Delaware Liberal

Open Thread for Monday, October 10, 2016

Delaware Dem

This set of polls was conducted pre-debate and pre-sexual assault confession tape. I will let you know when they start to reflect reaction to the tape and the debate.

PRESIDENT
NATIONAL–Economist/YouGov–CLINTON 48, Trump 43
OHIO–CBS News/YouGov–CLINTON 46, Trump 42
WISCONSIN–CBS News/YouGov–CLINTON 43, Trump 39
IOWA–Des Moines Register–TRUMP 43, Clinton 39
FLORIDA–NBC/WSJ/Marist–CLINTON 45, Trump 42
PENNSYLVANIA–NBC/WSJ/Marist–CLINTON 49, Trump 37
PENNSYLVANIA–CBS News/YouGov–CLINTON 48, Trump 40
OHIO–TargetSmart–CLINTON 46, Trump 42
ALASKA–Alaska Survey Research–TRUMP 36, Clinton 31
VIRGINIA–Hampton University–CLINTON 46, Trump 34

Dan Balz: “What occurred here on Sunday is likely to be remembered as the Spectacle in St. Louis: a presidential debate wrapped inside a sordid and unfolding series of events that have left Trump isolated, defiant and politically wounded, his Republican Party at war with itself and the country caught up in a campaign that has left issues and even moderately civil debate far behind, almost an afterthought.”

Jonathan Chait: “To Republicans whose beliefs have been shaped through exposure to the Drudge Report, Breitbart, Fox News, or Rush Limbaugh, every word that escaped his lips was simple truths. Hillary Clinton cited the Republican officials who have called him unfit for office, trying to use the prestige of the Republican Party against him. Trump used his time to show that he is the Republican Party.”

Ezra Klein: “At Sunday’s debate, Donald Trump revealed that he is not running to be America’s president so much as its dictator.”

Andrew Sullivan: “I’m horrified to say that Trump will survive this, even though he absolutely shouldn’t. I suspect this performance will prevent a total meltdown in his campaign. His Breitbart-style attacks on Clinton will have riled up his base… He’s a disgrace and a national embarrassment.”

Taegan Goddard: “Trump was completely unprepared. His body language was terrible. He showed he doesn’t even know how a bill becomes a law. He admitted he hasn’t paid federal income taxes for years — and that won’t the headline from tonight.

Considering that backdrop, Clinton did a decent job. She was very smart to stick to audience questions and try to understand their concerns. Rather than needle Trump as she did in the first debate, she mostly tried to ignore him.

Clinton wasn’t perfect. Her answer on her emails was extremely weak. She left many of Trump’s attacks unanswered. But there’s only one candidate seriously running for president at this point. She won the debate hands down. It’s hard to imagine Trump won over even a single voter tonight.”

Alexander Burns: “Mr. Trump’s defiant performance may not stabilize his candidacy, but it will likely put to rest frenzied speculation over the weekend that he might be forced from the presidential race. Facing abandonment by dozens of important Republican officials, he bucked calls to withdraw and instead offered a performance his core supporters will cheer loudly.”

“His rhetoric was stocked with buzzwords that will gratify the party base: Benghazi. Sidney Blumenthal. Deplorables. Radical Islam.”

Byron York: “You can make a good argument that Donald Trump won the second presidential debate with Hillary Clinton. You could also argue that no one won. But it’s probably beyond dispute that Trump’s performance will shut down Republican defections from his struggling campaign, at least for now.”

Nate Cohn: “Many commentators argued that Mr. Trump held his own Sunday night; some argued he won the debate outright. And his tactics — intentionally or not — probably made it harder for the Republican establishment to abandon him.”

“House Speaker Paul Ryan has discussed withdrawing his endorsement of Donald Trump, according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions within his inner circle,” Politico reports.

“Ryan is gathering House Republicans on a conference call Monday morning at 11 a.m.”

“No decision has been made. But that the speaker of the House has even mulled abandoning his own party’s presidential nominee is illustrative of the extraordinarily bizarre political climate in the Republican Party.”

A YouGov survey also found Clinton the winner, 47% to 42%.

Vox’s winners and losers from last night’s debate:

Winners: Hillary Clinton, Anderson Cooper and Martha Raddatz, Bashar al-Assad

Clinton had one task in the debate: Do no harm. She’s ahead in the polls. Trump just got hit with the worst scandal of the campaign so far. His elite Republican support is rapidly abandoning him. She just needs to not screw it up and let Trump continue to dig his own grave. She did that, and then some. She continued her effective strategy from the first debate of maintaining total discipline: never interrupting, never raising her voice, never getting remotely agitated. The point is to draw a contrast from Trump’s constantly flaring temper and clear inability to abide by basic debate rules, and it was effective.

Losers: Donald Trump, Fact-checking

There is no better illustration of the soft bigotry of low expectations than the fact that several smart, normally spot-on political observers saw the same debate as everyone else and declared that Donald Trump won. And in some narrow stylistic sense, he did bring more energy and confidence than he did in his weak first debate.

