Open Thread for Sunday, October 9, 2016

Trump supporters singing national anthem in the pouring rain, many have now left for the night pic.twitter.com/d3LsA0DgnX

— Chris Snyder (@ChrisSnyderFox) October 8, 2016

Taegan Goddard says the House is now in play.

The bombshell video in which Trump brags about sexual assault forces every Republican candidate to take a stand on Trump. They can either denounce Trump or rescind their endorsements of him. But Republican candidates are in a no-win situation. If they withdraw their endorsements, they risk losing the GOP base that supports Trump. If they continue to endorse him, they risk losing swing voters. Trump has already pushed away many independent and suburban women who are never coming back. The potentially bigger impact of the Trump video is that it will convince many Republicans the election is lost. Turnout of GOP voters may plummet. Many Republicans already thought Trump was going to lose, but if it were close enough the downballot races wouldn’t suffer. Those hopes are blown if Republican voters stay home.

And if Trump withdraws or is somehow removed as nominee, you think Trump voters are turning out? LOL. No. And all these defections from establishment Republicans like John McCain and Condi Rice and Jeb Bush are already pissing off the Trump voter, otherwise known as the Republican base. For example:

Just an incredibly tense scene here at (lol) Fall Fest. Trump supporters heckling GOP speakers, who then reprimand them from the stage.

— McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) October 8, 2016

Heck is getting booed as he says Trump should step down. "I'm so disappointed in you," one yells.
This is what the Republicans have wrought.

— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) October 8, 2016

In case you were wondering:

Trump, under pressure, tells the WSJ ‘zero chance I’ll quit’ and ‘support I’m getting is unbelievable’

And he backed it up with an unhinged tweet:

The media and establishment want me out of the race so badly – I WILL NEVER DROP OUT OF THE RACE, WILL NEVER LET MY SUPPORTERS DOWN! #MAGA

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 8, 2016

John Avalon says Donald Trump just lost the election:

“I’m usually reluctant to play the pundit-prediction game but Independent and Republican women aren’t going to bounce back from this one. Not when the GOP nominee is caught on tape talking about hitting on a married woman ‘with big phony tits’ ‘like a bitch’ and how part of his M.O. is ‘grabbing pussy’ because ‘when you’re a star’ ‘you can do anything.’”

“This entire campaign has been an exercise of the electorate being slowly simmered in a pot of boiling water, losing our sense of outrage amid a steady of onslaught insults and lies. But sex and cruelty resonates in a way that financial scandals or demagoguery just don’t.”

“Character is what you do when nobody’s looking. And this video captures Trump in the middle of day, sober, a few months after being married, talking with a man he barely knows, bragging about sexual assault, while wearing a microphone.”

“When it rains it pours. But, this race was over long before Friday night.” — GOP pollster Robert Blizzard, on Twitter.

As long as Trump stays in, he has the possibility, in his mind, of redemption. If he drops out, he is forever a disgrace.

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) October 8, 2016

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) withdrew his support from Donald Trump in the wake of leaked tapes of Trump making lewd comments about groping women in 2005, Politico reports.

Said McCain: “Donald Trump’s behavior this week, concluding with the disclosure of his demeaning comments about women and his boasts about sexual assaults, make it impossible to continue to offer even conditional support for his candidacy.”

There are now 19 Republican U.S. Senators who either called for Trump to step down or said they won’t vote for him

Josh Marshall on Republicans being surprised and shocked and clutching their pearls now:

We can’t say the emergence of this tape was predictable. But the behavior is not at all surprising based on what we already knew. Indeed, I would almost say this whole line of reasoning is offensive, in this sense: Sexual assault is terrible. But it’s hardly the only terrible thing that has been dredged up by this election. What about the campaigns of hate and occasional violence spurred by this campaign? Just yesterday I wrote about how Trump has done more to normalize anti-Semitism in American public life than anyone in decades. I wrote about this because it is something I know from personal experience. But Trump’s entire campaign has been explicitly about demonizing Hispanics and American Muslims – subjecting them to escalating campaigns of hate, harassment and in some cases actual violence. Meanwhile African-Americans have served as his stage props, sometimes being targeted with racist attacks and other times as powerless non-people who only Trump can save. Is all this stuff just a cost of doing business? Sexual assault and sexual violence of all sorts is one of the most pressing issues in our society today. But it is hard not to conclude that the revelation of this tape is considered a step too far because women are a critical demographic that is in play in the election and secondarily because the politicians have wives and daughters. Most of those wives and daughters aren’t black or Jews or Hispanic or Muslim or people from any of the other groups Trump has stepped on on his way to the nomination.

