InsideSources

As Donald Trump has solidified his lead on the Republican presidential field and Bernie Sanders has edged past Hillary Clinton in Iowa, speculation on who might run alongside the two “outsider” candidates has taken on a new urgency.

Would Sanders tap a more mainstream Democrat to ease concerns about his far-left politics? Could Trump enlist a woman or minority candidate to put a friendlier, more inclusive face on his no-holds-barred campaign?

Here’s a look at some possible vice presidential candidates for Trump and Sanders, as well as a couple of other intriguing potential pairings.

Possible Trump Mates 

Seven months ago, when the then-long-shot billionaire jumped into the GOP race and said he’d “love to have” Oprah Winfrey as his running mate, a skeptical press was quick to put together silly star-studded lists of other potential running mates, including Kim Kardashian and Chuck Norris.

Celebrity names still pop up in connection with Trump, but there have also been indications the GOP front-runner would be open to balancing his own unconventional bid for the White House with a more conventional vice presidential pick, including:

• Gov. Nikki Haley. Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, took a few nationally-televised jabs at Trump after the president’s State of the Union address earlier this month, saying the candidate’s fiery stump rhetoric was “irresponsible” and not helpful.

Trump, who has demonstrated a devastating ability and willingness to counter-punch critics in the GOP, the Democratic Party or the media, was relatively muted in his response, dismissing the second-term South Carolina governor as “weak on illegal immigration” in a Jan. 13 appearance on “Fox and Friends” — but stopped short of ruling out the 44-year-old Southern conservative as a running mate. “I wouldn’t say she’s off to a good start, based on what she has just said,” the GOP front-runner said. “Let’s see what happens,” Trump said.

• Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who endorsed her fellow reality television veteran last week, has also been touted as a potential member of a Trump administration. The two bonded in recent years over pizza and the Barack Obama birth certificate, and Palin even joked about Trump as her potential running mate in an appearance on Saturday Night Live last year.

• Two of Trump’s biggest challengers in the GOP field, Ben Carson and Ted Cruz, have each been mentioned as possible additions to a Trump ticket — though the increasingly heated exchanges between Cruz and Trump in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses may make that particular match-up unlikely. Still, Ronald Reagan once welcomed George H.W. Bush as his running mate despite that “voodoo economics” remark.

Potential Sanders Sidekicks

Sanders hasn’t said much about a running mate, but the Vermont senator’s excited supporters on the left are fired up about the possibility of a ticket that pairs the self-described socialist with another progressive, while Democrats who are awakening to the possibility of Sanders as the party’s nominee are thinking strategy.

• Sen. Elizabeth Warren. If there is a star on the left comparable to Sanders, it’s Elizabeth Warren, long touted as a potential presidential contender herself. The first-term Massachusetts senator has repeatedly said she has no interest in running for the presidency, but her counsel and her endorsement have been courted by each of the three Democrats vying for the nomination. So far, she’s remained on the sidelines. But in a speech on the Senate floor last week, the liberal senator sounded more like Sanders than the Democratic Party’s would-be standard-bearer, Hillary Clinton.

• Sen. Sherrod Brown. For the pragmatists in the Sanders’ camp, the 63-year-old, second-term senator makes perfect sense. Like Sanders and Warren, he’s been at the forefront of the economic inequality wars and he’s for cracking down on Wall Street. And having a sitting senator from Ohio — expected to be a crucial swing state in November — on the ticket can’t hurt. Brown has said he’s not interested in the job and already endorsed Clinton in October. But three months ago, Clinton was seen as the “inevitable” nominee. Things have changed.

Team Hillary

Clinton, trailing Sanders in the first-in-the-nation Iowa and New Hampshire contests but still the odds-on favorite to win not only the Democratic nomination but the presidency, has the deepest bench to draw from among all the candidates.

