Delaware Liberal

The October 24, 2016 Thread

Delaware Dem

PRESIDENT
NATIONAL–ABC News/Washington Post–CLINTON 50, Trump 38
TEXAS–CBS News/YouGov–TRUMP 46, Clinton 43
FLORIDA–CBS News/YouGov–CLINTON 46, Trump 43
FLORIDA–Reuters/Ipsos–CLINTON 48, Trump 44
MAINE–Reuters/Ipsos–CLINTON 48, Trump 39
VIRGINIA–Reuters/Ipsos–CLINTON 49, Trump 37
MINNESOTA–Reuters/Ipsos–CLINTON 44, Trump 32
PENNSYLVANIA–Reuters/Ipsos–CLINTON 49, Trump 39
NORTH CAROLINA–Reuters/Ipsos–CLINTON 47, Trump43

James Hohmann: “Clinton has spent the past few months trying to frame the election as a referendum on him. She’s succeeded, in part, because Trump’s favorite thing to talk about is, well, Trump. And he takes everything personally. Trump started his answer on the Supreme Court vacancy, for example, by noting that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said nasty things about him and claiming that she was ‘forced to apologize.’”

Maureen Dowd: “In Trump’s warped fun-house mirror of a psyche, every rejection is a small death. That is why he harps on humiliation, that America is being humiliated on the world stage … He gets so easily distracted by belittling statements … that he could not focus to make points in areas where Hillary is vulnerable. In order to stop losing, he would have to stop losing it.”

The Republican Party is f*cked. Look, Donald Trump is going to lose, most likely in historic Barry Goldwater fashion. But he is not going to go away.

A new Bloomberg poll shows 51% of Republican voters say Trump’s view better matches their own of what GOP should stand for while just 33% think Paul Ryan’s does. If Trump loses, 38% of his supporters say they’ll stay loyal to and follow him. Another 33% say they’ll follow him for a while but think they’ll eventually lose interest.

Even more interesting is who Republicans see as the next face of the Republican party. Nearly a quarter think it will still be Trump, while slightly more think it will be his running mate, Gov. Mike Pence.

“The third and final debate Wednesday marked the beginning of the end of a presidential race that most Republican leaders cannot wait to forget. But the party’s Donald Trump-driven divisions will not cease on election night,” the Washington Post reports.

“The axis of furious conservative activists and hard-right media that spawned Trump’s nationalist and conspiratorial campaign is determined to complete its hostile takeover of the GOP, win or lose.”

Matt Yglesias writes that the new silent majority is the opposite of the one Nixon talked about. While Trump voters and Bernie Millenials get all the press, the silent majority that is Hillary’s voters are going to win.

In 1972, Nixon’s silent majority, grounded firmly in the white working class, delivered a smashing victory for the GOP, dashing the hopes of George McGovern supporters that a new coalition of young white professionals and racial minorities could upend American politics. Forty-four years later, America is facing another silent majority election — one in which the story has been all about Trump’s supporters but the victory will go to Clinton’s…

Clinton led in the Democratic primary from the first day to the last, and has consistently led in general election polling since the beginning of the campaign. Yet the Clinton voter has not made the same kind of impression on the media, in part because the new silent majority voter offers less visible evidence of being fired up and the new silent majority’s signature politicians — Clinton and Obama — do not do grand performance of anger, even at a time when rage is all the rage in American politics.

To that end, the Democratic political data firm TargetSmart reports that we’ve already reached one political milestone in this election that is being shaped by that new silent majority.

The 2016 campaign may have reached dispiriting new lows, but voter registration in America has soared to new heights as 200 million people are now registered to vote for the first time in U.S. history.

The milestone is a sign of the aggressive voter registration efforts ahead of Nov. 8 and a symptom of the fast-growing and demographically shifting electorate that is expected to redound to the benefit of the Democratic Party in the coming years…

The figure means more than 50 million new people have registered to vote in the past eight years. Only 146.3 million were registered as recently as 2008, when then-Sen. Barack Obama first won the White House — a remarkable 33 percent surge in the electorate during a single presidency…

Overall, TargetSmart found that 42.6 percent of the new voters registered this year lean Democratic, and only 29 percent lean Republican (28.4 percent lean independent).

Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post on the fallout for Trump after the Al Smith Dinner Disaster:

And so, it’s no surprise that Trump (a) didn’t feel comfortable in the room last night and (b) didn’t get a very warm reception from the crowd. It was, quite literally, not his people. For all of the ostentatious wealth and the braggadocio, Trump knows that these people don’t like him and have never accepted him.

My guess is that Trump’s reaction on the campaign trail in the wake of the Al Smith dinner will be even more aggressive and anti-elite than it was going into last night. Trump is an able reader of crowds; he will know that they were laughing/booing at him. And, if it’s anything like what happened in the wake of the 2011 White House correspondents’ dinner, he will use his own resentment to drive him in the final 18 days of this race.

In short: Last night was ugly. On the trail, it’s likely to get even uglier.

And it did, with him devoting the first 100 days of his hypothetical Presidency to suing all the women he assaulted.

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign “has built a field team in swing-states across the country that is larger than a U.S. Army brigade, giving her a huge advantage over Republican Donald Trump on Election Day,” The Hill reports.

“Between Clinton’s presidential campaign, the Democratic National Committee and state party operations, campaign finance reports show Democrats employ 5,138 staffers across 15 battleground states… By contrast, Trump’s campaign, the Republican National Committee and state parties employ just 1,409 staffers in 16 states.”

Taegan Goddard says a Democratic Wave may be forming:

[T]he biggest factor may be a demoralized Republican party. With no hope of defeating Hillary Clinton and growing disgust over their own nominee, many Republicans may not even bother to vote.

The early evidence is striking. Last week’s ABC/Washington Post poll found a sharp 12-point decline in enthusiasm for Trump among his supporters. The latest poll shows intended participation of these voters has followed: The share of registered Republicans who are likely to vote is down 7 points since mid-October.

Trump’s own defeatist rhetoric over a “rigged” election may also be backfiring. Why participate in an election if you believe the outcome is predetermined?

At the same time, Clinton is shifting her attention to downballot races.

President Obama “will make a late splash into races for state senate and assembly over the next week, endorsing roughly 150 candidates across 20 states,” Politico reports.

“The endorsements—which will come along with a variety of robocalls, social media, mailers, photos of Obama with the candidates taken as he’s been traveling to campaign in recent weeks, and even a few radio ads—are Obama’s biggest investment in state races ever by far, and come as he gears up to make redistricting reform at the state level the political priority of his post-presidency.”

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