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NBC News: After Debate, Women Think Less of Trump and Better of Clinton

By Irin Carmon

Donald Trump has said, “I would be the best for women.” But according to a new NBC News|SurveyMoney poll taken after the first presidential debate, a majority of women aren’t convinced.

Twenty-seven percent of likely women voters said the debate made them think worse of Trump. Meanwhile, nearly a third, or 30 percent, said their opinion of Clinton had improved, compared to 22 percent of men. Women were also far likelier to say Clinton won the debate, by a 10-point margin over men.

“I’m undecided, but I’m leaning more towards Hillary than I ever have before because of the debate,” said Joan Hume, a 71-year-old retiree in Fairfield, Ohio who said she voted for Trump in the Republican primary because she wanted to “see Washington shaken up.”

Hume added, “There’s a side of him that’s scary to me that I’m seeing more of. I thought maybe he would change when he got the nomination, but he’s getting worse.”

Only 11 percent of women voters said their opinion of Trump had improved after the debate. Thirteen percent said their opinion of Clinton had worsened, compared to 21 percent of men who thought less of Clinton after seeing her debate.

Women were also likelier, by a 12-point margin, to doubt Trump’s personality and temperament, while men were likelier to doubt Clinton’s, by a near-identical margin of 13 points.

Trump fared particularly poorly with independent women when they were asked if he has the “temperament and personality to serve.” Eighty percent of independent female voters said he does not. By contrast, independent women voters were more evenly split on Clinton’s personality and temperament, with 51 percent saying she met the test for president.

“I was a little bit taken aback. I understand that Donald Trump is a passionate person, but in situations like that I believe he needed to pull back and not quite be so combative,” said Kathryn Fink, a 63-year-old library technician in Kirtland, Ohio who was undecided before the debate.

Continue reading, NBC News.

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Fox News: Trump threatens to ‘hit her harder’ at next debate, as surrogates rip moderator

By FoxNews.com

Donald Trump brushed himself off Tuesday following a rough-and-tumble debate with Hillary Clinton, returning to the campaign trail while warning he may have to “hit her harder” in the next round – as he and his surrogates rapped moderator Lester Holt for skating over the controversies associated with the Democratic nominee.

Clinton was widely seen as coming to the debate stage at Hofstra University well-prepared to take on the sometimes-unpredictable Trump, and standing her ground without any major stumbles. But the Republican nominee and his team pushed back Tuesday on any suggestion he might have missed opportunities to land punches, as Clinton’s supporters gloated that she got the better of him.

“I think [Trump] had a great night,” running mate Mike Pence, who will face Democratic counterpart Tim Kaine at a debate next week, said on Fox News’“America’s Newsroom.”

Trump, speaking on “Fox & Friends,” said the debate went well, especially when he was asked “normal questions.”

However, he and his backers noted that Holt never pressed Clinton on several issues, suggesting the moderator tilted the playing field in her favor during their opening bout.

“[Holt] didn’t ask her about the emails at all. He didn’t ask her about her scandals. He didn’t ask her about [Benghazi],” Trump said. “They were leaving all of her little goodies out.”

Continue reading, FoxNews.com

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Hillary Clinton to use larger podium than Donald Trump at first debate to make up for height disadvantage

By: Adam Edelman

 

Hillary Clinton says that we’re “stronger together,” but even she can’t deny Donald Trump is taller.

The Democratic nominee, who is 5-foot-4, has apparently enlisted the help of a raised podium for the first presidential debate against Donald Trump, who is 6-foot-3, Monday night, photos of the two podiums show.

According to WABC’s Rita Cosby, one of the two podiums inside the debate hall at Hofstra University, in Hempstead, N.Y., is larger than the other.

It is believed that the larger one was built at Clinton’s request to make her appear taller than she is.

“Clinton is 5’4″ and Trump 6’2″ and her team wanted the podium modified or a box added so she won’t look short next to Trump,” Cosby said in an email.

“One is clearly larger … than the other,” Cosby said.

 

Continue Reading: NY Daily News

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Politico: Clinton warns against getting ‘distracted’ by Trump’s terror talk

By Nolan D. McCaskill

Hillary Clinton on Monday urged Americans not to get “diverted and distracted” by Donald Trump’s inflammatory words as the United States combats the threat posed by the Islamic State.

