Newsletter: A week to take stock of the presidential campaigns

For the dozen or so serious contenders to be president of the United States and for their supporters, this was a week for taking stock.

Early in the week, a series of well regarded polls provided the latest snapshot of how the candidates fare with voters. Wednesday brought the close of the fundraising quarter, and campaigns began disclosing an even more critical statistic – where they stand financially.

The two measurements conveyed similar stories: On the Democratic side, Hillary Rodham Clinton remains a formidable front-runner, but Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont has shown staying power with the party’s left-leaning activists that far exceeds what most people expected when he entered the race. On the Republican side, Donald Trump’s rapid rise has stalled, but he remains the favorite of about a quarter of GOP voters.

On polls and fundraising, some once-heralded candidates, most notably Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, have largely dropped off the radar. Others, especially former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, are badly underperforming expectations. Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard executive, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio have both gained strength.

We examined the polling and the money race and have developed a terrific graphic showing the millionaires and billionaires pouring money into the campaigns. But since this is the Friday edition of Essential Politics, our focus will be on the stories that went behind the headlines to provide insights that will last longer than the next poll. I’m David Lauter, Washington Bureau chief, and here are a few of the week’s best reads.

Fiorina has been the talk of the GOP field since her performance at the Reagan Library debate last month. But the only other time she ran for office, seeking to unseat California Sen. Barbara Boxer in 2010, her record at Hewlett-Packard, which included some 30,000 layoffs and a disastrous merger, proved to be an inescapable liability. As we continue to examine Fiorina’s record, Mark Barabak, Seema Mehta and Andrea Chang took a fresh look at that chapter of Fiorina’s career.

Another California Republican on the rise is House Majority leader Kevin McCarthy, who is expected to win election as speaker of the House next week. If that happens, he and the Democratic Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, will form the first-ever duo from a single state to hold both parties' top leadership positions in the House. But don’t expect a California windfall as a result, Noah Bierman reports, the two barely speak to each other.

McCarthy, meantime, may be speaking too much for his own good. A remark in a Fox News interview about the politics of the House Benghazi investigation handed priceless ammunition to the Clinton campaign, which Democrats happily seized upon.

By Friday, McCarthy was backpedaling, and Democrats were hoping his gaffe will help Clinton, who is scheduled to testify before the Benghazi panel later this month. But Clinton has plenty of other problems, including restiveness among key Democratic constituencies, including teachers. Evan Halper examined the unexpected difficulties Clinton had in winning endorsement from the country’s largest teacher union, the National Education Assn., and explained what it tells us about one of the most serious splits within the Democratic coalition.

On a different note, Halper also traveled to the ranch of Tom Steyer, one of the Democrats’ biggest and most influential donors, to look at the billionaire environmentalist’s unusual, some might say quixotic, effort to prove that cattle can be raised in an environmentally sustainable fashion.

Herds of a different kind preoccupy Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, whose job is often likened to rounding up cats. Now that House Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio is stepping aside under pressure from conservative members of the GOP caucus, Lisa Mascaro takes a look at whether McConnell will be the conservatives’ next target.

Finally, Michael Finnegan examines one of the most notable aspects so far of the 2016 race – the open appeals to racial and ethnic prejudices that in previous campaigns would usually be addressed only in coded hints.

What we’re reading:

As always, we try to round off the Friday newsletter with a couple of insightful reads from other publications.

If you’re interested in what the latest polls tell us about the state of the race, you couldn’t ask for a better guide than this, from the Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter.

And for an engaging look behind the scenes at Clinton as a retail politician interacting with voters, check out this report from BuzzFeed’s Ruby Cramer.

That wraps up this week. On Monday, my colleague Christina Bellantoni will be back with the daily newsletter. Until then, keep track of all the developments in the 2016 campaign with our Trail Guide, at our politics page and on Twitter at @latimespolitics.

Send your comments, suggestions and news tips to politics@latimes.com.