He isn’t even officially in the race, but Ron DeSantis has already gone through a painful rite of the modern presidential campaign: surge and decline.

The precise political science term refers to turnout and preference between the two parties. But increasingly over the past few elections, individual primary candidates have skyrocketed in the polls in open races, only to come back down to earth quickly — and never recover.

There are a few examples from which DeSantis can learn: The best case is former Sen. John McCain, who faded away in the polling only to surge again and win the nomination. The worst is an unflattering comparison to another former Florida governor who surrendered the nomination to Trump.

Earlier this year, DeSantis was running even or narrowly in front of former President Donald Trump in some of the national and early-state GOP primary polls. Since then, the Florida governor’s poll numbers have nose-dived, and he’s barely visible in Trump’s rear-view mirror.

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PHILADELPHIA — Pollsters are again staring down a familiar nemesis: Donald Trump.

The polling industry whiffed every year Trump has been on the ballot. In 2016, Trump upset Hillary Clinton to win the presidency. And after spending four years trying to fix what went wrong, the polls were even worse in 2020. Trump ran far more competitively with now-President Joe Biden than the preelection surveys suggested.

Pollsters are breathing a sigh of relief after largely nailing last year's midterm elections. But presidential years have been a different story in the Trump era.

And now, with Trump expanding his lead over his GOP primary rivals, pollsters are fretting about a bloc of the electorate that has made his support nearly impossible to measure accurately.

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Former President Donald Trump’s supporters should be able to protest “peacefully” if Trump is arrested for his involvement in possibly paying hush money during his 2016 presidential campaign, Sen. Mark Kelly said Sunday.

Trump’s supporters, “have First Amendment rights, and they should be able to exercise those peacefully,” Kelly (D-Ariz.) said on CNN's "State of the Union." But law enforcement officials should be prepared to “make sure it doesn't rise to the level of violence,” he added.

Kelly pointed out that levying charges against the former president would be “unprecedented,” acknowledging that “there's certainly risks involved” in doing so. However, “we're a country of laws and nobody is above the law,” Kelly said.

“If they come to the conclusion that he should be charged, the former president has some constitutional rights, and this is a process that's going to need to be worked out between him and his lawyers,” Kelly said.

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A new, highly anticipated report from the leading association of pollsters confirms just how wrong the 2020 election polls were. But nine months after that closer-than-expected contest, the people asking why are still looking for answers.

National surveys of the 2020 presidential contest were the least accurate in 40 years, while the state polls were the worst in at least two decades, according to the new, comprehensive report from the American Association for Public Opinion Research.

But unlike 2016, when pollsters could pinpoint factors like the education divide as reasons they underestimated Donald Trump and offer specific recommendations to fix the problem, the authors of the new American Association for Public Opinion Research report couldn’t put their finger on the exact problem they face now. Instead, they've stuck to rejecting the idea that they made the same mistakes as before, while pointing to possible new reasons for inaccuracy.

“We could rule some things out, but it’s hard to prove beyond a certainty what happened,” said Josh Clinton, a professor at Vanderbilt University and the chair of the association’s 2020 election task force. “Based on what we know about polling, what we know about politics, we have some good prime suspects as to what may be going on.”

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Russian operatives are using a sneakier, more sophisticated version of their 2016 playbook to undermine the November election — and this time, groups inside and outside the U.S. are furthering their goal of sowing chaos.

Kremlin-backed operatives are flooding social media with fake accounts and stoking racial divisions around topics like Black Lives Matter. Articles in state-owned Russian media with millions of U.S. readers online seek to dampen Joe Biden’s appeal among progressives and echo President Donald Trump’s unsupported claims about voting fraud.

At the same time, Russian state-backed hackers are waging cyberattacks against political parties, campaigns, consultants and others tied to the U.S. elections — using more elaborate deceptions than in 2016, Microsoft said last week.

So far, the 2020 race hasn’t featured any obvious repeats of the mass hacking and dumping of confidential documents that undermined Hillary Clinton at key moments during the 2016 campaign. U.S. intelligence agencies later blamed that breach on a covert Kremlin effort to torpedo the Democratic nominee and help Trump win.

