Tuesday Open Thread [8.16.16]
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
OMG Donald Trump tried to crash Chelsea Clinton's wedding: https://t.co/AgCbohrOUs pic.twitter.com/RqU8ZIZLnn
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) August 16, 2016
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.”
That night @TimKaine visited a brewery in Asheville, joined the band, and serenaded crowd & press w/ "Wagon Wheel" pic.twitter.com/tQ9HX6WVpf
— Kailani Koenig (@kailanikm) August 16, 2016
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.”
Here's Obama tonight—at a Hillary fundraiser—on Democrats' election season psychology: pic.twitter.com/sY1JaegShs
— Gabriel Debenedetti (@gdebenedetti) August 16, 2016
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.”
"Bush can never be held accountable for 9/11, while everything…from ISIS to Syria is [Obama's] responsibility." https://t.co/uVs8d2y3PH
— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) August 16, 2016
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.”
VIDEO: Vice President Biden takes Hillary Clinton on tour of his childhood home in Scranton, Pa. https://t.co/40ltjVCHpo
— The Associated Press (@AP) August 15, 2016
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.”
Pretty pictures.https://t.co/knlNKTRFiD
— Al Giordano (@AlGiordano) August 15, 2016
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.”
In case you missed @VP ripping into Trump for being completely unfit and unqualified for the presidency, here you go pic.twitter.com/KLhIRoeBjO
— Alan Kestrel (@AlanKestrel750) August 15, 2016
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.
What a Clinton landslide would look like: https://t.co/tsJJN5OUpk pic.twitter.com/hkGCtG9m8C
— FiveThirtyEight (@FiveThirtyEight) August 15, 2016
Kaine needs to get that paunch under control. (Yes I’m body shaming the future VP because I am that entitled.)
Just the other day I was wondering “Where’s Bernie? Why don’t I see him campaigning for Hillary?” And then it occurred to me, Hillary is doing just fine without him and would probably rather not have anyone remind voters just how far left her campaign has traveled from Democrats’ comfortable center-right position. I think a lot of Hillary supporters don’t know or care about her Warren MI speech.
Progressives have won the fight to push Hillary’s campaign to the left. The challenge will be to hold her to it after the campaign.
Exactly, Puck. I would imagine Bernie will do several rallies in the fall for Hillary, but right now, in the dog days of August, he is not needed.
Kaine also needs to get on that mic a little more…. and practice more.
I kinda wanna make a thing out of the “nice long toke” line, given the Clinton/Kaine’s DEA stance of pot as a substance as harmful as heroin…. but I need coffee first.
Well, I believe Hillary has said she wants to reschedule pot at the very least
Bernie is back urging House and Senate Dems to not vote on the TPP if it comes up in a lame duck. He may not be actively campaigning for her, but he is pretty firmly standing in the way of a pivot to the center on this and still helping to keep this thing toxic.
Progressives can thank Donald Trump for HRC being able to stay on her primary message. The “moderate” voters that a general campaign needs to appeal to can compare HRC with Trump’s extreme bullshit and HRC does look moderate. The overton window is also helped by the fact that people are apparently already nostalgic for Obama.
And with Bernie back in the Senate doing his thing, we can now avoid judging which of the two opposing candidates are shouting the loudest. There is nothing standing in the way of Trumps BS rhetoric.
|The “moderate” voters that a general campaign needs to appeal to can compare HRC with Trump’s extreme bullshit and HRC does look moderate. The overton window is also helped by the fact that people are apparently already nostalgic for Obama.|
Maybe we can redefine “moderate” with this election. If the platform the Dems are carrying now is “moderate”, I think I’m okay with that.
Also, Bernie’s and Trump’s bipartisan and widely shared opposition to TPP has prevented Hillary from supporting TPP and running on it as part of her plan to create jobs, which I think she otherwise would have done.
One thing still perplexes me about TPP: Why did DNC fight so hard to successfully keep TPP opposition out of the platform? Especially since Hillary did in fact oppose TPP in her campaign.
The simplest answer is they didn’t want to create conflict with the sitting Democratic President who is pro-TPP. I can think of many other increasingly cynical explanations.
I’m OK with that too. Because it is tough to look at polls from places like Pew and not see that much of the country lines up with basic Dem Party priorities. The difficulty is that the GOP campaigns on their resentments and their need to provide more giveaways to businesses and rich people. So far, she hasn’t had to triangulate positions to get to the voters who might still reflexively think that what American business wants is reflexively good for Americans.
On that note, I was surprised and pleased to see so little attention paid to the recent “Stock market Trifecta”
A tiny flame of hope that people understand that “the markets” aren’t the economy is beginning to flicker in my heart.
I’d like people to understand that success in GDP and equities is not necessarily the same thing as a broad prosperity.
My shares of Consolidated Lint have done quite well
@Cassandra: That’s a good point in your last sentence: Most Americans still don’t realize that they’re called “multinational” corporations for a reason. Such corporations’ only loyalty to the U.S. is predicated on the U.S. military protecting their (“American”) interests. If more people understood that corporations’ only interests are their own bottom line, perhaps they would be more reluctant to support pro-corporate positions at the ballot box.
November can’t get here soon enough for me. However, I am looking forward to the debates because I believe there will be such a contrast between the candidates that Clinton (aided by Trump’s mouth and ignorance) will all but bury Trump. It’s the one time when her wonkishness will serve her well during the campaign.
Funny… The debates are the part that concerns me the most. I still remember Al Gore sighing at the stupidity of GWB (deservedly) and the way that it turned off voters that wanted to have a beer with their President.
Like with W in 2000, I find myself exasperated with the ignorance of the candidate. Hillary will have to find the balance between treating him like a buffoon and like a Presidential candidate.
I remember Obama’s first uninspired debate with Romney when Obama came away with at best a draw.
Michael Moore’s scenario sounds plausible:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-moore/trump-self-sabotage_b_11545026.html?
“Hillary will have to find the balance between treating him like a buffoon and like a Presidential candidate.”
I agree that’s the key – it will be hard to remain Presidential because Trump is such a target rich environment.
“I remember Obama’s first uninspired debate”
There is that risk. However, Clinton has been at this game for such a long time. She’s been beaten and hammered incessantly for almost a quarter century. Not sure what they can throw at her that hasn’t already been thrown.
You’re right to worry. Trump has hired Ailes for the debates:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/17/us/politics/donald-trump-roger-ailes.html
Inquiring minds wonder, will Ailes demand cash up front?
@a “Inquiring minds wonder, will Ailes demand cash up front?”
Maybe he wanted a special speech writing session with Melanija instead.