NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–NBC/Survey Monkey–Clinton 50, Trump 42
VIRGINIA–PRESIDENT–Roanoke College–Clinton 55, Trump 36
OHIO–PRESIDENT–Monmouth–Clinton 43, Trump 39
The Republican Party just doesn’t embrace its role in this process, and this can seen in no more complicated a way than that they spend most of their energy tearing down the very institutions they serve and rely upon to keep things honest. An institutional party that does all it can to win control of the federal government should not continually denigrate the effectiveness and legitimacy of the federal government. A party that wants a healthy established order, should not constantly make unwarranted and exaggerated accusations of media bias.
Taken as a whole, the Republican Party has, ever since its takeover by the conservative movement, done more than any foreign ideologues can ever hope to do to erode faith in the goodness of the American establishment. They’ve done this partly by being very bad at governing, but my focus here is on their messaging. During much of the latter Bush Era, the Republicans controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, and they had a friendly Supreme Court. They ought to have been able to argue that under their leadership the federal government was finally functioning as it should. But, even if this had been plausible based on their record, they could never have done it because their whole machine is geared to deride the tyrannical inefficiency of government. What they did instead was to blame their own failures on the very institutions they controlled, and on the media for never giving them a fair shake.
The result of their messaging, which has been carried out for decades now, both when holding power and when in the minority, was that their followers lost faith in every aspect of our institutions. An institutional party destroyed faith in itself.
Josh Marshall says Trumpism is the politics of loss and revenge:
I don’t want to attempt some grand overarching theory of Trumpism. But, broad brush, I continue to believe that it is best understood as a reaction to the erosion of white privilege, supremacy and centrality in American life.
That brings us to the second key point: Trumpism is about loss. And that loss is real. It’s not just about being haters or uneducated or stupid. The fact that what’s being lost is in most respects something that wasn’t legitimate to have in the first place – status, centrality and racial privilege – should not blind us to the fact that the loss is real and that it will have political consequences. As I mentioned when I wrote up that mortality study last December, I think this demographic and actuarial marker – an almost unprecedented reversal of a particular group’s mortality statistics – is hugely significant to understanding our contemporary politics. It almost unquestionably points to some acute socio-cultural stress. It’s just a matter of discovering what it is.
Consider this chart.
I looked this up when I started looking at the polls showing Hillary Clinton competitive or even in some polls ahead of Donald Trump in Georgia. There’s a powerful story here. If you were a 25 year old white man in Georgia in 1980, you lived in a state that was almost literally black and white. And whites were the overwhelming majority of the population. A mere thirty six years later the picture is dramatically different. According to the 2015 US Census estimate, non-Hispanic whites make up only 53.9% of the population. The African-American population makes a up slightly larger percentage of the population – I assume descendants of the early 20th Great Migration returning to the state. The same year Hispanics made up 9.4% of the population, Asian-Americans made up 4% and the remainder is made up of citizens who identified as being of multiple races or ‘other’. If you identify politically and culturally with your whiteness this is a profound and profoundly unsettling change.
If you look at the Georgia Republican primary this year, Trump won the overwhelming number of counties. But if you look at the percentages, he did best in counties with the lowest median incomes and those with relatively low percentages of white voters. (Of course, the GOP electorates were overwhelmingly white basically everywhere.)
One of the best and most frequently cited arguments against those who see Trumpism as driven by economic insecurity and globalization is: if that’s the case, why does he get basically no support outside of the white community since non-whites are at least as economically stressed as whites and in most cases far more so? The best rebuttal is that if you’re pushing a politics about globalization and declining economic opportunity which scapegoats non-whites as the source of the problem, of course you’re not going to get a lot of traction with the people your scapegoating.
“In one of the most important counties in swing state Colorado, Donald Trump is relying on 12-year-old Weston Imer, who runs the Jefferson County operation for the Trump campaign,” KDVR-TV reports.
