>> that's because you're wearing a jacket. >> that's true. i'm manish. i've never felt manish in this particular way. my thermostat is manish. >> you burn hot. it's a good thing. >> you blow my mind, alex wagner. well done. thank you. the rachel maddow show starts now. thank you at home for joining us this hour. so we're leading off with something big tonight because there is a problem. there is a significant problem in national politics. here is what has happened. fox news channel tonight has announced who they are allowing into the debate for the republican debate day after tomorrow in ohio. it appears they have sort of rigged it. there are 17 major candidates

competing for the republican presidential nomination this year. it was a strange decision in the first place when fox announced in may they would not allow all the candidates to debate. they would pick ten who would be allowed into the debate based on one metric only, based on national poll numbers even though national poll numbers at this point in a presidential primary are basically totally meaningless numbers. in years past they have had no predictive value at this point in the process in terms of who is going to go on to win the early states or who is ultimately going to win the nomination. it was a strange decision anyway for them to try to winnow down the field themselves using only national polls fully half a year -- more than half a year before the iowa caucuses, before any actual republican voters get to have their say. it was weird enough. fox news has face add lot of pressure over this decision and the republican party has faced a lot of pressure for letting fox do this to their presidential primary process. they could have just said, listen, we don't really want more than ten candidates on the stage at one time. that's unwieldy. instead, since we have this giant field of potentially viable candidates, we'll split them up, randomly assign half the candidates to one of the

debates and half to the other. we'll do them both the same night. they could have kept everybody in by a similar process that everybody agreed would be a preferable and fair alternative. they decided they would go with this national poll top ten system instead. it made the candidates very angry. it made republicans in the early states very angry because it meant all the candidates have had to structure their campaigns in a way to maximize their national poll numbers instead of meeting people in iowa and new hampshire and south carolina and trying to build up support in the early states which candidates have always done in both parties in every other year in the modern political system before fox news decided this year they were going to change it and take over the process. now there's a problem. now fox news tonight has announced the results of this criteria that they have imposed on the republican nominating process, and there's a problem

with what they've announced. here is what fox had said before today about how they were going to choose who was in the debate and who was not in the debate. to get into their debate, before today here is what fox had said publicly. they said candidates, quote, must place in the top ten of an average of the five most recent national polls as recognized by fox news leading up to august 4th, today, at 5:00 p.m. eastern. such polling must be conducted by major, nationally recognized organizations that use standard methodological techniques. that's what hey said in advance. that's not the shorthand public reference for some longer more explicit explanation they made elsewhere. that's it. that's what they said. that's all they have said. they would average out the five most recent national polls. today they announced who is in their debate and who is out of their debate. it turns out they didn't utes

the five most recent national polls. these are the five most recent national polls. fox news did their own poll, called people up to two days ago, same deal with bloomberg, same deal with cbs, same deal with monmouth. all those four national polls called their respondents over a period of three or four days that ended this past sunday. so that's four. the fifth most recent national poll was this one. this is the nbc/"wall street journal" poll. they polled people up through thursday, this past thursday. that's the fifth most recent national poll. fox news just didn't use that poll. they decided to skip it. they decided they would use an older poll instead. there is a poll that ended earlier than nbc's poll did, from quinnipiac. they used five of the six most recent polls.

they skipped the fifth and then used one through four. why did they do that? they used one, two, three, four. not five and six. the only criteria they had announced was that it would be the five most recent polls. nationally credited organizations -- right. this is important in terms of not just whether or not fox is conducting its debate in a way that has integrity and that is transparent and that is clearly decided in advance so as to not benefit any one candidate or hurt any one candidate. it's important in the material consequences of the decision they made. most polls at this point in the race, they do have the same basic contours in terms of the top group of top ranking candidates and the middle group of middle ranking candidates and the lower group of lower ranking candidates. most are producing roughly the

same results. when you look at the poll they threw out and you compare it to the one they decided to use instead, the one that isn't one of the most recent five, when you look at the difference between those two polls, one difference that has real material consequences. of course, it's not at the top, not with the candidates who will be at the center of the stage those guys are safe. the material difference between these two polls that fox made an inexplicable decision about, the material difference where it really matters is on the edge of the stage, the candidates with whom it means they either keep running for president or it's the de facto end of their run because fox news said so. the edge of the stage, where the question is are you going to make it into the debate or not. it's there where you find the salient difference between the poll they threw out and what they used instead, in the nbc news poll which fox threw out,