But fundamentally, this was a debate that spent much if not most of its running time focused on two themes: (a) Donald Trump is a lecherous, potentially abusive threat to women and (b) Donald Trump is a skeevy tax-evader. Neither of those are good looks for him. It’s like if Hillary Clinton got to personally set the agenda for the debate, except the agenda was set by Trump’s own, recently revealed actions. […]

But the fact of the matter is that Trump was losing even before the tape came out, and even if the saga ends now, the tape release could very possibly cause permanent damage all the same. The issue from an electoral standpoint always had less to do with elite Republican opinion and more to do with the possibility that the comments could depress Republican turnout, especially among women. That could still be true. And even if it isn’t, Trump was behind to start.

Trump needs to do something dramatic to shift the odds of the election in his favor over the next month or so, and he’s running out of time. One could’ve imagined a truly stellar debate performance that did that. This wasn’t it.

Chris Cillizza’s Winners (Hillary Clinton, Martha Raddatz) and Losers (Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Bill Clinton)

Clinton had more to work with in terms of negative hits on Trump in this debate than she did when the candidates met last month. And she did less with it than she did in the first debate. This debate was focused far more on Clinton than Trump — particularly in the final hour or so. Clinton’s answer on her email server was meh and her Abraham Lincoln defense on her speeches to Wall Street was ridiculous. So, how is she a winner? Because Clinton went into this debate with massive momentum in the race — much of it caused by Trump’s stumbles — and didn’t make any sort of glaring error that would allow the Republican back into the contest. She was steady, knowledgeable and pleasant — even in the face of some very personal attacks — throughout. And she let Trump talk, which, as has been the case since he got into the race, is always his undoing.

Josh Marshall:

I don’t think we can discuss this debate as citizens, take stock of it as a country, without noting that this is certainly the first time one candidate has openly threatened to jail the other candidate. Trump said openly that he would instruct the Justice Department to open a new investigation of Clinton and that he’d make sure it ended with her imprisonment. That’s something we expect it kleptocracies and thin democracies where electoral defeat can mean exile, imprisonment or death.

Such a ferocious claim, one that puts our whole constitutional order on its head, is not something that can be easily undone. That’s the ranting threat of a would-be strongman and dictator The threat itself is like a bell that can’t be un-rung. Through the course of what was often an ugly debate, I was thinking a lot of the destructiveness of this entire campaign, virtually all of which stems from Trump’s transgressive, norm-demolishing behavior. It’s a topic we’ll have to return to in the ed blog and one the country is going to need to wrestle with. None of this is going to disappear after November 8th. These are slashing wounds to the country’s political fabric that will at best leave tremendous scar tissue we’ll still see for decades. […]

With all that, my big picture sense is that Trump did significantly better than he did in the first debate. To the extent that one can evaluate these things in win or lose terms, on points, I’d say it was maybe a draw. But the only real measure is what it means for the outcome of the race. By that measure, a draw is a Clinton win. Because Clinton is significantly ahead of Trump with 30 days to go and his party is in the midst of abandoning him. I suspect Trump probably at least partly arrested or at least slowed the run of denunciations within his own party. But Trump needs to shake up the race in a big way or he’s on the way to losing. He clearly did not do that. That’s the only measure that matters. By that measure, it was Clinton’s night.

E.J. Dionne at The Washington Post writes—A vicious presidential debate

The most substantively shocking moment in the debate came early on. Speaking of Trump’s instability and untrustworthiness, Clinton said: “It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country,” Clinton said.

Trump immediately shot back: “Because you’d be in jail.”

Nothing could have done more to reinforce fears of Trump as a dangerously authoritarian figure.

Friday’s video almost certainly ended any chance Trump has of becoming president. Clinton understood this and acted accordingly, believing that Trump would do her work for her. He largely did. Trump’s desire to fight back ferociously kept him in the race but left him badly wounded and made some of the wounds deeper. He was thus more dangerous to his party after the debate than he was before it began.

Richard Wolffe at The Guardian writes—The nicest thing you could say about Trump’s performance was that it was bonkers:

That banging sound you heard were the last nails being hammered into the coffin of the Trump campaign. Or it might have been the thumping of Donald Trump as he stalked the debate stage. […]

He prowled around Hillary Clinton, looming behind her when she approached the undecided voters in the audience. He hugged himself and hooked his hands in his belt. He inhaled so sharply through his nose that he sounded like he was snorting his own insults.

Wounded animals behave in strange ways, and Donald Trump was nothing if not strange at the second presidential debate. He went far beyond barking his usual interruptions and conspiracies from the darkest corners of the internet: he answered a question from a Muslim voter by saying it was “a shame” there was Islamophobia. Then, two feet away from his questioner, he stoked Islamophobia as much as he possibly could: “We could be very politically correct, but whether we like it or not, there is a problem.”

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