard of Politico:

Ben Carson is the candidate most Republicans would like to see become president. “Like” is the keyword. They like his demeanor, his personality and his remarkable life story. This personal affinity has translated into a six-point lead over Donald Trump in The Wall Street Journal/NBC poll. His unfavorable numbers are the lowest in the poll.

Jeb Bush is the most qualified candidate to be president. For all the “establishment” criticism, any fair reading of his eight years in office shows it would be hard to design a more successful conservative governorship—lower taxes, limited spending, Medicaid reform, landmark school-choice initiatives. He left office in 2007 with a 60% approval rating.

With all this potential, how is it that Ben Carson and Jeb Bush have been the two most poorly prepared candidates in the GOP debates, including the undercard?
Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that a sitting president of the United States actually would have to know something about things like federal spending, tax policy, entitlements and foreign affairs.

An internal investigation by the Obama State Department discovered information that a top State Department aide to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, disgraced Democrat Anthony Weiner’s wife Huma Abedin, while working as a government employee was involved in activities that could be construed as serious conflicts of interest.The investigation also discovered evidence of overpayments by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to her alleged “closest aide.”

In an unanswered letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, Sen. Chuck Grassley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, stated that a special probe by the State Department’s inspector general uncovered possible leveraging of a State Department job by Huma Abedin that appears to have benefited her other employers while she worked for Mrs. Clintion. The two paid positions were with the now infamous Clinton Foundation and a consulting firm called Teneo Strategies that is also tied to former President Bill Clinton.

It’s not her, it’s them. According to a report in The Hill, young women are just not that into Hillary Clinton:

An NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll released on Friday showed Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont who is running as a Democrat, received 48 percent of support from young voters between the ages of 18-29, compared to Clinton’s 33 percent.

While the poll did not break down millennial support by gender, efforts by Clinton’s campaign to reach out to young women suggests it is a demographic the former secretary of State’s team is seeking to strengthen.

The idea that Clinton would sweep the votes of women, including young women, is not going as well as some Clinton supporters would hope:

Hillary Clinton continues to gain ground against her presidential rivals in key polls. Surveys released this week show Clinton regaining the lead in New Hampshire, dominating in Iowa, and opening a two-to-one national lead over her closest rival, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.

A strong showing at the Democratic debate, vice president Joe Biden’s decision not to challenge her for the presidency, and her performance before the House Select Committee on Benghazi have all contributed to a spike in Clinton’s poll numbers over the last three weeks. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released Tuesday shows her earning 62 percent support among likely Democratic primary voters to Sanders’s 31 percent. It’s a four-point increase from the lead she held in mid-October, when she had 58 percent support to Sanders’s 33.

A Monmouth poll also released Tuesday gives Clinton 48 percent support in New Hampshire to Sanders’s 45 percent — a razor-thin lead, but the first time in months she’s come out on top in a state next-door to Sanders’ native Vermont. If it holds, it would be a body blow to the Sanders campaign, which has led Clinton in the Granite State since late August.