down around tenth place, turns out john kasich and rick perry are tied, both at 3%. fox threw out that result. instead went with the quinnipiac poll which has john kasich kicking rick perry's butt, more than doubling them. these are small numbers. shawl numbers are the difference between rick perry being done with politics forever and rick perry being a contender for president of the united states. in that quinnipiac poll, john kasich beats rick perry 5-2. beats him by a lot. fox news inexplicably threw out that poll and picked that one where they're tied, throwing out the nbc poll picking quinnipiac instead. that decision has the effect of making john kasich look like he is way more clearly ahead of rick perry than he would look otherwise. having done that, fox news was

able to announce tonight that john kasich is in the in the debate and rick perry is out. >> this is where the real drama has been. the question has been who will make it into the tenth position and appear on the prime time debate stage with the fox news anchors at the debate. the tenth participant who will appear on stage at the fox news debate this thursday night is governor john kasich with 3.2%, the governor of ohio, which will be the state in which the debate is held. that edges out governor rick perry who had been in that position up until recently but did not average into the top ten. >> this is nuts. i can't believe they did this. i get that fox news only wants ten candidates on the stage. they know and everybody knows that arbitrarily setting this ten candidate cutoff when you have 17 people running is going to have politically fatal consequences for, if not all, at

least most of the candidates who don't make the top ten. it's impossible to look like a viable next president of the united states if they won't let you into the room with the major candidates to make your case. they know how consequential their decision is here. they know how the cutoff of candidate in tenth place versus 11 place, it better not look like an exceedingly close call or it will be way too obvious that fox has, in fact, perverted the course of the republican primary to end the candidacies that might otherwise have worked out in the end. it's really important, right, that tenth place versus 11th place looks like a big chasm. that's the decision between political life and political death and fox news is imposing it. so tenth better look like it's pretty far from 11th, better look like some sort of natural split. so it appears that what they did, they just kicked out the poll results that would make it look too close. they kicked out the poll result

that would result in their being let's than one percentage point difference between the candidate in the debate and the candidate out of the debate. so they threw that poll out and instead picked a different poll which would make it look like a much bigger gap. they violated their own previously announced criteria of what polls they would use. they moved the goal posts in the middle of the game in a way that makes it look like they were trying to justify the lineup of who they wanted on stage. i honestly can't believe they did this. i should be clear. i don't think there's any reason about them throwing out the nbc poll is anything specifically against nbc. fox news channel clearly dislikes us, dislikes friendly rivalry with us. we're msnbc. we're not nbc. nbc's partner in this poll is the "wall street journal." rupert murdock owns both.

i don't think this is a personal thing or ideological thing against the nbc/"wall street journal" poll, but it is one of the five most recent national polls which means according to fox's own announcement about how they were going to do this, it should have been part of the criteria forgetting into this debate. granted, using national polls was a bad idea in the first place. but there is something qualitatively different between the system looking stupid and the system looking rigged, rigged by a cable news channel in order to justify apparently what they want in terms of who they're allowing to compete from the republican nomination and who they're prohibiting from the republican nomination. this is the part i would say, oh, you sneaky bastards, it's not at all sneaky, though. it's kind of being rigged in plain sight. after they announced tonight, they had an explanation. after they announced who was going to be in the debate and

announced the five polls they used to come up with their debate participants and they weren't the five most recent polls, after they made those announcements tonight, they also for the first time tonight retroactively announced brand new criteria they had never publicly explained before which they say justify why they didn't include what they call the highly respected nbc/"wall street journal" poll. we're learning fox believes that doesn't meet the criteria for the exact manner in which the candidate's names had to be read to poll respondents and in what order and using what titles. this has never been previously announced as part of how fox would decide which polls to include and not include. they said it today for the first time as a retroactive explanation for why they were not including the nbc wall street journal poll even though it was one of the five most recent polls. apparently it's done now. they didn't take the most five

most recent polls. they took five of the six that showed rick perry being disconcluded from the debates. that would look terrible for them so they made sure that would never happen. if i were a republican in particular, i would be so mad about this. it would be one thing if this was a fight about tv ratings or the perception of somebody's approval ratings or something, but this really is who is allowed to compete for president of the united states. it is amazing that the republican party is letting this happen to that process, to the process of choosing who will compete to be president. but they gave it to the fox news channel and this is what they got.

