bolder balderson is better on crime and taxes and ordinary issues and the question is whether the trump base will respond to that a oppose to the more personality consult that surrounds trump as an individual. if the numbers froze right now, if the democrats even with an l in this race still have won because it went from double digit down to single digits as least as of today s polling. well, they will definitely spin it as a win. and you could argue that the fact that they are narrowing the gap so dramatically on a race on the seat that has been held by a republican for decades is a big deal. there are lots of other races like that actually more favorable to democrats across the country come november, they only need 23 seats in order to flip the house. so they would probably take this feeling confident, take this game plan to some of these other races.
loans. she said manafort was in serious debt by 2016. $1 million in clothing debt alone. with manafort trying to use the bank loans to sustain himself financially. still in question, whether rick gates will testify there. joining me now, signor justice correspondent and the our legal analyst back with us as well. so you were in there, and you have to start there, right, ryan. what stood out to you in what happened this week? i mean it was sort of amazing. i think what you have to look at if you look at the big picture here is that essentially what manafort s team will have to argue, that there is this tremendous conspiracy that he had no clue about to save him a lot of money on his tax returns. and just not really a believable or plausible scenario. and i think that it will be a challenge once this switches over to the defense side to make that case to the jurors. you had all these situations where manafort directly was paying for a lot of his more
throughout the last hour and a half or two and we expect the president to arrive and get there on the ground, the question might be is the president in a phase where for local politics, he is not a help in some cases, a help in others, or is it a nancy pelosi messaging which is coming from the president as well and republicans? which is the dynamic? now that we re weaning our way of on of the primary season, in a primary the president is key. he is absolutely helpful. in the trump district that is going to be supportive of donald trump, by fi5 to 15 points or more, the president is bad. in a swing district, he is toxic , horrible. this is not a swing district and they lost ten points, balderson did. ohio 12. it is supposed to be a trump, 15 point trump seat. it is now a one point seat.
excentric. and he has been a bit of a wild card in this whole proceeding. at one point, you know, causing quite a flurry in the conservative media by raising the anxiety that there may be a problem with mueller s appointment, only then to turn around and write a lengthy opinion saying just the opposite. he has clearly held the prosecution to its paces and limited its ability to sensationalize this by talking about oligarchs and by making too much of the spending. i think in the broad scheme of things, that is a good thing in the sense that this is at the end of the day a tax fraud trial and the question isn t were you doing business with viktor yanukovich. the question is were you not
the president s lawyers will drag this out as long as possible because the moment they say no in a formal way, they force the issue. and so the longer they can drag it out, the better. and so the question is at what point does mueller either shrug his shoulders and say i don t need the interview, i won t litigate over it, because especially if i win the litigation, the president can just assert the fifth amendment and not testify anyway, or say as frank suggested i need to go the extra mile to try to show that i ve done everything i can and play that card. and so i don t think that you can play out the time frame. it does feel like it is coming to a head, but it has felt like that before as well. and looking at maybe one of the indicators reporting coming out today from the washington post here, and that is that as