Delaware Liberal

Open Thread for Saturday, October 1, 2016

Delaware Dem

PRESIDENT
NATIONAL——Fox News——CLINTON 49, Trump 44
NATIONAL——The Times-Picayune/Lucid Tracking——CLINTON 45, Trump 35
NEVADA——Suffolk——CLINTON 44, Trump 38

All the polls since the debate have shown a Clinton debate bounce. Nate Silver tweets: “Starting to get some high-quality state polls. They suggest Clinton’s in a considerably better position post-debate.”

Donald Trump has a sex tape. I will wait until you stop projectile vomitting.

“Donald Trump made an appearance in an explicit 2000 Playboy video,” BuzzFeed reports. “Trump’s role in the porn is relatively benign and centers around him breaking a bottle of champagne on a Playboy-branded limo while several of the playmates are visiting New York City.”

Hillary is on fire!

The San Diego Union-Tribune has endorsed Republicans for president from 1868 through 2012, but today they backed Hillary Clinton.

Vengeful, dishonest and impulsive, Trump is no Romney. This is why Hillary Clinton is the safest candidate for voters to choose in a complex world. Terrible leaders can knock nations off course. Venezuela is falling apart because of the obstinance and delusions of Hugo Chávez and his successor. Argentina is finally coming out of the chaos created by Cristina Kirchner and several of her predecessors. Trump could be our Chávez, our Kirchner. We cannot take that risk.

The only publication in America that has endorsed Donald Trump is the National Enquirer.

Jason gets his wish. “As the last full month of this presidential contest begins, Hillary Clinton is shifting toward a pure base-turnout strategy, inching away from her all-out effort to lure disaffected Republicans in favor of a traditional get-Democrats-to-the-polls effort that mirrors Barack Obama’s 2012 game-plan,” Politico reports.

“Gone are Clinton’s regular references to winning over moderate conservatives and her sly allusions to GOP leaders meant to give defecting Republicans a framework for abandoning their nominee. With 39 days to go, Brooklyn headquarters and battleground state operatives are activating the massive surrogate machinery, a heavy early voting push, and a large-scale registration offensive they think they need to secure a win in November.”

Joan Walsh does a great job of explaining why Donald Trump is having a meltdown.

It’s no accident that three of Trump’s victims – Machado, the Khan family, and Judge Gonzalo Curiel – are not white. Hostility to minorities is the animating energy of the campaign. But the candidate’s derangement over Machado surpasses his prior breakdowns – for a good reason. A woman he once controlled, quite literally – making her exercise in front of the media, to prove she was taking his demands to lose weight seriously – is defying him publicly. Another woman, Hillary Clinton, refused to slink into obscurity after her husband humiliated her (last year Trump shared a fan’s tweet asking, “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?”) and is currently leading him in the race for the presidency.

Josh Marshall makes a similar point.

Trump hit a brick wall in Monday night’s debate. He didn’t prepare. It took Hillary Clinton, a woman he’d spent weeks calling frail and weak, only 15 or 20 minutes to knock him off stride and reduce him to a defensive posture for the rest of the debate…She dominated him in front of more than 80 million people. His inability to contain or damage her kept him angry and unfocused, flailing through the encounter…

For Trump, Machado must be like a terrifying nightmare: a strong, beautiful Latina, draped in an American flag, who is intent on hurting him but who he is incapable of injuring.

…The sum of all these facts – the debate defeat, the fight with Machado, the faltering polls – seem to be propelling Trump into a new rage spiral, rooted in narcissistic injuries, seemingly catalyzing itself, reinforcing itself in spiraling cycles of rage and self-injury.

Rick Klein: “How has Donald Trump gone through three campaign managers without anyone being able to lock him out of his Twitter account? Or at least overnight – or change the password on his smart phone? Trump has redefined the ability to dominate a news cycle with a Tweet. But, as always, that cuts in both directions. Does Trump really want to spend another news cycle on his feud with the former Miss Universe? He’s now calling her ‘disgusting,’ and is urging followers to check out her ‘sex tape and past’ Is that the way to get past a rough debate night? Every passing day has brought more Trump complaints about that debate. The days have also revealed the brilliance of Hillary Clinton’s debate gambits. She set traps that snapped so hard that they continue to reverberate, right through her opponent’s Tweets.”

Matt Yglesias says its time to dispense with the notion that Donald Trump knows what he’s doing.

To make a long story short, Donald Trump is the GOP nominee in a year when a generic Republican would be favored to beat a generic Democrat. Rather than running against a generic Democrat, he is running against an unusually unpopular Democrat. And he is losing.

That’s not good.

Of course, the mere fact that Trump’s overall campaign is ineffective doesn’t mean that every particular choice he makes is bad. But it does mean that there’s no particular reason to give him the benefit of the doubt. The big lesson of the 2016 campaign is that the fundamentals matter a lot. The electorate is polarized, and so even a really bad candidate has a high floor.

Clinton has major weaknesses in terms of weak economic growth and voter fatigue with Democratic Party leadership (manifesting in 2016 largely in millennial disaffection with Clinton, even as young voters eschew Trump). These factors keep Trump perennially within striking distance; it’s a very winnable election for him. But instead of winning, he is losing. And he has been consistently losing, because he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Steven A. Holmes explores “The truth about the white working class: A mosaic of their own” at CNN Politics, and notes “While support for Trump is relatively strong across the board among working-class whites, there are significant differences among different groups…Men over the age of 50 are among the Republican nominee’s strongest backers with 68% of voters in this group saying they would consider voting for him, compared to 51% of women who are 50 years or older…Rural (68%), suburban (66%) and Southern (70%) working-class white voters voice support for Trump in larger numbers than urban dwellers (49%) and those living in the West (54%) and Midwest (53%). And 78% of working-class white voters surveyed who say immigrants are a burden on the country say they would consider voting for him, compared to 38% who of those who believe immigrants strengthen the country.”

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