She could, some pundits have speculated, ask current Vice President Joe Biden to run with her, or even look into adding her husband, former President Bill Clinton, to the ticket (Constitutional? Maybe. Likely? No). Instead, look for Clinton, 68, to try to broaden the party’s appeal with a pick aimed at energizing Hispanics or African-Americans, like:

• Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro. The former San Antonio mayor was in Iowa on Sunday campaigning for Clinton. The 41-year-old Stanford and Harvard graduate would add youth and genuine progressive chops to Team Hillary: Castro’s mother, a longtime Hispanic activist, helped establish the political party La Raza Unida.

• Former Gov. Deval Patrick, 59, said last month he has ruled out the possibility of joining anyone’s ticket as a vice-presidential candidate, but the first African-American governor of Massachusetts remains a tantalizing possibility for some (the pairing even has its own Facebook page)

• If Clinton can’t get Biden, maybe she could get the next best thing. Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia was reportedly a runner-up to the current vice president when Obama was making his decision on a running mate in 2008. Kaine’s fellow Virginian in the Senate, Democrat Mark Warner, is also regularly touted as a potential candidate.

The British may not appreciate or understand Donald Trump’s brand of politics, but as of Thursday, they think he’s a good bet to win the Republican nomination. That’s the message, at least, from the United Kingdom’s biggest bookmaker.

Just days after the British Parliament ducked a controversial vote to ban the New York billionaire from the United Kingdom, London-based William Hill on Thursday made Trump its favorite in the GOP race, setting the New York billionaire’s odds at 5 to 4 – up from 33-to-1 longshot odds offered when the campaign began.

The gambling site still has Hillary Clinton as an overwhelming 8-to-11 favorite to win the election next fall.

In the odds to win the presidency, Trump follows in a fairly distant second at 10 to 3, Bernie Sanders and Marco Rubio come in at 6 to 1, Ted Cruz, despite his recent surge in Iowa is at 16 to 1 and Jeb Bush is given a 22-to-1 shot.

Trump’s also running second on the Irish betting site PaddyPower, where Clinton is at 5 to 6, Trump is at 7 to 2 (interestingly, the Irish seem to think there’s a scenario for Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who at 100 to 1 is given better odds than Democratic contender Martin O’Malley, a 150-to-1 longshot who is actually in the race).

The unexpected rise of Trump has been costly for William Hill, according to a spokesman.

“The run of cash for Donald Trump has been astonishing. He is a six-figure loser for us and by far our worst result,” said William Hill’s Rupert Adams.

Unlike Las Vegas, which does not take bets on the American presidential election, the British bookmaking operation offers gamblers some intriguing opportunities for 2016 – and beyond.

Former GOP standard-bearer Mitt Romney, who lost in 2012 and has repeatedly insisted he is not interested in the 2016 race, still gets 80-to-1 odds of winning the Republican nomination. That’s significantly better than the 100-to-1 shot the bookmaker is giving Ben Carson, the former neurosurgeon and tea party favorite who just weeks ago sat atop the GOP field alongside Trump.

Could Trump’s unprecedented success be fueling interest in future presidential runs by other celebrities?

William Hill is also offering gamblers 100 to 1 odds on actor George Clooney, 200 to 1 on rapper Kanye West and 250 to 1 on actor Will Smith becoming president during their lifetimes.

There are odds on President Lady Gaga, too. 500 to 1.

In the end, it was all for show.

The British Parliament didn’t end up voting Monday to ban Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump from entering the United Kingdom as a result of his “hate speech.”

And it was no surprise, given that Prime Minister David Cameron, a Conservative, and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn were both against the proposed move.

But the absence of a vote didn’t stop Parliament’s three-hour debate over a Trump ban from generating international media frenzy. In fact, the spectacle was only bumped from the headlines on Tuesday, when the endorsement of former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin ensured Trump’s domination of another news cycle.

Yet as reporters marveled at the London proceedings — lawmakers from America’s closest global ally inveighing against a leading White House contender over his rhetoric against Muslims, Mexican immigrants and other minorities — much of the coverage neglected an underlying story.