we just got one of the responses to fox's decision on who will be allowed to debate in the republican presidential debate this thursday. this candidate's campaign is not particularly happy. quote the campaign statement, the idea they have left up the runnerup for the 2012 nomination, the former four-term governor of texas, the governor of louisiana, the first female fortune ceo and three-term senator from south carolina due to polling seven months before a single vote is cast is preposterous. that is from rick santorum's communications manager after learning his candidate will be relegated to the pre debate consolation prize event this thursday on fox news. the senator has a month, seven months before a single vote is cast, what fox news just did may really mean the end, not only of the rick santorum campaign. it may mean the end of several of those candidates he mentioned. we'll have more on that in just a moment. stay with us.

today is president obama's birthday. this chart is his present from the republican party and its voters. happy birthday, mr. president. this is the last 30 days of polling in the race for the republican nomination for president. this is what it looks like overall. break it down so you can see what's going on. down there y are the lines representing polling numbers for lindsey graham, fiorina, rick perry, chris christie, the lilac beauty showing life there. that's john kasich. they're all sort of barely respirating. there's the next little group.

this group of five is rand paul, marco rubio, ted cruz, mike huckabee, ben carson. the only one of them, the dark red line -- the ted cruz line there -- ted cruz is the black line. the only one showing upward lift at all, a little upward slant for ted cruz, the black line? then you've got the top three. you've got jeb bush. jeb bush in green there. he's on a slow but unstudy dissent. in yellow you have scott walker starting to get some lift, but then not. every single one of those pooling stories is a sad trombone, except for one guy, this guy. look. he's it. he is it. and he is why everyone else is failing to thrive at best or just out right failing at worst.

donald trump is not just the republican presidential front-runner. donald trump is so far out ahead it is hard to overstate how dominant he is in this field of candidates. just in terms of his raw lead, donald trump has now been the number one choice of republican voters in the last 12 straight national polls. 12 polls in a row. in terms of the national polls out today, in the cbs poll, 24% which is more than jeb bush and scott walker combined and they're in second and third. in the new fox poll that came out last night, mr. trump is at 26%, which again is more than jeb bush and scott walker combined, and they're in second and third. in the new bloomberg poll out today, mr. trump is at 21% which again is more than jeb bush and scott walker combined even though they're in second and third place. in bloomberg they wrote up their poll like they almost can't believe it. here is their -- joshua green at bloomberg says mr. trump has

risen to a position of total dominance in the republican presidential field. quote, trump leads with male voters and female voters. he leads with voters younger than 45 and older than 45, leads with seniors, with voters who don't have more than a high school degree, leads with voters with a college degree, with affluent voters, non-affluent voters who make less than 50 grand a year, wins with born again christian voters, protestants, tea party conservatives. the only demographic he doesn't win is self-professed moderate voters. but even here donald trump is a narrow second choice. jeb bush leads self-professed moderate republican voters with 12%, only one point behind f. you think the republican presidential primary is going to be decided by self-proclaimed moderate republican voters, i would say i would like to sell

you a bridge, but what i would like you to do is take me to meet some of these people. the last five years of national politics tells me those people do not exist. the top of the field in terms of the republican presidential nomination is stark and clear and by many measures it is amazing. republican voters may yet change their mine. right now if you ask them who they'll pick to be president, they are going to pick donald trump with an explanation point and a megaphone and a helicopter and a beautiful tower and a casino and -- the top of the one truly dominant front-runner. and inchoate, still sorting itself out, or it would be if the republican party didn't decide this year, seven months of the iowa caucus, they'll kill off a large number of their candidates by letting fox news exclude them from the competition by not letting them debate.

politico.com reporting the day rick santorum who fox news is keeping out of the debate, rick santorum already is politically dead. his campaign manager, his iowa manager, top digital strategist, they have all left the rick santorum campaign and are going to try to work at a super pac instead and see if that works. maybe it will work. but it's never a good sign when your campaign manager leaves and the only statements are that there are no plans to replace him. fox news excluding rick perry from the debate, it looks like the perry campaign will start to die, too. larry sabado has already run the death knell. quote, the stakes are simply too high. if a candidate can't even make it to the debate stage, why would rational donors and volunteers continue giving money and time to what is apparently a lost cause.