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On a Saturday in late July, Rudy Giuliani was having lunch with Donald Trump at the president’s golf course in Virginia. Both men were in unusually good spirits. Giuliani, the president’s sometime lawyer who is representing Trump in negotiations over the presidential debates, was happy again to have regular face time with the president after months of coronavirus-related isolation.

Trump, who has been glum about the still-raging pandemic that has killed nearly 160,000 Americans, the subsequent economic collapse, polling that suggests he’s headed for defeat in the fall and his inability to arrest the slide, was buoyed by a good round on the links. “He did very well at golf,” Giuliani said in a lengthy interview with POLITICO over the weekend. “So that might have been why he was in a good mood.”

Naturally the conversation turned to the general election and how Trump might turn things around. Republicans have been bombarding Trump with advice, arguing that his insistence on stoking the same divisive issues — white resentment of minorities, the culture wars and “LAW & ORDER” — which worked so well for him in 2016, now appeals to only the Trump die-hards and have turned off a broad majority of the country.

“It used to be that he would do five rallies a day and say whatever came off the top of his head and he thinks that won him the election,” said a senior GOP congressional aide, echoing the sentiments of a still-intact class of Republicans appalled by Trump and how he is turning vast swaths of Republican-leaning suburbs into Democratic territory. “It’s like when a 25-year old gets drunk and shows up at a family engagement. That can be cute. But if you’re a 50-year-old and you show up at the gathering drunk and embarrassing, that just hits a little differently. It’s not cute anymore.”

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The Justice Department signaled Monday that it could back away from plans to put a Russian company on trial next month on a criminal charge that it bankrolled online and offline troll activity during the 2016 U.S. presidential race.

During a court hearing in Washington, a prosecutor questioned whether the firm linked to an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin — Concord Management and Consulting — was sufficiently involved in the American legal process to demand a trial on the criminal conspiracy charge obtained by special counsel Robert Mueller in 2018 as part of a broader indictment of Russian companies and individuals.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Adam Jed, who served on Mueller's staff and is still assigned to the case, said Concord's defiance of a court-approved subpoena raised doubts about its commitment to the U.S. trial.

"We're starting to have some concern about whether Concord is really participating in this case," Jed told U.S. District Court Judge Dabney Friedrich. "We envision a possible situation where it would not be either possible or prudent to adhere to the current trial schedule."

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The 2016 race upended almost everything we thought we knew about the art of campaigning. Are we ready for more?

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The 2016 race upended almost everything we thought we knew about the art of campaigning. Are we ready for more?

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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned his Russian counterpart on Tuesday that the United States will not tolerate meddling in its elections, calling such interference “unacceptable.”

To which the veteran Russian diplomat, Sergey Lavrov, replied, in essence: “Who, us?”

The exchange was indirect and in careful, semi-diplomatic language, coming during a news conference. It coincided with Democrats’ unveiling of articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. It also preceded a Lavrov meeting with Trump, after which the two sides haggled over whether election meddling was even discussed.

Overall, the day‘s events showed that, three years after U.S. intelligence agencies pinned blame on the Kremlin for interfering in the 2016 race, Russia is far from willing to admit any culpability. If anything, Moscow has been amused to see the impeachment debate give steam among Republicans to a debunked conspiracy theory that it was actually Ukraine, a country with which Russia is at war, that interfered in the U.S. election.

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The Democratic National Committee sent an urgent alert on Monday to every presidential campaign aimed at avoiding a repeat of the cybersecurity fiasco the party suffered at the hands of Russia and WikiLeaks in 2016.

The subject of the email was “Counter-Disinformation Update,” and it was part of a regular series of communications by DNC Tech, the party’s in-house group responsible for internal security and monitoring the spread of fake news about Democrats.

POLITICO obtained the full archive of DNC Tech’s missives to the presidential campaigns. They reveal a party struggling to combat the continued onslaught of the twin threats faced by the Democratic Party: cyber penetration from state actors abroad and the spread of disinformation about its top presidential candidates by Donald Trump and his allies at home.