Britain’s policy of banning individuals the government deems “not conducive to the public good” stands in stark contrast to the American tradition of free expression. What’s more, it demonstrates a growing culture of speech suppression in the service of multiculturalism with direct relevance to U.S. debates over “political correctness” and the First Amendment.

Since 2005, the United Kingdom has banned at least several hundred people — and maybe more, considering the exact numbers aren’t public — under a government policy excluding individuals deemed not “conducive to the public good,” according to the BBC. Some are barred because they’ve committed crimes. Others are kept out simply for what they’ve said. The list of Americans banned includes National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, conservative talk radio host Michael Savage and the late Westboro Baptist Church pastor Fred Phelps, whose virulently anti-gay organization is widely viewed as a hate group.

There’s no doubt these people are controversial. Many would use stronger terms to describe them. It’s also possible that some of their rhetoric could inspire violence at home or abroad.

But that’s not the standard America uses for expulsion or censorship. There’s a long national tradition of permitting incendiary speech, as long as it doesn’t urge harm to others directly. The United States would never stand for expelling the San Francisco-based Savage, for example, whose show reached an estimated 10 million listeners at its peak.

Savage’s case is jarring for another reason as well. Cameron’s government maintains the ban on the talk show host can be lifted only if he recants on-air statements, deemed threatening to national security. But as the Daily Mail reported, “the U.K has never specified which comments it found so dangerous.”

How is Savage supposed to make make amends if he doesn’t know what he’s apologizing for? And why hasn’t the public been given any explanation of what specifically caused the ban?

For his part, the host has always said Britain’s actions are an egregious affront from the land of the Magna Carta — and he has completely rejected the notion that he’s a security threat of any kind.

“I have never advocated violence,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2009. “My views may be inflammatory, but they’re not violent in any way.”

The question of whether Trump’s rhetoric incited violence was central to Parliament’s debate. When Labour MP Tulip Siddiq argued for banning the Republican, she held him responsible for violence against Muslims toward the end of last year. She also cited the Boston beating of a Hispanic homeless man, in which police said one assailant justified his actions by saying “Donald Trump was right — all these illegals need to be deported.”

“[His] words lead to real crime and violence,” Siddiq said of the presidential candidate. “That is where I draw the line on freedom of speech.”

Other MPs drew the line elsewhere. “It is perfectly right that the [government] bans extremist preachers when they tell their followers to commit acts of terrorism and to cause harm and pain to individuals and communities, and ultimately to kill,” said Conservative Steve Double. “However, I do not believe that Mr. Trump has done that.”

“I wonder how long the list would be if our country began to ban people because they said things we did not like,” he added.

The debate came amid growing concern about free speech in the United Kingdom. As Reason detailed, British citizens have been jailed and investigated by the police for writing offensive remarks on Twitter or even using hashtags the government disliked. Joke-telling can get you arrested. Advertisements deemed off-putting to Christians, feminists and public health advocates can be ripped from the public square.

“[N]o zone of British life,” wrote contributor Brendan O’Neill, “is free from the peering eyes and always primed red pen of the new censorious set that longs to scribble out or shut down anything dodgy, eccentric, hateful, or upsetting (to some).”

It’s a notable trend, if nothing else — especially as many Americans are now grappling with debates over “political correctness” emerging primarily on college campuses. Accusations of censorship in these battles have primarily concerned private institutions and individuals, so government policing hasn’t been involved. Still, Britain’s experience could be a glimpse of the future, playing out across the pond.

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Donald Trump’s response Wednesday to S.C. Gov. Nikki Haley’s jab during a nationally televised speech a day earlier was — for Trump — surprisingly subdued.

The GOP front-runner, who has shown no reluctance to steamroll rivals and critics since joining the Republican presidential field last summer, seemed to take a more measured  approach to the South Carolina governor’s Tuesday night remarks, which included thinly veiled criticism of the billionaire’s fiery rhetoric.