it's hard to look presidential languishing at home while your opponents are discussing foreign policy and national security on national television. that has already started for rick santorum who is out of the debate thanks to fox and whose campaign has apparently started to die because of it. next on campaign death watch now is probably rick perry. but in his case because of the way fox changed around their poll eligibility criteria on the day they announced who is in and out of their debate, in rick perry's case he has a credible case to make, he didn't lose it, it was stolen from him, because of some cable news executives moving things around to effectively stack things against him. joining us is larry sabado, director of politics at the university of virginia. thanks for being here. >> thank you, rachel. >> the fox news criteria has been widely criticized before it

was used today to finally announce who they're going to let in and who they'll exclude from this debate. do you think it is the death knell for candidates who don't get on that debate stage? >> that would be my guess. miracles happen in politics as well as other sectors of life, but they don't happen very often. it seems to be awfully difficult for a candidate sitting at the kid's table, the 5:00 sex, to make a case to those donors that somehow, some way they're going to be able to compete with the adult whose are getting all the prime time. i mean it's pretty obvious to people, most people who are active in caucuses and primaries aren't stupid. they've been around for a while. they play close attention to politics and pick up on signals like this. >> in terms of how we got to this point, i can understand, it seems totally reasonable you wouldn't want more than ten candidates on the stage at once. maybe you wouldn't even expect you'd have to make hard

decisions if you let up to ten candidates on the stage at once. i think that's the biggest primary debate we've had, about ten candidates. when this historically enormous field evolved on the republican side and it looked like we'd have 16 or 17 candidates with a reasonable chance at being viable, does it make sense that the rnc didn't insist on a more inclusive criteria? there's a weird dynamic between a republican party and a media outlet being given much say in the process, isn't there? >> of course. remember they gave the same flexibility to cnn and they're having something similar in september. i wasn't in the room when the decisions were made, but if i were to guess i would suggest it happened this way, the republican national committee wants that field winnowed. they know it's too big and the longer it goes on with 15 or 16 or 17 candidates, the more

negative attacks you'll have candidate against candidates. why did they want to reduce the number of debates? they believe mitt romney was weakened by the debate process in 2012 when many of those candidates survived for a long time and attacked romney pretty intensely for months and months. they wanted to prevent that this time. they wanted to winnow the field but they didn't want to do it because the committee would get the blame for excluding candidates, so instead they said to the networks, you come up with a process. it's okay. whatever you do we'll rubber stamp, it's all right. the networks, of course, also didn't want to make the decision to exclude candidates. so that's how they picked the polling process because they can blame it on the polls. americans love precision. they love numbers, and that's what the polls present people with. the problem is, anybody who understands polling, the numbers

really aren't precise and really aren't all that useful. certainly when you get down into the low single digits. so this whole process has been a matter, at least in my view, of one entity after another kicking the can down the road and now the polls are going to be blamed when, in fact, there were alternatives that were much better, like taking the field of 16 or 17, splitting it into two, splitting the prime time available into two, having two separate debates with the lottery picking the eight or so candidates that would be in each segment. i add a little twist to that, rachel. i believe it would be very useful not to tell the candidates in the campaigns ahead of time which group of eight they're going to be in. have the lottery lead off the debate. this might actually lead to some spontaneity because they would have no idea in advance what the dynamic would be on that stage.

they wouldn't know who they were going to be on the stage with. naturally no one would be in favor of this, or very few people involved in the process many stead. >> it would make not only for interesting -- an interesting challenge for all those candidates, it would make for great tv to see them actually drawing straws or participating in that mini lottery and deal with their fate right there. >> pay per view? >> maybe we can get ufc to organize it. >> larry sabado from university of virginia, great to have you here. thanks a lot. >> i will say with fox making this decision that they just are not using the five most recent polls and picked five of the six and threw one out, that would make rick perry look a lot closer to being a contender. if i were the rick perry campaign, i would be doing everything short of filing a lawsuit right now, if not that. i don't know. i just can't imagine that something this arbitrary is

going to be used to effectively end his political career after four terms as governor of texas, makes a run in 2012 and comes back. they're going to let him kept out of this debate under circumstances like that? i've got to say i am no rick perry partisan but i feel for him tonight in the way he has been left out of this. i can't believe any fair minded republican looking at this think it's okay he won't be there on thursday night. lots more ahead. we'll be back. announcer ] when you're serious about fighting wrinkles, turn to roc® retinol correxion®. one week fine lines appear to fade. one month deep wrinkles look smoother. after one year, skin looks ageless. high performance skincare™ only from roc®.