The institutional Republican party didn’t want Donald Trump. But they’ve been playing a dangerous, dangerous game since they were landed with him. Their reasoning has been that however bad he is, whatever he represents, they’ll work with him and embrace him because if he can become president they’ll get their Supreme Court nominees and a green light for their legislative goals. This is a dangerous, dangerous business. The American presidency is an extremely powerful office compared to most other modern democracies. It is in some ways a carryover from the somewhat limited monarchy the constitution-writers of the late 1780s knew from their experience as British subjects, only with more failsafes and limitations in place. The American president is limited on the domestic front. But he or she is close to regal in foreign and military affairs.

The institutional Republican party has endorsed and supported a dangerous man, enabling the damage he’s done during the campaign and leaving the country open to innumerable depredations should he become president. #NeverTrump ended up being a marginal reality, backed by only a few Republicans and virtually no officeholders. If this tape brings them around to some measure of responsibility later, wonderful. But this has been a game they’ve been playing for months with eyes wide open.

Jeff Stein shows us the math of how the House is in play now:

The House has long looked like impossible to flip because gerrymandering has given Republicans a fortress of extraordinarily safe seats. (In 2012, for instance, Democratic House candidates won 1.7 million more votes than their Republican foes — and still ended up with 33 fewer members of the House.) Democrats need to win 30 Republican-held seats to flip the House, and are widely expected to nab closer to 15.

But one political analyst I interviewed earlier this campaign thinks an epic Trump collapse might be enough to overcome that built-in advantage. Geoffrey Skelley, of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, argues that a Clinton victory of 6-points or more might be enough to put the House back in play.

Right now, the polling averages suggest Clinton is running around five points ahead of Trump. If she can use this Trump implosion to further increase her national lead, at least according to Skelley’s projections, she may give downballot Democratic allies a real chance at reclaiming Congress. And that would have huge consequences for the next two years American government.

Skelley’s math is rooted in a simple fact: If the Democratic presidential nominee wins a House district, the Democratic congressional candidate also probably win that House seat. This is not an ironclad rule, but it’s a pretty good indicator — in 2012, only 6 percent of districts that voted for Barack Obama voted a Republican into the House.

This is the key to understanding why Skelley thinks a 6-point Clinton win could put the House in play. That kind of national victory would likely mean 50 House districts currently controlled by Republicans would vote for Clinton — therefore suggesting they have a good shot of also going blue at the House level.

Not enough people get this, but the Clinton Camp has every voter IDed and modeled in the battleground states. Every voter. Think about that https://t.co/MSXripSLRI

— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) October 6, 2016

Mook claims re FL: “We are turning out more of our low-propensity voters than Republicans”

— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) October 6, 2016

Nate Silver says the bottom can drop out for Trump: “If Trump gets stuck at 40 percent of the vote, you could wind up with an outcome like Clinton 51 percent, Trump 40 percent, Gary Johnson 7 percent, Jill Stein and others 2 percent, or something of that nature. That is, a double-digit win for Clinton, which could potentially yield somewhere around 400 votes for her in the Electoral College, and make states as exotic as Texas and Alaska competitive.”

“That outcome might seem far-fetched. But in an election with high uncertainty, it shouldn’t be. Even before the “hot mic” tape, our model gave Clinton a 5 to 6 percentage point lead, and the error in the forecast is roughly symmetric. The polls could move by 5 or 6 points toward Trump, giving him a narrow win, or — equally likely, per our model — they could move by 5 or 6 points toward Clinton, giving her a double-digit margin. To put it another way, a Clinton landslide is no more far-fetched than a Trump victory — and given the events of the past 24 hours, probably less so.”

Sam Wang says all the GOP defections yesterday could cause a Democratic wave: “The insta-consensus among commentators is that somehow this event is a cause of Trump’s electoral doom. I think the logic is backwards – to me, the growing obviousness of his doom created an environment for this story to blow up. The genuinely new development is the impact for downticket – in both the Senate and the House.”

“Until now I thought the House was likely to remain Republican. But the fact that swing district Congresswoman Barbara Comstock has fled for the exit is an early indicator. If Trump is enough of an anchor, Democrats have an outside chance. However, at a minimum they need to win the national popular vote by 6-8%.”