In a Wednesday interview on “Fox and Friends,” Trump pushed back with what has become his standard response to political adversaries: Claim the critic has solicited campaign donations in the past and accuse them of being soft on illegal immigration.

Both accusations undoubtedly cover a huge swath of Republican officeholders. After all, the billionaire developer has donated regularly over the years — to politicians from both parties. And few high-profile lawmakers in Washington or in state capitals across the country are further to the right — publicly — on immigration than Trump.

“She’s very weak on illegal immigration,” Trump said. “She certainly has no trouble asking me for campaign contributions, because over the years she’s asked me for a hell of a lot of money. It’s sort of interesting to hear her. Perhaps, if I weren’t running, she’d be in my office asking me for money. But now that I’m running she wants to take a weak shot on immigration. I feel very strongly about illegal immigration, she doesn’t.”

Asked if he would consider Haley, touted by many as a vice presidential pick who could potentially broaden the appeal of the GOP ticket next fall, as his running mate, Trump was cool. But he stopped short of ruling out the conservative Southerner and daughter of immigrants.

“Considering I’m leading in the polls by a lot, I wouldn’t say she’s off to a good start, based on what she has just said. Let’s see what happens,” Trump said. “We’ll pick somebody, but we’ll pick somebody who’s very good.  But whoever I pick is also going to be very strong on illegal immigration. We’ve had it. We’ve had it with illegal immigration. Believe me … we’ve had it with a lot of things in this country.”

Trump, who is leading national polls but is trailing in next month’s first-in-the nation Iowa caucuses, is counting on a Feb. 20 win in South Carolina to cement his status as the candidate to beat in the still-crowded GOP field.

Haley, tapped by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to give the official GOP response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech Tuesday night, didn’t call out Trump but name, but urged Republicans to adopt a more empathetic tone.

“During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the silent call of the angriest voices. We must resist that temptation. No one who is willing to work hard, abide by our laws, and love our traditions should ever feel unwelcome in this country,” Haley said.

On Wednesday morning, the second-term South Carolina governor made clear her remarks were directed to Trump, among others.

“”Mr. Trump has definitely contributed to what I think is just irresponsible talk,” Haley told NBC’s “Today Show.”

Haley has been skewered by immigration hard-liners on Twitter, including conservative commentator Ann Coulter and radio host Laura Ingraham, but Trump, who has shown a notoriously quick trigger finger on social media, has held his fire.

Trump should deport Nikki Haley.

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) January 13, 2016

Too bad @NikkiHaley missed her oppty to stand w/ working ppl who want borders enforced, American workers put first, govt shrunk. — Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) January 13, 2016

Republican presidential candidates Carly Fiorina, Gov. John Kasich and Donald Trump debated different strategies for dealing with terrorists’ purported use of encrypted communications during Tuesday night’s Republican debate on CNN.

The issue has risen in prominence on Capitol Hill since investigators alleged Islamic State-inspired attackers in Paris and San Bernardino used encryption to plan their assaults. The question of whether companies providing those services should be forced to work with intelligence and law enforcement spilled over onto the 2016 GOP debate stage in Las Vegas.

“They do not need to be forced,” Fiorina said. “They need to be asked to bring the best and brightest, the most recent technology to the table.”

“I was asked as a CEO, I complied happily, and they will as well,” the former HP CEO said, referencing her time as the chair of a CIA civilian tech advisory board during the last Bush administration. “But they have not been asked.”

Trump took a more aggressive stance, and repeated a headline grabbing statement from earlier this month that he’s open to restricting portions of the Internet to undermine the threat of terrorists communicating and radicalizing online.

“We should be able to penetrate the Internet and find out exactly where ISIS is and everything about ISIS, and we can do that if we use our good people,” the business mogul said. “I would certainly be open to closing areas where we are at war with somebody. I sure as hell don’t want to let people that want to kill us, and kill our nation, use our Internet.”

