Delaware Liberal

Wednesday Open Thread [8.10.16]

Delaware Dem

NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–Economist/YouGov–Clinton 48, Trump 41
NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–Bloomberg–Clinton 50, Trump 44
OHIO–PRESIDENT–NBC/WSJ/Marist–Clinton 43, Trump 38
PENNSYLVANIA–PRESIDENT–NBC/WSJ/Marist–Clinton 48, Trump 37
IOWA–PRESIDENT–NBC/WSJ/Marist–Clinton 41, Trump 37
FLORIDA–PRESIDENT–NBC/WSJ/Marist–Clinton 46, Trump 45
OHIO–PRESIDENT–Quinnipiac–Clinton 49, Trump 45
OHIO–PRESIDENT–Quinnipiac–Clinton 52, Trump 42
NORTH CAROLINA–PRESIDENT–PPP–Clinton 43, Trump 41
KANSAS–PRESIDENT–Survey USA–Trump 44, Clinton 39
MISSOURI–PRESIDENT–Reminton–Trump 44, Clinton 42

Kansas might be a battleground state. Kansas.

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that 70% of registered Republicans want Donald Trump to stay as the party’s nominee while 19% would like him to quit.

Former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) said he’s thinking of supporting Donald Trump for president, Jewish Week reports. He’s still undecided but added there are “a lot of us, I think, who can’t feel quite comfortable either way yet.”

Gore’s biggest mistake, followed up closely by dissing the Big Dog.

Donald Trump said that he will commit to three debates this fall with Hillary Clinton, but may try to re-negotiate the terms that have been agreed upon by a bipartisan commission, Time reports.

Said Trump: “I renegotiated the debates in the primaries, remember? They were making a fortune on them and they had us in for three and a half hours and I said that’s ridiculous. I’m sure they’ll be open to any suggestions I have, because I think they’ll be very fair suggestions. But I haven’t seen the conditions yet. They’re actually presented to me tonight.”

LOL. He won’t debate. He will demand “unbiased moderators.” And walk away when they are not Fox employees not named Megyn Kelly.

Can we win the House? Yes. Sam Wang tracks the generic congressional ballot and shows Democrats are at least theoretically within range to take control.

Ed Kilgore says Trump’s assassination “joke” was thinly veiled sedition:

Donald Trump managed to descend to new depths today by repeating a tedious gun-lobby argument that Hillary Clinton wants to “essentially abolish the Second Amendment” and then turning it into a “joking” suggestion that “Second-Amendment people” might hold the only way to deal with that threat. Nothing like a little assassination humor to liven things up on the campaign trail, eh?

But even as they condemn the shocking utterance, a lot of observers seem to be missing the fact that Trump is adapting a dangerously common right-wing claim. It’s that the most important purpose of the Second Amendment is not to allow people to defend themselves from robbers and muggers and would-be murderers and rapists if the police cannot get the job done, but rather to create a heavily armed populace prepared to undertake revolutionary violence if the government tries to impose “tyranny.” Let’s be clear about this doctrine: It lets the gun-wielders decide for themselves whether high taxes or government surveillance or Obamacare is a sufficient threat to liberty to justify getting out the shooting irons and killing the police officers and armed-services members assigned the responsibility of enforcing the “tyrannical” laws in question. And conservative politicians have often made it clear they understand and are okay with that incredible risk, as when Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle referred cheerfully to “Second-Amendment remedies” for the liberal policies supported by her opponent, Harry Reid. Angle was hardly alone: During the Republican presidential primaries this cycle, Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz both endorsed the idea of gun rights being a safeguard against too much Big Government liberalism.

Josh Marshall asks whether there will be Trumpism after Trump?

With everything that’s happened this year, with the emergence of a white nationalist incarnation of the GOP, with everything that comes with that, do we think those folks, the big chunk of GOP voters who are hardcore Trump supporters, will come back in 2020 and say, “Okay, that didn’t work out. Let’s go for Marco Rubio.”

That does not strike me as at all plausible.

Of course, if Trump suffers a devastating defeat, as now seems at least plausible, maybe hardcore supporters will simply see the Trumpite cause is hopeless? This does appear to be fairly widespread conventional wisdom. Trump goes down to an epic defeat. Establishment Republicans haul out a big bucket of ‘I told you so’ and retake the reins. Does that sound right? It doesn’t to me.

We’ve now had a version of the GOP that is strongly anti-immigrant, white nationalist in character, hostile to foreign trade as much as its hostile to foreign countries and the people who come from those countries. We’ve seen that a big chunk of the Republican party is hugely supportive of that program. The excitement, the galvanization of a large part of he electorate – I think that’s all too transformative to be dropped in favor of the pre-2016 GOP.

Josh Barro:

It doesn’t really matter what Trump meant. It matters what he said — a reckless comment that might or might not be outrageous, depending on your interpretation. This has happened over and over during the campaign, and it would happen, with much higher stakes, during his presidency.

What the president says matters. Presidents’ comments can move markets, create policy, inflame foreign tensions, even start wars. It is therefore important that presidents be careful.

“Representatives of Hillary Clinton’s campaign phoned state Democratic leaders in Arizona and Georgia this week to alert them of plans to begin transferring funds to hire more field organizers in those states,” the Washington Post reports. “Polls in both states — which Republican nominee Mitt Romney carried in 2012 — show a tightening race between Clinton and Donald Trump. The move by the Clinton campaign suggests a bid to expand the number of battleground states in play in November.” “A Democrat familiar with the campaign’s plans said the outlays in Arizona and Georgia would be “in the six figures” for now, with plans to use the money to hire staff.”

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