Democrats are entering a critical stretch of the campaign when voters are paying more attention, the top candidates and their desperate single-digit rivals are more likely to begin attacking one another, and Trump, facing both impeachment and a slew of general election polls that show him losing to most Democrats, is pillorying Joe Biden in an attempt to shape the nomination contest to his benefit.

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They hate Donald Trump’s tweets. They worry about his temperament. They’re still uncomfortable with the name-calling.

But many voters in Milwaukee’s Republican suburbs like his court appointments. And they approve of his stewardship of the economy.

How those suburban voters square those feelings is likely to determine the president’s fate in Wisconsin according to interviews with more than two dozen organizers, operatives and party leaders from both sides in a state that proved crucial to Trump’s upset victory in 2016.

Few expect the three key counties that surround the state’s largest city to vote Democratic next year. But they say the level of enthusiasm for Trump in Wisconsin’s so-called WOW counties — Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington — matters a great deal in a state where three of the past five presidential elections were decided by less than 1 percent.

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Bernie Sanders keeps getting bad news.

After Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren seized the spotlight in the first primary debate, the Vermont senator dropped to fourth place in two polls in the first-in-the-nation caucus state of Iowa. In some national surveys, Sanders fared just as poorly. And though he raised an impressive $18 million over the last three months, former Vice President Joe Biden and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg posted bigger hauls in the same period.

Inside the campaign, though, Sanders’ aides are defiant: They believe that Washington journalists are getting the presidential election wrong all over again, underestimating Sanders’ large volunteer base and mistaking temporary changes in surveys as permanent shifts in the race. They see the up-and-down polling — some of which has shown him gaining ground after the debates — as proof the primary is wide open. And they think that if Biden continues to lose support, as he did after Harris landed a blow on him in the first debate, Sanders is best positioned to win over his voters.

“When he announced in 2016, a lot of people in the elite class said that he stood no chance and couldn’t win. Over the course of his campaign, he proved a lot of people wrong,” said Faiz Shakir, Sanders' campaign manager. “Fast forward to 2019, and you have some of the same skeptics saying it’s dead, it’s all over. I think they will be similarly proven wrong.”

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SAN FRANCISCO — Bernie Sanders put down roots in California during the last presidential race — and he never really left. Now, he is making the delegate-rich, early-voting state, where progressives are ascendant, a central part of his 2020 campaign.

But as the Vermont senator sets up camp, he finds himself in a different and perhaps less favorable environment: Without Hillary Clinton to play off, he's losing momentum to a progressive rival, Elizabeth Warren, and fighting off a popular home-state senator, Kamala Harris.

A crush of events this weekend revolving around the Democratic State Convention — from ballroom speeches to intimate meals to a liberal forum organized by the influential group MoveOn — laid bare the emerging scramble to cut into Sanders’ progressive base.

“Last time, Sanders was able to run as the only progressive against an establishment candidate,” said Doug Herman, a California-based Democratic strategist. “There are multiple options for a progressive candidate at this point — if that’s who you want to elect. And polling is showing that Warren is taking the biggest bite out of Bernie’s base.”

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A former congressional candidate from Rhode Island pleaded guilty Thursday to using more than $1 million in political donations for personal use, according to theJustice Department.

Harold Russell Taub, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully against Democratic Rep. David Cicilline in 2016, solicited more than $1.6 million to two organizations he falsely presented as political action committees. According to the Justice Department, Taub used more than half of what he collected for “purely personal expenses.”

Taub, 30, said donations to the two organizations — which he called Keeping America in Republican Control and Keeping Ohio in Republican Control — would be used to support GOP candidates in federal and state races. He did not register either entity with the Federal Election Commission or make proper reports to the federal agency as required by law.

On Thursday, Taub pleaded guilty to charges of wire fraud and campaign finance violations in U.S. District Court in Rhode Island. He will be sentenced July 12.

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Hillary Clinton will not run for president in 2020, she told a New York TV station in an interview that aired Monday night.