“Let’s not get diverted and distracted by the kind of campaign rhetoric we hear coming from the other side. This is a serious challenge,” Clinton told reporters after delivering a statement from White Plains, New York. “We are well equipped to meet it. And we can do so in keeping with smart law enforcement, good intelligence and in concert with our values.”

Clinton addressed the recent string of attacks in New York, New Jersey and Minnesota on Monday, remarking that the terrorist threat of the Islamic State is real while also casting herself as the only candidate with the experience necessary to handle such threats.

“This threat is real but so is our resolve. Americans will not cower. We will prevail. We will defend our country and defeat the evil, twisted ideology of the terrorists,” said Clinton, who implicitly contrasted her role as head of the State Department and Trump’s inexperience in politics and government as she declared, “I’m the only candidate in this race who has been part of the hard decisions to take terrorists off the battlefield.”

Clinton also presented herself as a longtime advocate of “tough vetting” and called for an improved visa system. Her response Monday contradicted Trump’s message. While the Republican presidential nominee seemingly encouraged racial profiling to help law enforcement stop future attacks during a phone interview with “Fox and Friends,” Clinton talked up her bona fides.

Continue reading, Politico.

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New York Mag: Trump’s Path to Victory Is Starting to Look Very Real

Trump's Deplorables

By Ed Kilgore

The week before last I looked at Donald Trump’s likely “path to victory” and adjudged it as “a tightrope walk down an insanely narrow path to 270 electoral votes.” I’d now take out the adjective insanely and maybe even suggest it’s a walk along a balance beam rather than a tightrope. As the popular-vote margin separating Clinton and Trump gradually shrinks, putting together a map of states Trump might carry involves less conjecture about where he might make gains and more confidence that he might be able to consolidate gains he has already made.

Deciding who is leading nationally or in the battleground states is, of course, a matter of choosing whose measurement of public opinion you consult. I’d automatically assume, unless there is some compelling reason to do otherwise, that polling averages make the most sense. Nationally, the most straightforward of the polling averages, from RealClearPolitics, has Clinton up by two points in a four-way race. That is her smallest lead at RCP since late July. Averages at FiveThirtyEight and HuffPost Pollster factor in trends and poll accuracy data; they give Clinton a slightly larger lead (3.1 percent at FiveThirtyEight, 4.2 percent at HuffPost). It is worth noting that only one national poll has been published with data from September 11, when the unverified conventional wisdom would have it that Hillary Clinton’s standing might have taken a fall. It also appears that Trump is getting, despite contrary expectations earlier, the traditional pro-Republican “bump” when pollsters switch from samples of registered voters to those of likely voters. That could tilt polling averages a bit more in his direction very soon.

So observers are no longer asking (at least not right now) if and when Hillary Clinton’s lead is going to blossom into the double digits, as it has occasionally done in certain polls at different points in the general-election contest. It is, by most accounts, a close race still favoring Clinton.

Something similar has happened in state polling, with a subtle but important difference: What looked a couple of weeks ago like a long wall of states in which Trump needed to overcome a long-standing Clinton lead has gotten shorter. This is most dramatically shown in the state-by-state projections from Daily Kos (a pro-Democratic but, if anything, rather impressively pessimistic outlet), which now gives Trump an advantage not only in the previously red but blue-trending states of Arizona and Georgia, but also in Florida, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio. Add all that up with the states everyone expects Trump to carry and he’s at 259 electoral votes.

Other state-by-state projections (the Upshot has a nice table of them) have Clinton ahead in Florida, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio (though a new Bloomberg poll of Ohio showing Trump up by five points among likely voters could change estimates of that state’s trajectory), but none by such margins that a tilt by a couple of points nationally would not topple all or most of them into Trump’s column. Then comes the point when it starts getting harder for Trump to get across the line to 270. But it is clear that if he can move Pennsylvania — a “blue” state that has been trending “red” and where the demographics offer him some strategic avenues — into the hypercompetitive category, then all things are possible for him.