Trump previously said he would turn to Bill Gates and other leaders in the tech community for advice on “closing that Internet up in some ways” to deal with encryption and the spread of ISIS propaganda on social media.

Kasich took his own hardline stance, and advocated compelling technology companies to decrypt data and produce it at the behest of agencies including the FBI.

“There is a big problem, its called encryption,” the Ohio governor said, adding San Bernardino suspects Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook were able to plan their assault by using encrypted devices — a claim that has yet to be substantiated by investigators.

ABC, CBS, the International Business Times and Fox all reported earlier this week the attackers used devices “with some form of encryption,” citing unidentified senior U.S. officials.

Cybersecurity experts were quick to describe the claim as vague at best, and pointed out virtually every contemporary device with mobile connectivity features some level of basic encryption by default, without which users would routinely have sensitive data intercepted and stolen in transmission.

“We have to solve the encryption problem; it is not easy,” Kasich continued. “We need to be able to penetrate these people when they are involved in these plots and these plans, and we have to give the local authorities the ability to penetrate, to disrupt.”

“Encryption is a major problem and Congress has got to deal with this, and so does the president to keep us safe.”

Following an address from President Obama that touched on the issue last week, the White House recently announced it’s reweighing its stance on encryption, with a policy decision pending in the coming weeks.

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Donald Trump’s threat to run as an independent lost some potency in recent days, with both Texas and Ohio officials indicating that’s not going to happen in either state.

Monday marked the deadline in Texas for candidates to finalize their party affiliation, and Trump, who previously filed as a Republican, is now prohibited under state law from appearing on the ballot in 2016 as an independent.

Not everyone agrees that particular segment of the state’s election code would withstand a court challenge, but state election officials told InsideSources Monday that as far as they’re concerned, Trump is a Republican for the 2016 election cycle in Texas.

The GOP front-runner faces a similar “sore loser” rule in Ohio, where Trump filed to run as a Republican on Friday. Ohio election officials said state law now prohibits the New York real estate mogul from appearing on the general election ballot as anything other than a Republican.

“Since Donald Trump has filed a declaration of candidacy with our office as a Republican, has filed with Federal Election Commission as a Republican candidate, and voluntarily took part in the Republican presidential debates, the first of which was held in Ohio, there is no way for Mr. Trump to disaffiliate from the Republican Party ‘in good faith’ during this election cycle,” an official in Secretary of State Jon Husted’s office told the Cleveland Plain-Dealer.

Sore loser laws are meant to prevent losing primary candidates from torpedoing party nominees in the general election by siphoning off votes with doomed third-party bids.

That’s essentially what Trump has threatened since getting into the GOP presidential race last summer, warning Republican officials across the country he would run as an independent if he feels he is treated unfairly by the party establishment.

Speculation about a third-party bid ramped up again in the past week as Trump slipped behind Sen. Ted Cruz in a couple of new Iowa polls and GOP officials held a quiet meeting in Washington to discuss the possibility of a floor fight for the Republican nomination at next summer’s convention.

The Dec. 7 meeting, which included Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, according to reports, included discussion of convention strategies that would allow delegates to coalesce around an alternative to Trump, who has alienated GOP leaders in Washington with his comments on immigrants and refugees.

After the story broke in The Washinigton Post, party officials insisted the meeting — which included allies of former Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio, two of Trump’s rivals for the GOP nomination — was a routine session, not an attempt to undermine Trump or other “outsider” candidates like neurosurgeon Ben Carson.

Carson has also warned GOP officials to play fair.

“If this was the beginning of a plan to subvert the will of the voters and replace it with the will of the political elite, I assure you Donald Trump will not be the only one leaving the party,” Carson said last week.

Trump signed a pledge earlier this year vowing not to run as an independent and support the party’s eventual nominee, but has since refused to rule out an independent bid.

“If they don’t treat me with a certain amount of decorum and respect. If they don’t treat me as the front-runner … If the playing field is not level, then certainly all options are open,” Trump told CNN recently.

