The November 6, 2016 Thread

NATIONAL–Reuters/Ipsos–CLINTON 44, Trump 40
NATIONAL–ABC Tracking–CLINTON 49, Trump 44

Key finding: “Even though both candidates are remarkably unpopular, there’s more affirmative voting for Clinton than for Trump, a factor that can motivate turnout. A majority of her supporters mainly support her, rather than opposing Trump. That’s pretty much reversed for Trump: 51 percent of his backers mainly oppose Clinton, rather than supporting him.”

OHIO–Columbus Dispatch–CLINTON 48, Trump 47

Clinton internals must have seen this. That is why they were there Friday. Robby Mook knows what he is doing. Hillary will win Ohio.

PENNSYLVANIA–Morning Call–CLINTON 48, Trump 42
IOWA–Des Moines Register/Selzer–TRUMP 46, Clinton 39
IOWA–Loras–CLINTON 44, Trump 43
WASHINGTON–SurveyUSA–CLINTON 50, Trump 38

“In a sign of momentum for Hillary Clinton, Florida Democrats widened their lead over Republicans in casting early ballots in the nation’s biggest political battleground Saturday morning as she and Donald Trump paid late-minute visits to the Sunshine State,” Politico reports.

“Hillary Clinton plans to return to Michigan on Monday, the final day of campaigning before Election Day, as her campaign seeks to lock down a traditionally Democratic state where the race has tightened,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The Clinton campaign is also sending its top surrogates to Michigan. Former President Bill Clinton, the candidate’s husband, is set to campaign in Lansing on Sunday and President Barack Obama is scheduled to hold a rally in Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan, on Monday. The campaign is now running paid TV ads in Michigan as well.”

“Donald Trump was rushed offstage by security guards not long after he began speaking on Saturday night at a rally in Reno, Nev., in a startling scene that was not immediately explained,” the New York Times reports.

“Two members of Mr. Trump’s security detail raced toward Mr. Trump, with one of them grabbing him and forcibly escorting him away from the lectern. Moments before, Mr. Trump had seemed to notice a commotion in the crowd in front of him. As he was led away, video from the event appeared to show people near the stage subduing someone in the audience.”

That someone is a Republican who is against Trump, who was trying to lift a sign. Scaredy cat coward Trump supporters yelled “GUN!” and then they all started to beat the man on the ground. The Trump campaign then tried to claim that it was an assassination attempt by a Hillary supporter.

Here's what happened to Austyn Crites, the man who raised a "Republicans Against Trump" sign & was detained after someone shouted "gun" pic.twitter.com/OG6FYtqIWn

— Jeremy Diamond (@JDiamond1) November 6, 2016

Nicholas Kristof says the “for Hillary” case is even better than the one “against Trump.”

I’ve known Clinton a bit for many years, and I have to say: The public perception of her seems to me a gross and inaccurate caricature. I don’t understand the venom, the “lock her up” chants, the assumption that she is a Lady Macbeth; it’s an echo of the animus a lifetime ago some felt for Eleanor Roosevelt. …

In fact, what makes Hillary Clinton tick has always been a 1960s-style idealism about making the world a better place.

In 1993, The New York Times Magazine published a famous article about Clinton titled “Saint Hillary,” mocking her as a befuddled do-gooder trying to help the unfortunate. The article ridiculed her as naïve, sanctimonious and incoherent, but it also captured something real about her earnestness and motivations.

In contrast, today’s widely held caricature of an avaricious, selfish and manipulative crook is to me just plain wrong. Sure, she compromises, she sometimes dissembles and at times her judgment has been flawed. But fundamentally she is a morally serious person whose passion for four decades has been to use politics to create a more just society. That’s her real conviction.

Jack Schlossberg (President Kennedy’s grandson) reminds us that voting is an action we can take pride in for a long time.

Four years ago, I went to the polls to cast my first vote. I knew that years later, I’d proudly tell a kid voting for the first time that when I was her age, I voted for Barack Obama.

For my entire life, people have come up to me and told me a story just like mine, except for them, it was 1960 and their first vote was for my grandfather, John F. Kennedy. These men and women came out in numbers to elect a man who challenged them to ask what they could do for their country, who called for bold leadership in science and space, who supported civil rights and who inspired millions to help change the world for the better. …

Every young person, in age or at heart, should realize that Hillary Clinton is our candidate and that we have a responsibility to each other to turn out and vote. Too much is wrong with our country, our world and our planet for any of us to stay home.

