Delaware Liberal

Tuesday Open Thread [8.16.16]

Delaware Dem

NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–NBC/Survey Monkey–Clinton 50, Trump 41
NEW YORK–PRESIDENT–Siena–Clinton 50, Trump 25
WASHINGTON–PRESIDENT–Elway–Clinton 43, Trump 24
VIRGINIA–PRESIDENT–Washington Post–Clinton 52, Trump 38

National Journal looks at how Democrats in downballot races are tying their Republican opponents to Donald Trump.

“The at­tacks are, in part, a re­sponse to grow­ing evid­ence that many voters view Trump as something of a polit­ic­al an­om­aly, who is mean­ing­fully dif­fer­ent even from Re­pub­lic­ans who will sup­port him. To fully be­ne­fit from a po­ten­tial anti-Trump wave, Demo­crats will have to per­suade voters that the same char­ac­ter­ist­ics they dis­like in Trump can be found in loc­al Re­pub­lic­ans.”

Charlie Cook: “As the race stands today, Trump could sweep the entire Toss Up column and still come up two electoral votes short of the 270 needed to win.”

“The reality is that Trump’s challenge is actually tougher than the above paragraph suggests. Using the Realclearpolitics.com averages of polls in individual states, Trump trails in each of the whole states in the Toss Up category, albeit some by fractions of a percentage point. Trump holds minuscule leads in Arizona and Georgia, two states that we are generously putting in the Lean Republican column. Clinton leads in every state carried by President Obama in 2012 plus North Carolina, which went for Obama in 2008.”

First Read: “The states in Hillary Clinton’s column now add up to 288 electoral votes, which exceeds the 270 needed to win the presidency. Donald Trump, meanwhile, is at 174 electoral votes, and an additional 76 are in the Tossup category.”

“No candidate in Donald Trump’s position at this stage of the campaign has gone on to win the popular vote in November in the modern polling era,” Politico reports.

“That’s the sobering news confronting the Trump campaign as it seeks to rebound from his recent slump.”

Nate Silver: “At some point, complacency could become an issue, although it’s probably too early to worry about that. In the nearer term, I’d be worried that the race has been so volatile. Sure, things look good now. But conditions in May, and then again in July, produced a close race. Is there anything inherently preventing those conditions from arising again? I suppose I’d wonder about what Wikileaks has up its sleeve and what sort of geopolitical events could work in Trump’s favor.”

Daily Beast says the debates will be a big moment: “Barring some unforeseen event, such as a serious terrorist attack at home, the decisive event that will determine who wins the 2016 presidential election is almost certainly going to be the series of debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. beginning on September 26 at New York’s Hofstra University.”

“Since 1960, when John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon first met in Chicago, no other single moment has been more important in affecting the outcome of our elections. For good or ill, television’s laser-like eye reveals the candidates’ fitness for the presidency—their knowledge of domestic and foreign policy, their ability to answer reporters’ probing questions, their coolness under fire, the image they project—all tell voters which person should occupy the Oval Office.”

The New York Times asks whether Trump has written off black voters: “Mr. Trump may not have purposefully snubbed black neighborhoods — he rarely plunges into any community to tour businesses, sample local cuisine or spontaneously engage in the handshake and back-patting rituals of everyday campaigning. His preferred style of politicking consists almost entirely of addressing arena-size rallies, conducting media interviews and receiving visitors in private at events or at his Manhattan skyscraper.”

“But the 70-year-old white self-described billionaire has not just walled himself off from African-American voters where they live. He has also turned down repeated invitations to address gatherings of black leaders, ignored African-American conservatives in states he needs to win and made numerous inflammatory comments about minorities.”

Nate Cohn: “The Upshot’s model gives Mrs. Clinton an 88 percent chance of winning. It’s about the same probability of hitting a field goal from the 20-yard line.”

“That’s a pretty good way to think about it. If Mrs. Clinton ultimately wins, we will probably look back and say she had more or less already won it by this point. If she loses, these next two months will be talked about for decades.”

“The game-winning field-goal analogy has one big weakness: She may win this by a lot more than a field goal.”

Markos has a message for weenie Liberals who are afraid to win.

Telling people you are losing demotivates supporters! So why am I bringing this up? Because there remains a strain of weenie liberalism that is terrified at the idea of winning. You’ve seen them. You say, “This poll looks great for Democrats!” and inevitably, someone has to respond with, “Don’t get complacent! Fight like you’re 10 points down!”

Seriously, if people were motivated by being 10 points down, we would’ve crushed it in 2014, when we were actually 10 points down. Look, I’m not going to sit here and pretend we’re winning when we’re not. We didn’t pretend in 2014, or 2010. But when we are winning? We’ll be shouting it from the rooftops. And embrace it! Winning is good! It feels good, and it gets people excited and eager to join the bandwagon! That’s why the Yankees have so many fans, and Barcelona FC, and Man U!

We are winning today, and winning big. Wear it proudly. Rub it in the GOP’s faces. They nominated Donald Fucking Trump! Ha ha ha ha! So yeah, I don’t want to hear about how we need to pretend we are losing in order to motivate ourselves. The world doesn’t work that way. Leave the loser talk to Donald Trump, so that he and his godforsaken party get properly obliterated this November.

Thank you.

Ah, but with Nate Silver’s warning about complacency is worth noting and preparing against. We have to all vote like it is a close race terrified of the idea of a President Trump while at the same time gloating that we are going to win. It is a difficult balancing act, to be sure.

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