Those options include court challenges that, despite what Texas and Ohio officials say, would likely put Trump’s name on the general election ballots in all 50 states, according to some legal scholars.

Richard Winger, editor of Ballot Access News, told InsideSources that American courts generally rule in favor of more ballot access, not less.

“There have been 13 people in history who ran in major party presidential primaries and then got on the ballot outside major parties,” Winger said. “No third party or independent candidate has ever been kept off a general election ballot because of running in a presidential primary until 2012, when Michigan kept Gary Johnson off its general election ballot as the Libertarian. And even then Michigan admitted he was free to be an independent candidate. But they didn’t think he could be the Libertarian because he had run in Michigan’s Republican presidential primary.”

Even if Trump loses a court challenge to the Texas and Ohio laws, there are ways around the restrictions, Winger said — running a proxy candidate, for example, whose Electoral College votes would go to Trump.

Gaining access to the ballots in all 50 states isn’t even the most difficult part of running as an independent, Winger said: “The debate problem is a bigger problem than ballot access.”

Winger and other advocates for a more open electoral process say the key for a successful independent candidate is participating in next fall’s nationally-televised general election debates — debates controlled by the Republican and Democratic party insiders who sit on the Commission for Presidential Debates.

“The problem is not ballot access. The problem is the CPD,” said Cara Brown McCormick, president of Level the Playing Field, an advocacy group that is part of a lawsuit seeking more third-party participation in the debates.

“Unfortunately you have no chance of ever becoming president as the Libertarian Party nominee, or as the Green Party nominee for that matter, or whoever the party is,” she told InsideSources. “If you’re not on that debate stage in the fall, you are not going to become president.”

A lot has changed since last month’s Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee. Outsiders Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina have sunk in the polls, while Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have risen on renewed national security concerns after two bloody terror attacks — one in Paris, another in San Benardino, Calif.

But as the Republican candidates converge on a Las Vegas stage Tuesday for the fifth GOP debate, the one constant in the race remains the front-runner status of Donald Trump, the pugnacious billionaire who has maintained a stunning lead over the field in national polls.

The latest Real Clear Politics averages have Cruz, Rubio and Carson each polling at around 15 percent — about half the 30 percent of Republicans backing Trump, who saw his numbers jump again after controversial comments last week about a “total and complete” shutdown on Muslim travel to the United States.

In Tuesday’s CNN-moderated debate, Trump is likely to defend the Muslim comments, as he did again Sunday, while also looking to reclaim momentum in Iowa, where Cruz is surging.

In an interview Sunday with Fox, Trump brushed aside criticism of the proposed travel ban, widely panned by leaders across the political spectrum, including Republicans like House Speaker Paul D. Ryan and presidential rivals former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham.

Trump said on “Fox News Sunday” he sees the ban as a temporary solution “until we get our hands around this problem.”

“There’s a group of people who are very sick. We have to figure out the answer. The Muslims can help us figure out the answer,” he said.

After a Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics Iowa Poll released Saturday showed Cruz with a 10-point lead in Iowa, 31 percent to 21, and a Fox News poll released Sunday had the Texan up 32 percent to 25 in the state, Trump ramped up his criticism of Cruz.

“The way he’s dealt with the Senate — where he goes in frankly like a bit of a maniac — you never get things done that way,” the GOP front-runner said on Fox. “You can’t walk into the Senate and scream and call people liars and not be able to cajole and get along with people. He’ll never get anything done.”

Trump began targeting Cruz after The New York Times last week reported Cruz questioned the presidential qualifications of Trump and Carson in a closed-door session with campaign donors.

“Well look he’s from Texas — to the best of my knowledge, there’s a lot of oil in Texas, right? So, he gets a lot of money from the oil companies, and he’s against ethanol,” Trump told an ethanol-friendly crowd in Iowa last week.

In an audiotape of his comments at the fundraiser, obtained by the Times, Cruz tells supporters the terror attacks had made it more difficult for Trump to become the GOP nominee.