Washington Post: “But Trump was still Trump. As his motorcade pulled into Denver’s Ritz-Carlton hotel for the night, Trump was in a fury. He lashed out at aides for booking such luxurious accommodations, saying he would have preferred to stay at a Holiday Inn Express — a chain he considers reliably clean — as he did on occasion during the primaries, according to three people familiar with the episode who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.”

“So it went throughout the rest of this week, as pressure mounted on Trump to rebound or risk losing to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in a landslide. Although Trump understood that he needed to improve his standing, he continued to boast behind the scenes about unscientific online polls showing he won the first debate.”

“Trump resisted suggestions from his advisers to practice exhaustively for the second debate, a town hall-style forum that will be held Sunday night in St. Louis. He flat-out refused to participate in mock sessions, saying such playacting was annoying.”

More Josh Marshall on the now joined GOP Civil War:

Over the last couple hours, Trump’s supporters are coming back into view. They reportedly heckled Paul Ryan at the event in Wisconsin where he was originally supposed to have shared the stage with Trump. The same apparently happened in Nevada with senate candidate Joe Heck. Joe Ralston says Heck was booed a short time ago as he told a crowd that Trump should step down. “I’m so disappointed in you,” yelled one angry Trumper.

This should hardly surprise us. The institutional GOP resisted Trump mightily. But he won anyway because he has a massive amount of support among the most engaged Republican voters. The last 24 hours has probably lost him significant support in the race against Hillary Clinton. Perhaps he’s fallen from the low 40s to the very high 30s. Just a guess. But in the context of intra-Republican politics that leaves him with massive levels of support intact. This is a pivot establishment Republicans tried to pull off at numerous points on the road to October. They were never able to do so. Indeed, realizing the scope of the challenge they essentially never tried. Despite the news of the last 24 hours, there’s little reason to believe they’ll be successful now. And by ‘successful’ I mean leading a party abandonment of Trump as opposed to ripping open a massive hemorrhage in the party just weeks before the election.

If any part of Trump was buckling or feeling he had to give way (which I think is unlikely), these boisterous voices claiming betrayal will stiffen his resolve. They will make him want to fight and convince him – correctly – that many are on his side. We haven’t seen the level of intra-party civil war that this looks like it might become at any time in recent political history. If it does it could radically alter what we’ve expected to see as the outcome of the 2016 election.

New York Times: “During a 90-second videotaped appearance, Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, offered a strikingly brief articulation of regret for a decade-old audiotape in which he boasted about grabbing women’s genitals and said he could have his way with women because of his fame.”

“But his real message, which appeared early Saturday, was one of defiance. He described the controversy that upended the Republican Party for most of Friday as a mere ‘distraction,’ and said that his vulgar remarks captured on the tape were nothing compared with the way Bill and Hillary Clinton had mistreated women.”

“If anything, Mr. Trump’s videotaped statement was a truncated version of a speech that he had given countless times. And it did not reflect the several hours of conference calls and strategy meetings among his top aides, who were at first stunned and then nearly paralyzed by the revelation of the tape, which they worried would be fatal to his White House hopes.”

John Harwood: “Trump, trailing Clinton by several percentage points nationally and in most battleground states, was on track to lose the election before disclosure of the tape. Republican confidence that he can close that gap and win has vanished as Trump approaches Sunday night’s second debate with Clinton in a severely-weakened position.”

“The principal question now is how many other Republicans go down with him. Democrats need to gain at least four seats to win back a Senate majority; their odds are good.”

Jonah Goldberg: “The grab them by the pussy video is the perfect October surprise two days before the debate, when early voting is really coming online, and when Trump’s Achille’s heel is his poor standing with moderate suburban college educated women. That is not a coincidence.”

“I can’t imagine what the Clinton campaign would be unloading if Trump were five points ahead.”

“Donald Trump is a fundamentally dishonorable and dishonest person – and has been his whole adult life. The evidence has been in front of those willing to see it all along. And there’s more to find. And there’s more in the Clinton stockpile.”

Nate Cohn: “You do not need a statistical model to know that Donald J. Trump is in a lot of trouble.”

“His chances were already in jeopardy heading into the second presidential debate Sunday. Hillary Clinton’s lead has grown steadily over the last two weeks, and she was ahead by five to six percentage points before a videotape revealed Mr. Trump bragging about groping women and getting away with it because he’s a celebrity.”

“Now it’s fair to wonder whether he’ll drag down the whole Republican Party.”