Friday Open Thread [8.5.16]

Watch this video to see President Obama jamming out to Eminem. And some other pretty great behind the scenes stuff.

NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–NBC News/Wall St. Jrnl–Clinton 47, Trump 38
NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–McClatchy/Marist–Clinton 48, Trump 33
NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–Reuters/Ipsos–Clinton 43, Trump 39
FLORIDA–PRESIDENT–Suffolk University–Clinton 48, Trump 42
GEORGIA–PRESIDENT–Atlanta Journal-Constitution–Clinton 44, Trump 40

A New Latino Voice poll in Florida finds Donald Trump getting just 12.9% support from Hispanic voters, “a historical low for a Republican candidate.” Mitt Romney and John McCain each won roughly 40% of the Hispanic vote in the state.

Paul Nehlen (R), who is running against Speaker Paul Ryan (R) in a Wisconsin primary and has been praised by Donald Trump, told a radio station that the United States should have a “discussion” about deporting all Muslims from the United States. Said Nehlen: “The question is, why do we have Muslims in the country?”

.@washingtonpost: Donald Trump can’t stop bringing up imagined stories that involve evil Muslimshttps://t.co/lXpSAJUUx4

— Jesse Lehrich (@JesseLehrich) August 4, 2016

Josh Marshall on what we should glean from the recent polls:

First, Clinton got a sizable bounce out of her convention. That bounce appears not only to be persisting but actually growing. That’s a big deal. It’s still too soon to say we’re in the post-convention period. I’d say we need about a week more to be there. But historically speaking where the polls are a week or two out of the conventions tends to remain fairly stable. There aren’t a lot of opportunities to really change the game. The debates are the big exception. But for all frenzy, there have been few cases where the presidential debates have really reset the race. People say a lot that three months is a long time, that polls are only a snap shot of the race as it stands today. All true. But we’re coming up on the phase of the campaign where polls really start to matter and become much more predictive of the outcome.

Second, it’s not just a Clinton bounce. Trump’s support appears to have eroded significantly. What counts as ‘significantly’ or ‘a lot’ is relative of course. We’re only talking a few percentage points. But national elections, especially in this hyper-partisan era, play out in a highly constrained band. And Trump has fallen below what I and I suspect most other observers consider a key benchmark, 40%. […]

The last point is where this goes from here. Of course, we don’t know. But the events of the last couple days suggest the institutional GOP, the top elected officials, stakeholders, funders and so forth are at something of a breaking point with Trump. Unfortunately they don’t have any clear place to break to.

Secret Service agents walk on stage during Hillary Clinton rally https://t.co/Btp1na4Pxt

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) August 4, 2016

A little context here, the protesters were from this really really fringe of the fringe group that believes animals have constitutional rights and thus cannot be eaten. One of them rushed the stage, and you can see Hillary not take her eyes off the rusher until he was contained. But that was a quick comeback from Hillary on Trump’s killing animals.

“When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different.” — Donald Trump, quoted by the New Yorker.

“I don’t know why we’re not leading by a lot. Maybe crowds don’t make the difference.” — Donald Trump, quoted by Politico at a large campaign rally.

No shit. On both counts.

"That’s what 21st century feminism is about: The idea that when everybody is equal, we are all more free." —@POTUS https://t.co/6Ou7XEOE3j

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 4, 2016

Several hours after Tennessee state Rep. Curry Todd (R) was arrested on a warrant charging him with stealing primary challenger Mark Lovell’s (R) campaign signs, the incumbent was due to be released on bond, the Memphis Commercial Appeal reports.

And who posted that $100 bond? None other than Lovell himself.

Explained Lovell to the Washington Post: “Shoot, I felt sorry for him. Wouldn’t you be sad if you were a state representative and nobody would come bail your ass out of jail?”

Jonathan Chait says Trump proves that I, Delaware Dem, was right all along about the nature of the right’s opposition to Obama: “As careful studies of the tea-party movement revealed, what animated Republican voters was a fear of cultural change. Their anti-statism was confined to programs that seemed to benefit people other than themselves. Racial resentment and ethnocentrism, not passion for limited government, drove the conservative base.”

“Almost alone within the party, Trump understood this. That is why his comically long list of ideological deviations never hurt him. Trump’s racism demonstrated to most Republican voters that he stood with them on the essential divide that ordered their political world — one defined by identity more than ideology.”

“In the conservative elite’s imagination, the romanticized history of the tea-party revolt — a story of liberty-loving Americans rising up against Big Government excess — still prevails. It is a story that attributes the party’s extraordinary opposition to the president’s policies, not to the primal fears he aroused. Trump has not only disproven the conservative movement’s theory of its own base. He’s disproven its history of the Obama presidency.”

They opposed him with such vehemence because they were and are racists. And being racist explains why Trump has won the GOP nomination. The GOP is racist. Trump is racist. It is a match made in hell.