It is possible, in fact, that Trump is opening up multiple paths to victory. Recent polling in both New Hampshire and Colorado — two states generally conceded earlier to be in Clinton’s pocket — is showing a decided tightening of the race. There’s also fresh evidence Trump could win in the second congressional district of Maine, which independently awards a single electoral vote. There is one scenario where even if Trump loses Pennsylvania he could get to 270 votes via New Hampshire and that 1 vote from Maine.

Clinton’s strategic advantage, however, includes not just multiple paths to 270 EVs, but an advantage in battleground-state ad and field resources. And that’s where it gets really tough for a GOP nominee who cannot afford to lose his best states.

A very granular look at Pennsylvania by Sasha Issenberg and Steven Yaccino at Bloomberg, using proprietary data, suggests that if Clinton successfully turns out her base and her less reliable voters using her GOTV advantage, she will be very tough to beat. Trump would have to “run a perfect ground game, miraculously turn out all his Republican targets, win every expected persuadable vote cast—projected to be around 187,000—and [could] still lose.” According to this analysis, he isn’t likely to win Pennsylvania unless he can dig even further into the remaining Democratic vote in the southwest part of the state.

So it’s possible Trump will hit a wall in Pennsylvania even if he does win all of those other states where white working-class voters offset millennials or minorities. Still, it could be a near thing. In another analysis, Harry Enten concludes Clinton has been outperforming what demographics and voting history would expect her to have in the Keystone State. If, as he suggests, her “natural” lead is only 3 percent, that’s a small cushion.

Sometimes you can get lulled into complacency by win-probability projections that sound immutable but really aren’t. Citigroup put out a warning about that today:

A new note from Citigroup Inc. says that while the firm still puts the probability of Hillary Clinton securing the U.S. presidential election at 65 percent, investors are not taking the remaining chance of a win by Donald Trump very seriously.

“A 35 percent probability for a Trump victory is more meaningful than investors may be appreciating,” the team, led by Chief Global Political Analyst Tina Fordham, writes in a note published on Tuesday. “Political probabilities are not like blackjack — there is only one roll of the dice, and 35 percent probability events happen frequently in real life.”

The Upshot, which rates Clinton at an even higher 79 percent win probability, offers this sobering analogy: “Mrs. Clinton’s chance of losing is about the same as the probability that an N.F.L. kicker misses a 45-yard field goal.”

Continue reading, NYMag.

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Daily Caller: Colin Powell’s Personal Email Hacked, Under Pressure To Endorse Hillary Clinton

By Peter Hasson

The Daily Caller can exclusively reveal that two years worth of emails have been stolen from former secretary of state Colin Powell’s personal email account.

The emails range from between June 2014 to August 2016. The most recent emails are dated August 19, 2016.

When asked for comment regarding the apparent hack, Powell replied: “I wasn’t aware of any infiltration of my Gmail account. If accurate my privacy has been violated.”

“As a private citizen I would hope journalists would respect that privacy,” he added.

The emails were given to hacktivist group DCLeaks by unnamed hackers. They emails are currently password protected. DCLeaks puts the total number of hacked Powell emails in their possession at around 30,000.

The Daily Caller was able to examine some of the hacked emails, which cover topics such as Donald Trump’s feud with the Khan family and Hillary Clinton’s email server.

The hacked emails reveal some people close to Powell expect him to endorse Hillary Clinton before the Nov. 8 election.

Former New Jersey governor Christie Whitman — a Republican who has said she will vote for Clinton over Trump — sent Powell an email in late July with the subject line, “Hillary.”

“Have you endorsed her yet?” the one line email said.

“Nope,” Powell replied.  “By the way, if you have a WSJ today take a look at my piece on immigration. I can send it you missed. On Oped pages.”

“You’ll recall that in 2008 and 2012 I waited until early fall,” he added.

Powell confirmed the email chain’s legitimacy to TheDC.

On July 30, Powell emailed several people a link to a Huffington Post article on Trump’s then-budding feud with the Khans.

On August 2, longtime Powell friend and adviser Harlan Ullman asked Powell, “when are you going to throw the knock out blow?”

Continue reading, The Daily Caller.

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LA Times: ‘Believe me’: People say Trump’s language is affecting political discourse ‘bigly’

By Lisa Mascaro

Of all the rules of politics that Donald Trump has broken in his run for the White House, his way with words may top the list.