“You look at Paris, you look at San Bernardino, it’s given a seriousness to this race,” Cruz said.

The Texas senator, who has avoided going head-to-head with both Trump and Carson in hopes of eventually claiming their supporters, goes on to suggest voters will eventually reject both men out of concerns for national security.

“Who am I comfortable having their finger on the button? Now that’s a question of strength, but it’s also a question of judgment. And I think that is a question that is a challenging question for both of them,” he said on the tape.

On Twitter, Trump predicted it would be “easy” to beat Cruz.

Looks like @tedcruz is getting ready to attack. I am leading by so much he must. I hope so, he will fall like all others. Will be easy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 11, 2015

While Trump was unloading on Cruz, the Texan was sticking to his strategy of trying to play nice, calling Trump a “friend,” and tweeting a link to the video for “Maniac,” the theme to the 1983 film “Flashdance.” Asked about the Trump Muslim ban last week, Cruz said: “I disagree with that proposal,” while adding, “I like Donald Trump.”

Rubio, also rising in the Real Clear Politics averages, took a harder line on Trump, telling “Meet the Press” on Sunday that the Musljm ban was “offensive and outlandish.”

Cruz, Rubio and Trump will be joined on the Las Vegas stage at 8:30 p.m. Eastern by six other “first-tier” candidates: Carson, Bush, Fiorina, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.

CNN will hold an undercard debate at 6 p.m. for the four other GOP candidates: Graham, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and former New York Gov. George Pataki.

Presidential frontrunners Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are taking last week’s Islamic State-inspired mass shooting in California as an excuse not just to float policies aimed at online censorship and restricting Americans’ First Amendment rights, but a new avenue to demonstrate current and would-be high-level government officials’ fundamental misunderstanding of technology.

“We need to put the great disruptors at work at disrupting ISIS,” Clinton said at the Brookings Institution Sunday, the same day she told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos companies like Facebook and Twitter “cannot permit the recruitment and the actual direction of attacks or the celebration of violence by this sophisticated Internet user” — a reference to one San Bernardino shooter declaring allegiance to ISIS in a Facebook post proclaiming the attack.

RELATED: Obama Hedges on Encryption

“You’re going to hear all of the usual complaints, you know, freedom of speech, et cetera,” Clinton said at Brookings. “But if we truly are in a war against terrorism and we are truly looking for ways to shut off their funding, shut off the flow of foreign fighters, then we’ve got to shut off their means of communicating. It’s more complicated with some of what they do on encrypted apps, and I’m well aware of that, and that requires even more thinking about how to do it.”

Trump made similar comments Monday night at a campaign rally at the U.S.S. Yorktown in South Carolina.

“We’re losing a lot of people because of the Internet,” the Republican frontrunner said. “We have to do something. We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them, maybe in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some ways. Somebody will say, ‘Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people. We have a lot of foolish people.”

Beyond Trump’s laughable assumption that Bill Gates — who stepped down as Microsoft’s CEO in 2000 and chairman in 2014 — is capable of “closing that Internet up in some ways,” and both candidate’s flagrant dismissals of “freedom of speech, et cetera,” their terminology demonstrates a lack of comprehension, oversimplification, and policy proposals that, at best, advocate mixed messages.

The term “disruptors” in tech refers to innovators, technology or business models aimed at disrupting traditional economic sectors (think Uber and the taxi industry), and if posting on Facebook qualifies someone as a “sophisticated Internet user,” it’s likely your grandmother and most everyone else online qualifies.

Facebook removed San Bernardino shooter Tashfeen Malik’s post because it violated the company’s community standards, which “don’t allow people to praise acts of terror or promote terrorism,” according to a company spokeswoman — not because of a government mandate (yet). Twitter — the platform favored by ISIS radicalizers — quietly suspended 10,000 pro-ISIS accounts in the spring “for tweeting violent threats,” a representative later said.