"I'm not running, but I'm going to keep on working and speaking and standing up for what I believe," she said in an interview with News 12 in New York State.

Clinton’s 2020 intentions had remained unclear until Monday. Given her status as the Democratic Party’s nominee in 2016, her presence had hovered in the background as the party’s crowded presidential field had begun to take shape.

Though she laughed when asked if she could ever imagine running for office again, Clinton did say she was still planning to be a vocal part of the political process.

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On the final night of the Democratic National Convention in July of 2016, Bernie Sanders’ staffers went out to a Mediterranean restaurant and hookah bar in Center City Philadelphia to celebrate and mourn the end of the campaign.

Sitting at the bar sometime after midnight, convention floor leader Robert Becker — who oversaw Sanders’ Iowa campaign, then helped lead his efforts in Michigan, California and New York as deputy national field director — began talking with a female staffer who had worked under him with her boyfriend.

Becker, now 50, told the 20-something woman that he had always wanted to have sex with her and made a reference to riding his “pole,” according to the woman and three other people who witnessed what happened or were told about it shortly afterward by people who did. Later in the night, Becker approached the woman and grabbed her wrists. Then he moved his hands to her head and forcibly kissed her, putting his tongue in her mouth as he held her, the woman and other sources said.

The woman did not report the incident at the time because the campaign was over. But over the past several months, Becker, who is not on Sanders’ payroll, has been calling potential staffers and traveling to early primary states to prepare for another presidential run — activities that Sanders’ top aides did not endorse, but did not disavow, either.

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A consent decree that limited Republican Party’s use of controversial poll-watching and ballot security efforts for more than three decades appears consigned to the scrap heap of history after a federal appeals court rebuffed a move by Democrats that could have led to restoration of the long-running court order.

The 3^rd Circuit Court of Appealsturned down the Democratic National Committee’s attempt to reopen discovery aimed at proving that the Republican National Committee violated the order in 2016 as then-candidate Donald Trump pressed publicly for a crackdown on what he contended was likely election fraud.

After the election, Trump famously claimed — without evidence — that millions of illegal immigrants cast ballots in the presidential contest.

Despite Trump’s public calls for his supporters to keep a close eye on certain neighborhoods, the three-judge panel unanimously ruled Monday that Democrats had not made a sufficient showing that the depositions they wanted to take were likely to show that the RNC actually responded to Trump’s entreaties.

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Gallup, the country’s best-known polling firm, is once again scaling back on the political surveys that have made it so famous.

Only a year after Gallup switched its presidential tracking poll — the ever-present reading of the president’s approval rating — from daily to weekly, the company will announce Friday that it plans to measure President Donald Trump’s job-approval rating only on a monthly basis. It's all part of what the company calls its new, "more global perspective," which de-emphasizes U.S. politics.

It also includes a leadership change, with Mohamed Younis — who has focused more on polling outside the United States in nearly a decade at Gallup — replacing Frank Newport as editor in chief. Newport has served in that role since 1990.

"Gallup will discontinue almost all 'spot' polls in the U.S. — overnight polls, usually political, of immediate front-page interest — and we will reduce much of our coverage of the electorate, as it is well covered now by a plethora of polling organizations," said Jim Clifton, Gallup's chairman and CEO, in a statement shared with POLITICO. "Gallup's contribution will be deeper, long-trend dives into the most serious issues of the day worldwide, such as trust in governments, capitalism vs. socialism, and the future of work."

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The content of the tweet @RealDonaldTrump posted on the night of Feb. 5, 2013, was bland: a simple thank you to the actress Sherri Shepherd for flattering comments she’d made about Trump on television.

But its implications were historic.

When Trump’s young social media manager saw the tweet, he was perplexed. He typically typed and sent Trump’s tweets for the boss, but in this case he hadn’t. He did recall that Trump had been spending a lot of time in his office lately playing around with a new Android smartphone.

The next morning, the handful of staffers with access to the boss’ account told the social media manager, Justin McConney, that they had not sent it either.

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