here is a little jib let to drop into the stew tonight -- that sounded grosser than i meant it. here is a thing. this is from the democratic side of the presidential race. this is kind of amazing, the new wmur poll out of new hampshire. it shows hillary clinton and bernie sanders in a statistical tie for the democratic presidential nomination in new hampshire. hillary clinton in this new poll is ahead of bernie sanders in new hampshire by six percentage points. look at the margin of error. this is a poll where secretary clinton's new hampshire lead is six points but the margin of error is 5.9 points. this is too close to call pollingwise in new hampshire between hillary clinton and bernie sanders. i knew this presidential election was going to be fun. i didn't expect it to be this fun.

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this was the headline over the weekend in new jersey's largest newspaper, quote, christie booed mercilessly twice at the haskell. that's a horse race that took

place over the weekend in new hampshire, a very exciting race. here is how that newspaper described what happened when governor chris christie took center stage to present the winner's trophy to the winner of the race. the record crowd of 60,983 people booed the governor, long, loud, sustained booing. the print description of that event was bad for chris christie. the tape of it was almost too awkward to watch. >> it's my honor to introduce the governor of chris christie, the honorable chris christie will be giving the trophy. joel hasher, the president of william hill u.s. will do the honors as well. >> great day for new jersey, new jersey's horse, welcome home, mr. asher. [ booing ] >> having a giant stadium full of tens of thousands of people boo you lustily in your home

state, that's not good. that's not good even if you're not the governor, but particularly if you're the governor that's not good. in general, things have not been good recently for new jersey governor chris christie on the presidential campaign trail. the booing was over the weekend in new jersey. this morning at a campaign stop in new hampshire, chris christie took his tell it like it is campaign motto and told it maybe way too much like it is. this is 9:30 this morning. watch the guy on the lower left-hand part of your screen. >> for instance, i'm a catholic, but i've used birth control, and not just the rhythm method, okay? so you know, my church, my church has a teaching against birth control. does that make me an awful catholic? >> they say face palm rarely happens. that man appears to trying to

physically hide from hearing what the governor is saying about not just the rhythm method. things have been going this way for presidential candidate chris christie in terms of the reactions to him, the booing, the uncomfortable rhythm method thing. this night this was flowover a new jersey fund-raiser in asbury park, chris christie makes us sick. then this polling out of rutgers, governor christie losing in his home stayed to donald trump by republican voters. the people most likely to vote for him in the world. they say they would rather have donald trump as their president than chris christie by a long way. ow. this time four years ago, in the 2012 race, chris christie was going to be a shoo-in, say he was going to run and the nomination could be his.

this year he's been written off, over before it started. now there may be signs that things maybe be starting the look up for the christie campaign. at the new hampshire event he did last night, kind of a first debate and kind of not, him and 13 other republican candidates. governor christie more than held his own. he sounded prepared and confident. to my ear he sounded quite human. >> one of the folks working here tonight asked me pretty passionately if i would ask one of you this tonight, her daughter recently passed away from a heroin overdose. she wants to know why there's not rehabilitation in prison, why there's not more help for these addicts versus just arresting them, when they have to turn to prostitution to get more money to support their habit. why are we falling down? >> new jersey is the first state in the country to say for first-time non-violent drug offenders, no more prison.

