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Capital Journal
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Good morning from the WSJ Washington Bureau.
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Trump's Day: President Trump holds meetings with Carribean leaders at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida this afternoon.
Afghanistan: Two American service members were killed in action in Afghanistan, the latest casualties to strike international forces as the U.S. and the Taliban labor toward a negotiated settlement of the 18-year war.
Federal Budget: The Treasury Department releases the February budget gap figures. Economists surveyed by WSJ forecast a deficit of $229 billion.
North Carolina: The do-over election for North Carolina’s empty Ninth Congressional District seat is off to a contentious start, and there is a long road ahead. The Republican field is unusually crowded.
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Mr. Trump said it's time for the U.S. to recognize Israel’s sovereignty of the Golan Heights, which sits along its disputed border with Syria. The U.S. hasn’t officially recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan, and White House officials haven’t said if the administration’s Middle East peace plan would do that, Vivian Salama reports.
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The State Dept. hinted at a policy change, using “Israeli-controlled” instead of "Israeli-occupied" to describe the Golan in a report last week.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will visit Mr. Trump next week, as corruption allegations imperil his re-election bid.
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The territory was seized from Syria during the Six Day War in 1967 and annexed in 1981 over international condemnation.
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The Trump administration took its first steps to tighten economic sanctions on North Korea since last month’s summit meeting in Vietnam. Officials said the move was intended to maintain economic pressure on North Korea to give up its nuclear arsenal. But they also said the action didn’t represent a major push to escalate the economic pressure on Pyongyang, Michael R. Gordon reports.
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North Korea has withdrawn from a liaison office it shared with the South near the demilitarized zone since September. Its decision follows its recent threats to suspend nuclear talks with the U.S.
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Mr. Trump put colleges and universities on notice Thursday that they could lose federal funding if they don’t protect free speech, addressing a longstanding complaint of conservatives but sparking concerns the move could wind up squelching free expression instead, Michelle Hackman reports.
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The number of immigrants sent out of the U.S. rose 10% in last three months of 2018 from the same year-ago period, reports Louise Radnofsky, but remained far below the peak during the Obama administration. Around 57% of the deported immigrants had criminal convictions, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said.
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The Coast Guard, with a growing mission involving border security, has yet to recover from the government shutdown, reports Ben Kesling. The service expects to fully replenish supply warehouses and be caught up with maintenance work around June 1.
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Republicans See Signs of Hope With Suburban Voters
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Republicans aiming to claw back support among suburban voters are pinning their hopes on the possibility of a progressive Democratic presidential nominee in 2020.
In the 2018 midterms, Democrats flipped more than two dozen House seats in highly educated suburban areas, where President Trump is often unpopular. Those gains, an acceleration of years-long trends, portended a permanent shift in where the two major parties find their major bases of support. As Democrats have grown stronger in suburban areas, Republicans have become more popular in rural areas.
But with many urban and suburban areas quickly growing in size, Republicans will need to remain competitive in those districts if they hope to take control of the House again. Mr. Trump’s presence on the ticket in 2020 may again pose a barrier to suburban voters, but some Republicans think that a candidate like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) could prove just as alarming.
A nominee like Mr. Sanders could create an opportunity for Republicans to focus their electoral message on the economy, assuming it continues to perform well before the election. Republicans argue that Democratic policies would be too expensive and harm the economy. An October 2018 Wall Street Journal/NBC News national poll found that 43% of respondents thought Republicans would do a better job on the economy, while 28% of Americans said Democrats would.
Picking the right issue to center a campaign on can have important consequences.
During the 2018 midterm season, Democrats focused their campaign message on health care and protecting the Affordable Care Act. Polling showed that voters preferred the Democratic approach to health care policy to the Republican approach by a similarly wide margin: in the same October poll, 45% said Democrats would do a better job on health care policy, while 27% said Republicans would.
In 2018, Republicans homed in on immigration and Mr. Trump’s pledge to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. While popular among rural voters and committed supporters of the president, the focus on immigration alarmed some Republicans in suburban seats, who warned that immigration was not a winning issue in their districts. The October poll found Democrats leading Republicans on the issue nationally 40% to 36%.
Write to Andrew Duehren at andrew.duehren@wsj.com
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President Trump and the Political Economy
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The Federal Reserve sent some important signals this week about the state of the U.S. economy. Here's why that spells good news and bad news for President Trump.
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Democrats say they have evidence that White House officials used personal email accounts and apps for business. House Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings said in a letter to White House counsel Pat Cipollone that the White House’s failure to turn over documents was obstructing the committee’s investigation, Rebecca Ballhaus reports.
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Abbe Lowell, Jared Kushner’s lawyer, in a letter sent yesterday to Mr. Cummings, disputed the claim that Mr. Kushner corresponded on WhatsApp with foreign leaders. He said Ivanka Trump now always forwards any emails about official business to her White House account.
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The demise of the Republican Party's moderate wing has some in the GOP fearing the party is alienating women, reports Kristina Peterson, because the divide on the Hill over abortion is starker than among voters of either party. Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski represent the fewer than 1% of GOP lawmakers considered abortion-rights supporters.
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Meet the candidates. The 2020 Democratic presidential primary is the party’s biggest and most diverse in modern history.
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In a cover story, Time magazine looks at how Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became the only Democrat with enough star power to match President Trump's. (Time)
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Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich argues for releasing the full report by special counsel Robert Mueller so Americans can decide whether he has conducted "a legitimate investigation – or an inquisition carried out by bureaucrats who didn’t like the choice Americans made in 2016." (Gingrich360)
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Nationalism isn't an irrational sentiment, it is more widely accepted around the world than critics say, and it isn't going away. (Foreign Affairs)
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This newsletter is a production of the WSJ Washington bureau. Our newsletter editors are Tim Hanrahan, Kate Milani, Troy McCullough and Daniel Nasaw. Send feedback to capitaljournal@wsj.com. You can follow politics coverage during the day on our Politics page and at @wsjpolitics on Twitter.
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