David Graham calls the conspiracies regarding Hillary Clinton’s health the “birtherism” of 2016:
The fact that there’s no evidence for serious ailments plaguing Clinton is not an impediment to these conspiracy theories; it’s essential to them. In the absence of evidence, campaign surrogates can espouse the theories on television and elsewhere, under the old guise of “just asking questions.” This is a favorite Trump trick. He doesn’t know whether Ted Cruz’s father was implicated in the Kennedy assassination, but he saw a story saying that in the National Enquirer and he’s just asking some questions. Or, to connect this back to the birther issue, Trump doesn’t know that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States, but there are some fishy things, and he’s just asking whether there’s any evidence he wasn’t. […]
Political tactics like this—there’s a delightfully filthy term for it—make for fun for operatives, and they can produce some mayhem, but they seldom win elections, especially at a national level. The birther movement reached a huge range of people; as recently as this month, a plurality of Republicans in an NBC News poll disagreed with the assertion that Obama was born in the United States. The movement may have greased the skids for Trump, too. But it didn’t have much luck stopping Obama, who won two terms.
“Donald Trump is teetering on the brink of a historic defeat, but Republican National Committee officials are poised to reward the party’s chairman Reince Priebus with another term,” Politico reports.
“Priebus is soliciting support for January’s chairmanship election — leaving some insiders with the impression that he is preparing for a future with the party after a Trump loss.”
Hysterical.
Eugene Robinson’s write-up of Trump’s latest failed “pivot”:
Donald Trump’s “pivot,” desperately hoped for by sane Republicans, was over before it began. He couldn’t pretend to be inclusive and statesmanlike for two days in a row if his life depended on it. […]
Poor [campaign manager] Conway had better get used to explaining what her candidate must have meant as opposed to what he actually said. She also should get accustomed to the fact that Trump will frequently make her into a liar. “He doesn’t hurl personal insults,” she said Sunday — but then Trump took to Twitter. Within hours, he had slung a personal insult at a regular guest on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” (not me). And Monday morning, he lobbed even nastier personal insults at the show’s co-hosts. Whatever, Donald.
Trump’s pivot turned out to be a 360-degree pirouette: back into the mud, where he feels most at home.
I’ve said it before: Trump is not going to change. No matter how many times he reshuffles his campaign, he is who he is. It’s delusional to pretend otherwise.
“Trump nearly quintupled the monthly rent his presidential campaign pays for its headquarters at Trump Tower to $169,758 in July, when he was raising funds from donors, compared with March, when he was self-funding his campaign, according to a Huffington Post review of Federal Election Commission filings. The rent jumped even though he was paying fewer staff in July than he did in March.”
Politico: “By hiring Breitbart’s Steve Bannon, a media provocateur in his own image, and accepting the resignation of the man who was supposed to professionalize him, Trump is signaling the final 78 days of his presidential campaign will be guided by a staff that indulges his deeply held conspiracy theories and validates his hermetically sealed worldview.”
“That includes his insistence that the only way he loses is in a “rigged” election. According to two long-time Trump associates, the notion of a fixed election isn’t just viewed as smart politics inside Trump Tower; it’s something the GOP nominee believes.”
“Democrats are starting to fight about what they want Hillary Clinton’s win to look like: Play it safe and focus on beating Donald Trump in the states that will decide the election, or try to run up the score and clobber him?,” Politico reports.
“For strategists preparing for the final phase of the campaign, this is a question of how to allocate money, staff, attention and operations. But it’s really a question of confidence and appetite for risk. Democrats looking at good polls now are torn between being nervous they’ll regret going big and nervous that they’ll regret not going big.”
Clobber him.
A new National Association of Business Economics survey finds that 55% of professional economists said they believe Hillary Clinton would be the best choice to oversee the U.S. economy as president.
Donald Trump had just 14% support, behind Libertarian Gary Johnson (15%) and “Don’t Know/No Opinion” (15%).
“I’m a journalist.”
— Sean Hannity, on Fox News in 2008.
“I never claimed to be a journalist.”
— Hannity, quoted by the New York Times on how he’s been advising Donald Trump.