they're going to mandatory treatment. the war on drugs has been a failure. everyone makes mistakes. everyone in this audience has made a mistake. there but for the grace of god go i for those people who have been stricken with the disease of drug and alcohol addiction. >> that was last night. and then tonight he made it, just barely, but he squeaked through the completely arbitrary debate criteria fox news made up out of thin air and tweaked at the last minute to make themselves look good. chris christie will be allowed on stage on thursday. for chris christie you have to think this will be key, running the entire campaign on the strength of his personality, his ability to tell it like it is in realtime in front of a crowd. that is his campaign platform. that is why he says he should be president. that means governor christie has -- he had more to lose than

almost anyone if he failed to make it onto the debate stage. now that he's made it, he has more to gain than anyone. if he can shine on the debate stage, the booing, the awkwardness on the campaign trail, the deep seated hatred for him at home, that will be seen as the first act in the comeback story of how the naysayers felt and how he showed them all. is he back and can people who know him very well tell any better than the rest of us can? >> joining us is matt katz who has covered governor christie extensively. great to have you here. >> thank you, rachel. >> would it be fair to say that over the last year or so chris christie started to look less and less and less viable as a candidate for president? >> sure, december 2013 he was the clear front-runner. january 2014, bridgegate happened and it's been an absolute steady collapse since then.

he announced his candidacy june 30th, hasn't gotten any traction, toiling in 3%, 4% range. can't get out of it. i think you're absolutely right. this debate, getting on the stage, he's well prepared, answering more questions from constituents than probably any other candidates so far. 16 town halls just in new hampshire. he's going to be able to answer -- like the answer or not, he'll be able to answer every question posed to him at this debate thursday night. he's also probably in a better position because he's chris christie, can land a nice zinger on trump or jeb or whomever. if you put on the rose-colored classes. if you're team christie, you see a pathway to the nomination via that debate and via new hampshire. been to new hampshire more than any other candidate. all he needs -- he said he only needs 20 to 25% in this crowded field to win. most people don't make their minds up until january, the last month before the election in new hampshire.

by then he's going to have been there so much, he'll have shaked so many hands and so many diners all those people will end up supporting him. that's what they envision. >> the reason i wanted to talk with you about this tonight, i feel like of everybody poised for the great comeback story, provided that donald trump doesn't keep up these numbers and steamroll everybody, if that's going to fall apart, the person best poised for the comeback is him. in part because -- mostly because of his innate political skills and instincts and ability to perform on his feet. what i don't know is whether or not he's actually run ag good campaign and whether he's got a good infrastructure and fund-raising in place and all the fundamentals he'll need to climb to the middle tier and ultimately the top tier. >> he has a guy who worked on both gubernatorial campaigns and was running the new hampshire state party with a blessing from the governor. this guy left new jersey --

>> a guy who had more than a cameo in bridgegate. >> that's true. hauled back to trenton to testify because he was responsible for securing the endorsements of mayor tom lee whose town got jammed up by traffic. for the last year and a half he's been in new hampshire building relationships. they're starting to see the fruits of that come to bear. he's getting endorsements from local elected officials. this guy, matt mours, know it is lay of the land over there. he certainly has an infrastructure there. they have a little operation in iowa. this is a new hampshire strategy. they think if they can win new hampshire, it changes everything and the establishment falls in line with him. he also, because this is a post citizens united world, he has billionaires backing him, steve kohn, the controversial hedge fund manager whose company was indicted a couple years back, he and his wife gave $2 million. >> more where that came from?

>> plenty more, absolutely. he's got the pieces in place. >> if stuff turns around for him, i think he's the best candidate for stuff turning around. matt katz from wnyc radio, nice to have you here. >> thank you for having me, rachel. there's a mystery that involves two republican candidates, something strange going on ben them. i need your help with this. it's a small story but i think a really strange one. that's next. stay with us.

mystery, we've got a mystery on our hands. this does not make any sense to me at all, tell me if it makes any sense to you. a super pac called keep the promise, psyched about the prospect of a ted cruz presidency. that's the reason they exist, to collect and spend tons of money to get cruz elected president.

