Delaware Liberal

Open Thread for Saturday, September 17, 2016

Delaware Dem

Josh Marshall gives us all a chill pill:

News Events Can Dramatically Affect Enthusiasm. Clinton has come off an awful few weeks. She took a bunch of days off the campaign trail for fundraisers. Then she had a media storm with “deplorables”, then she collapses on camera, was diagnosed with pneumonia and then spent three or four days totally off camera and off the campaign trail. These events may hurt Clinton. They may damage her campaign fatally. But a more likely explanation of the rapid shift in the polls is that they sharply demoralized her supporters and shook free her least committed supporters. That shows up in likely voter models; it leads to differential poll response. This does not mean the polls are wrong. It means they are accurately measuring the effect of those events. But there is good reason to think that it may be ephemeral because it is more as much a shift in enthusiasm and engagement than opinion. (We’ve even noticed a significant drop in TPM traffic since Clinton’s fainting spell. We’ve seen this happen before when our readers think the news sucks and some just tune out. No, I’m not basing this theory on TPM’s traffic. I just think it’s part of a common phenomenon.)

This is a real phenomenon. I have suffered from it. But yesterday was a good day for Hillary, as was Thursday. The trend will be ticking back our way now.

Markos looks at the polling averages, which show that Hillary’s convention bounce is gone but she still has a solid lead.

Trump is running into the same problem Mitt Romney had in 2012, which is the same problem every Republican candidate will have until they stop making so many demographic enemies—his current levels of support are so low, getting to 50 becomes a monumentally difficult task.

Nationally, Trump is at 43. Add Libertarian Gary Johnson, and Trump falls to 39 percent.

Trump doesn’t even break 40 percent in Colorado (38 percent), Michigan (36 percent), New Hampshire (37 percent), Pennsylvania (38 percent), Virginia (38 percent), and Wisconsin (38 percent). Actually, Romney was at least in the low 40s in those states, so Trump is further behind than the last Republican loser.

Or put another way, Trump can barely muster a third of the electorate in many key battleground states.

In fact, the only battleground states he breaks 45 percent are Arizona (48 percent) and … that’s it. Arizona. Still, Republicans can be heartened that he’s above that mark in Kansas (48 percent), South Carolina (46 percent), and Texas (48 percent). Not Utah, though. He’s at 36 percent in Utah. (Clinton is at 27 percent.) But he won’t lose too many traditionally Republican Red states.

I’m still not worried about Nevada. Pollsters can’t capture the state’s Latino population, and it always comes back Bluer than the polling. Remember, Harry Reid was supposed to lose six years ago. Iowa, on the other hand, looks to be the one Obama state in real threat of switching sides.

The Washington Post‘s David Fahrenthold sent this to Donald Trump’s campaign:

I noted that today Mr. Trump said he believes President Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate is legitimate. That makes this a story for me now: Can you provide details of where and when he will donate the $5 million Mr. Trump promised to give to charity?

And as if on cue…

Matt Yglesias:

Did he “joke” about someone shooting Clinton as part of a deliberate effort to rile people up and distract attention from the birther controversy or the fact that his economic plan makes no sense? Or did he do it because he’s just entirely out of control? When journalists draw attention to things like an irresponsible joke that will possible end up inspiring political violence with tragic consequences, are we playing into his hands?

He is a sociopath. People need to stop rationalizing his behavior.

Matt Taibbi: “No doubt about it, the country is in a brutal spot right now. We are less than two months from the possibility of one of the dumbest people on the planet winning the White House. And it seems that all anyone’s talked about this week, whether around the water cooler or on TV news, Twitter or Facebook, is the lung capacity of Hillary Clinton.”

“That sucks. But it’s not all the media’s fault. This is classic horse-race stuff, and if you’re getting it, it’s at least in part because you spent decades asking for it.”

“The campaign has devolved over time into an entertainment program, a degrading and vicious show where the contestants win the nuclear launch codes instead of a date with a millionaire. Under the rules of this reality series which media consumers turn into a gigantic hit every four years, collapsing in front of a cell-phone camera at a 9/11 memorial service is more important than a dozen position papers.”

“It just is. You proved it when you clicked on that video of the episode last weekend and didn’t read a compare-and-contrast piece on, for instance, the candidates’ banking policies.”

Gary Johnson and Jill Stein have missed the cut for the first presidential debate, The Hill reports.

The Commission on Presidential Debates announced that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the only presidential candidates who will participate in the first debates.

Good.


Josh Marshall says Trump was introduced today at this anti-birther speech by a Birther:

At the peak of birtherism, you may remember, an Army lieutenant colonel refused to deploy to Afghanistan absent proof that President Obama was born in the United States. The officer, a doctor named Terrence Lakin, was court-martialed, found guilty, jailed, and discharged from the Army.

One of Donald Trump’s introducers today at the new Trump Hotel, was a retired Air Force general who supported Lakin. He even submitted an affidavit on his behalf, questioning whether Obama was properly within the chain of command, since his U.S. birth was in question.

Eric Levitz says maybe it is still the Economy, stupid:

Clinton went from winning the economic debate by two points, to losing it by 15. Considering the fact that “the economy” is the electorate’s number-one concern, this seems like a shift worth dwelling on.

While Clinton has put forward a robust economic agenda, much of her messaging has directed attention away from it: You can’t make a full-throated case for a progressive economic vision and insist that this election is about “more” than left versus right. The second argument inevitably crowds out the first. How much moral urgency can you put into your case for expanding social welfare, while still casting Paul Ryan — a man who has worked tirelessly to cut nutritional benefits to needy children — as a kind of honorable public servant? Forced to choose between conveying a clear ideological message and courting the broadest possible coalition against Trump, Clinton opted for the latter.

This made some sense when Clinton was leading by 10 points, and looking to engineer a landslide. It makes less sense today. Especially since the center-left’s agenda is, on paper, way more popular than Trumponomics.

More than 60 percent of Americans believe the rich should pay higher taxes. Same for raising the federal minimum wage. And while polling data is limited, evidence strongly suggests that expanding Social Security is a big winner for Democrats. At the very least, tying Trump to his party’s affinity for Social Security cuts couldn’t hurt: More than two-thirds of Republicans don’t want to see benefits reduced. Similarly, there is little appetite among voters of either party for deregulating the finance industry. And yet, the GOP nominee has committed himself to doing just that.

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