My closing argument against Trump. #NeverTrump | Tom Nichols: What Trump has already cost America https://t.co/vE8obA9acf

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) November 5, 2016

An online Twitter war broke out yesterday between Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post and Nate Silver at 538 over Grim’s article accusing Silver of this: “The short version is that Nate is changing the results of polls to fit where he thinks the polls truly are, rather than simply entering the poll numbers into his model and crunching them.”

“Silver calls this unskewing a ‘trend line adjustment.’ He compares a poll to previous polls conducted by the same polling firm, makes a series of assumptions, runs a regression analysis, and gets a new poll number. That’s the number he sticks in his model ― not the original number.”

“He may end up being right, but he’s just guessing. A ‘trend line adjustment’ is merely political punditry dressed up as sophisticated mathematical modeling.”

Whatever. Silver’s model is just one data point. He is not God. I think his model is wrong this year (he still has Nevada and Florida going Republican against all early vote evidence). But so what. If he is wrong, he alone will bear the consequences on election night and thereafter. No need for a flame war on Twitter.

Político writer tells MSNBC that Trump has stopped polling – because he refuses to pay his pollster. May explain campaigning in odd places.

— Frida Ghitis (@FridaGhitis) November 5, 2016

Josh Marshall:

We’ve seen and discussed this pattern again and again. But we’re closing the race on it. Clinton is seeing surprising strength in former Democratic ‘reach’ states, largely driven by minority and especially Hispanic voters. At the same time she’s seeing relative softness in much whiter states in the northern tier of the country which have seemed pretty solidly blue for a generation. My best guess, looking at all the numbers and number crunchers at my disposal, is that she wins the Northern states anyway, with perhaps slightly lower margins and picks up states in the South and West. But this is going to be one of the big closing questions of the election – just how and how evenly is that shift in the electorate spread out over these different regions.

@brianstelter Video of camera man who left the press pen being harassed by Trump supporters caught by Right Side Broadcasting live feed. pic.twitter.com/bNHQrA4UTK

— Richard W. (@IceManNYR) November 6, 2016

There are three lengthy Vox pieces that I think you all should read, and I can’t really excerpt them here because a small excerpt would not do any of the pieces justice. The first is “White Riot” by Zack Beauchamp on how racism and immigration gave us Trump, Brexit, and a whole new kind of politics. Second, we have “Hillary’s Quiet Revolution” by Dylan Matthews on how Hillary is running on an ambitious plan to remake the American social compact. Finally, we have the 11 moments in her history that have defined Hillary Clinton.

Here it is, the @bonjovi – @timkaine duet you've been waiting for: pic.twitter.com/UvKwnOgpE3

— Betsy Klein (@betsy_klein) November 6, 2016

David Atkins says Dems there are three big reasons why Dems should be optimistic.

First, Democrats and liberal constituencies are trouncing Republicans in the early vote. Latino turnout in Georgia, North Carolina and Florida is well beyond 2012 and 2008 benchmarks. In Nevada Democrats lead the statewide early vote by over 45,000, with a whopping 72,000 vote lead in Clark County. Over 30 million Americans have already voted early–and in most of the states (Ohio excepted) the numbers seem to favor Democrats.

Second, while the Trump campaign has been seeking to turn out “missing white voters”–i.e., those who demographically and culturally should be voting for Republicans but who don’t usually turn out to vote–evidence suggests we are seeing a surge of nonwhite “missing” voters this year. As Greg Sargent notes, this is likely in part because of the very same racist tactics that Trump is using to turn out non-political white voters is energizing nonwhite voters against him.

Third, if it seems unlikely that voters are changing their minds this much between Trump and Clinton in the waning days of the election, that’s because it is. When polls seem to “swing” away from the mean–whether because of a convention bounce or a debate–it’s not usually because voters changed their minds so much as because supporters of candidates who recently did well are likely to respond to polls. This is known as response bias, and the closer we get to election day the likelier swings in the polling are to reflect that rather than genuine shifts in the electorate.

Important to remember as irregular voters start turning out: missing and newly registered voters lean Dem https://t.co/L2WZ7kR1wL

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) November 5, 2016