that's who they are, what they are trying to do. here is the mystery. look at what's inside the most recent campaign filing from this ted cruz super pac. that's the reason they exist to collect and spend money to get look at what's inside the most recent campaign filing from the ted cruz super pac. this shows them spending $16,000 on legal advice. makes sense. writing a check for $20,000 to a polling company. okay. carly for america, one of ted cruz's direct competitors. carly for america is trying to get her elected. the ted cruz is trying to get carly fiorina elected president? why would a super pac set up for ted cruz give half a million dollars to someone running against ted cruz? that's word even for this presidential cycle. right? we reached out for a response

tonight. we got word late tonight since the show started. the president of the group tells us they do, in fact, support ted cruz for president, obviously. but some individual ton nors to the group have been, in their words, impressed by carly fiorina. so they, the ted cruz super pac is also now donating to people trying to beat ted cruz. how do you solicit donations for that? would you like to give money to our super pac to elect ted cruz or carly fiorina? something is up here. if you know that something is going on here more than is being explained send it to rachel.com. if you don't know what's going on watch this space as we try to figure it out. you may be muddling through allergies. try zyrtec® for powerful allergy relief. and zyrtec® is different than claritin®. because it starts working faster on the first day you take it. zyrtec®. muddle no more™ . so when my husband started getting

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when they scheduled the first republican presidential debate for this thursday i think there was something they didn't take into account. the date of the big first all important republican debate coincides with something else on the calendar that i think they are probably not planning on talking about. that's straight ahead. stay with us. take zzzquil and sleep like... you haven't seen your bed in days. no, like you haven't seen a bed in weeks! zzzquil. the non habit-forming sleep aid that helps you sleep easily, and wake refreshed. because sleep is a beautiful thing.

it's so shiny. i know, mommy, but it's time to let the new kitchen get some sleep. ♪ if you want beautiful results, you know where to go. angie's list. everyone can shop for services from highly rated companies, even without a membership. but as a member, you can save more. and you get exclusive access to ratings and reviews. angie's list is there... for all your projects - big and small. pretty! come see what the new angie's list can do for you. president lyndon johnson signed into law the voting rights act 50 years ago. >> millions of americans are denied the right to vote because of their color. the wrong is one which no

american in his heart can justify. the right is one which no american proved to our principles can deny. >> president johnson was a democrat, of course. but every time the voting rights act has been reauthorized, every time it has been done under a republican president. there was president richard nixon in 1970 and president gerald ford in 1975 with major support for republicans in congress for both presidents. same under president reagan. through everything that's been contentious in politics all these years, the voting rights act, through the years has consistently, again and again been reupped and praised as if it were the least controversial thing in the world. >> president refwan signed a 25-year extension of the 1965 voting rights act. >> the right to vote is the crown jewel of american liberties.

we will not see its luster diminished. >> president reagan with senator joe biden looking over his shoulder there. by the time of the 25-year anniversary of the voting rights act in 1990 president reagan's vice president had ascended to the top job. on the 25th anniversary of the act congress unanimously passed a joint resolution declaring that day national voting rights celebration day. president george h.w. bush signed that proclamation into law. then 16 years later it was his son's turn. in 2006 under george w. bush the senate voted unanimously, the house voted overwhelmingly to reauthorize the voting rights act and nine years ago now president george w. bush didn't just sign it, he pledged to be its champion and defender. >> they we renew a bill that helped bring a community on the margins into the life of american democracy. my administration will vigorously enforce the provisions of this law and we will defend it in court.

[ applause ] >> we will defend it in court. that turned out to be necessary. this thursday, august 6 will be the biggest anniversary yet for the voting rights act. 50 years, half a century. but this year, we are going to break the streak of republicans wrapping themselves up in the voting rights act's glory. this year the 50-year anniversary will be marked by the first republican presidential debate on that same day. this year from what we know, none of the republican candidates who will be on that presidential debate stage, none are in favor of the reauthorization and reinstituting of the voting rights act after the supreme court gutted it. president obama is expected to call for the reinstitution of the voting rights act on its anniversary this week but none of the republican candidates are expected to do the same. that's what we expect. but who knows? maybe one of the republican presidential hopefuls will be surprising on this issue. maybe one will find it within himself to be reaganesque on the

issue or even nixonesque on this area. this didn't used to be a partisan thing, but we'll see thursday night. 50 years. watch this space. this issue. 50 years. watch this. "first look" is up next. it's wednesday, august 5th. right now on "first look," top ten have been named. the rest are not happy. a jeb bush comment gives hillary clinton something to swing back with. severe weather packing a punch in the northeast. why is apple stock lost billions of dollars in value? why is china removing christian crosses? the video with 15 million views has people talking. "first look" starts now. thanks for joining us today. i'm betty nguyen. the field is set tomorrow.