While neither Clinton nor Trump, like almost every government official, have neglected to offer concrete solutions for government access to encrypted communications services — beyond getting law enforcement and the tech sector together “to figure out the best way forward” — suggesting third-party access at all ignores what experts have been saying for months: any backdoor between the sender and receiver adds to the complexity of encryption, and the likelihood of a vulnerability for criminals, bad actors or terrorists themselves to exploit.

Introducing backdoors will only drive extremists to use encryption products not sourced in the U.S., cryptologists argue. Even if the agencies eventually get access, it won’t help them identify suspects to surveil — something experts say was better accomplished by the NSA’s phone metadata program — a program Clinton endorsed ending via the U.S.A. Freedom Act.

While few would argue social media companies have an obligation to remove threats, bigoted comments or hate speech on their networks, proposing a broader form of blanket censorship beyond the content removal platforms already engage in seems to run counter to the goal touted by Clinton, Trump and others: tracking clearly identifiable suspects’ activity online — something encryption backdoors seemingly wouldn’t do.

That hasn’t stopped similar efforts from shaping up in Congress, where Senate Intelligence Committee ranking Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein is working to revive legislation, as early as this week, compelling Facebook, Twitter and others to alert federal agencies to terrorist activity on their networks.

On encryption, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul on Monday announced he’ll be forming a commission to examine the encryption issue, with the greater goal of getting representatives from the industry and federal agencies to sit at the same table and work toward a solution.

McCaul added the commission would not force concessions on companies, but seek to address “security and technology challenges in the digital age.”

“A legislative knee-jerk reaction could weaken Internet protections and privacy for everyday Americans, while doing nothing puts American lives at risk and makes it easier for terrorists and criminals to escape justice,” the Texas Republican said at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. “It is time for Congress to act because the White House has failed to bring all parties together — transparently — to find solutions.”

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Republican presidential contender Lindsey Graham, mired at the bottom of the polls, came out swinging at Ted Cruz and Donald Trump on Thursday, excoriating his two GOP rivals for what the South Carolina senator called “hateful rhetoric” on immigration.

Graham, one of a parade of GOP candidates set to speak at the day-long Republican Jewish Coalition presidential forum in Washington, told attendees that Cruz and Trump are alienating Hispanic voters.

“I believe Donald Trump is destroying the Republican Party’s chance to win an election that we can’t afford to lose,” the defense hawk and staunch supporter of Israel said.

Taking the stage just minutes after Cruz told attendees that turning out social conservatives was the key to Republicans winning next year’s presidential race, Graham ripped into the Texas senator.

“I believe we’re losing the Hispanic vote because they think we don’t like them,” Graham said. “I believe that it’s not about turning out evangelical Christians, it’s about repairing the damage done by incredibly hateful rhetoric driving a wall between us and the fastest-growing demographic in America — who should be Republican.”

Graham at one point made what seemed to be a comparison of GOP front-runner Trump’s hard-line stance on immigration to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

“We’re literally going to round ’em up. That sound familiar to you?” Graham asked the audience of Jewish conservatives. “Every one of them. Including their American citizen children. That’s the leader of the Republican Party. You think you’re going to win an election with that kind of garbage?”

Graham told attendees he’d planned to focus his remarks on foreign policy, but decided instead to respond to the speech he’d just heard from Cruz.

Graham warned that a far-right position on abortion would also cost Republicans the 2016 election.

“If the nominee of the Republican Party will not allow for an exception for rape and incest, they will not win,” Graham said. “Ted Cruz … says the debate’s going to be about the Little Sisters of the Poor. He’s going to take the fight to the Democrats over their wanting to impose social policy on charitable organizations.

Graham said if Cruz is the GOP’s candidate, Democrats undoubtedly would frame the issue differently: “It will be about rape … It will be about the nominee of the Republican Party telling a woman who’s been raped, ‘You gotta carry the child of a rapist.’ Good luck with that.”