Perhaps not since Sarah Palin gave Americans her tossed-word salads has a candidate’s speech pattern been so debated, celebrated and mocked.

But Trump is more than just a free-style rambler. Experts say he employs a very deliberate, effective communications approach unlike any other presidential candidate in memory.

The Trumpisms — “Believe me,” “People say,”  “Sad!” — have become so well known they are the subject of spoofs. But like a savvy salesman or break-through advertising campaign, Trump’s techniques carry a quiet power.

Here’s a breakdown of Trump-speak.

The art of the insult

Little Marco. Lyin’ Ted. Crooked Hillary. Even in the rough-and-tumble world of presidential politics, Trump has taken the art of the insult to a new level.

Trump’s name-calling may sound like simple bullying. But labeling his opponents with cutting nicknames also creates simple frames — catch phrases — that stick in voters’ minds, often because they reinforce existing perceptions.

George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at UC Berkeley who has written extensively about political speech, says studies show that 98% of thought is unconscious. Creating those nicknames is a way to make the broader message resonate with voters long after the rallies have ended — like a good advertising jingle.

“Even if he loses the election, Trump will have changed the brains of millions of Americans, with future consequences,” Lakoff writes on his blog.

As a businessman, Trump learned that speaking in an irreverent, shock-jock manner often won him free media attention. Now some Trump supporters are cheering that same willingness to give voice to politically incorrect opinions that they may secretly share, but would never say out loud.

Among the most controversial examples were his description of Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and his pondering of whether the Muslim mother of a U.S. Army captain killed in Iraq wasn’t “allowed” to speak alongside her husband at the Democratic convention.

“He has this great talent for, any time there’s a lull, he goes and grabs up all the attention again,” said Barton Swaim, author of “The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics.” “I’m out of the business of predicting how he won’t go to the next level.”

Say it. Repeat it. Say it again.

It’s a crescendo of almost every Trump rally, the call-and-response moment when Trump promises to build a “great wall” along the Southern border. “Who’s going to pay for it?” he asks. “Mexico!” the crowd answers.

Of course the Mexican president has said unequivocally that his country will not be paying for Trump’s wall. But that hardly matters. In Trump’s world, repeating something makes it seem true, even when it’s demonstrably not.

For example, Trump continues to insist that he warned against entering the 2003 Iraq War, despite a 2002 audio clip of him voicing support. He has repeatedly claimed to have watched TV footage of Muslims in New Jersey cheering on 9/11, despite no evidence of such an event.

He often repeats false claims that inner-city crime is at record highs or that neighbors of the San Bernardino terrorists saw bomb-making materials in their apartment but did not report it.

“The more a word is heard, the more the circuit is activated and the stronger it gets, and so the easier it is to fire again,” Lakoff writes. “Trump repeats. Win. Win. Win. We’re gonna win so much you’ll get tired of winning.’”

Continue reading, LA Times.

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LA Times: Trump, courting female voters, outlines child-care and paid-leave plans

By Seema Mehta

As Donald Trump tries to increase his appeal to moderate suburban women, the GOP presidential nominee on Tuesday unveiled plans for paid family leave and child care.

“Many Americans are just one crisis away from disaster – a sick kid, a lost job, a damaged home. There is no financial security in our country, especially anymore,” Trump told supporters during a shorter-than-usual rally in a Philadelphia suburb. He described his plans as “pro-family, it’s pro-child, it’s pro-worker. These are the people we have to take care of.”

Trump proposed offering six weeks of paid maternity leave and a tax deduction for child-care and elder-care costs. Low-income workers who don’t have any taxable income would receive a child-care rebate in the form of an earned income tax credit.

Trump also called for the creation of a dependent-care savings account that is not tied to an employer, where parents could deposit tax-free money for child care, enrichment activities, school tuition and elder care. Low-income workers would receive matching funds from the federal government.

The Republican nominee does not say how he would pay for any of this, with the exception of the paid maternity leave that his campaign estimated would cost about $3.4 billion a year. Trump says he would fund the leave program by eliminating fraud and improper payment in the unemployment system. He pledged to outline on Thursday his full economic plan, which he said would be balanced through job growth and budget cuts.

Continue reading, LA Times.

 

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Breitbart: NPR Station Publishes Anti-Trump Comic for Teachers, Children to Use in Class

By Joel B. Pollak

San Francisco Bay Area NPR affiliate KQED has published a comic book guide to Donald Trump’s immigration policy, aimed at students, which is titled “Fear of Foreigners” and casts Trump as part of the “History of Nativism in America.”

The comic book slide show, illustrated by Andy Warner, is part of KQED’s series “The Lowdown,” described by the station as “Connecting newsroom to classroom,” and is presented among “lesson plans and education guides” for teachers to use.

The “lesson” consists of twelve panels, starting with two panels depicting the Republican presidential nominee commenting on Mexican immigrants and proposing to shut down Muslim immigration. It goes on to explain: “Some Americans find his rhetoric alarming, but it follows a long tradition of anti-immigrant public discourse.”

Subsequent panels trace hostility to immigration from Benjamin Franklin in the mid-18th century, to the Know-Nothings of the 1850s, through the anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan, the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II by FDR, and California’s own Proposition 187 in 1994.

The series misses important facts and dates, and provides little historical context. For example, it leaves out the Immigration Act of 1924, arguably the most important law restricting Jewish migration in the interwar period, preferring to dwell instead on antisemitism by the KKK, Henry Ford, and Charles Lindbergh, which serves the purpose of demonizing America without actually explaining the anti-immigration backlash. And if America was so terrible to Jews, who were fleeing real persecution in Russia and elsewhere, why did they flock to the U.S.? Warner does not interrupt his indictment of America to explain.

Nowhere does Warner mention the real problems of anarchism and communism among immigrant communities in the early 20th century. The illustrations also fail to mention the problem of radical Islam among present immigrants from the Muslim world, until a brief allusion at the end: “the nation remains on edge after recent ISIS-inspired attacks.” And the series makes little effort to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants, casting all hostility to our present immigration policy as the result of prejudice and economic insecurity, ignoring genuine public concerns for sovereignty, security, and the rule of law.

Continue reading on Breitbart.

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Ballot Box: Early voting begins in White House race

By Reid Wilson, Garrett Evans, Sarah Mearhoff and Joe DiSipio

Brace yourselves: Election Day has begun.

Some federal write-in absentee ballots, which are typically reserved for people serving dangerous foreign deployments or stints on submarines, have already started to come in. And that trickle of ballots will soon become a flood, with early voting set to begin in several states around the country.

The first round of early ballots will be dropped in the mail in North Carolina on Friday, kicking off a nearly nine-week sprint of early and absentee voting before the final results are tallied on Nov. 8.

Alabama elections officials will begin putting ballots in the mail on Sept. 15. By the following week, ballots from all 50 states will be on their way to members of the Armed Services and registered voters living abroad.

On September 23, voters in Minnesota will be the first with a chance to cast their ballots early, at in-person locations around the state. Polls open in South Dakota and Michigan the following day. By the end of September, voters in seven states will be able to cast ballots in person.

The popularity of early and absentee voting has exploded in the last decade and a half. In 2000, about one in five voters cast their ballots before Election Day. In 2016, more than a third of voters are likely to cast their ballots early this year, according to Michael McDonald, a political scientist who tracks the early vote at the University of Florida.

“We’ve been on an upward trend of early voting since really the late 1970s,” McDonald said. “Part of what we see in the upward trend is that more states will offer early voting options.”

Since the 2012 elections, in which 32 percent of voters cast ballots early, two states have made significant changes that give voters more access to early ballots: New Jersey now allows voters to obtain an absentee ballot without an excuse, four years after Hurricane Sandy shut down voting in some coastal cities. And Colorado now mails ballots to all of their registered voters.

Early voting can also help voters deal with a longer ballot, especially in states like Washington, California and Oregon where ballot measures can make for hours of reading.

“This year has a really loaded general election ballot, including a bumper crop of state and local measures, the White House, Congress, most of the legislature, judges and local races,” said Kim Wyman, Washington’s Secretary of State. “It is a lot to ask of our voters, and we’re pleased to have the convenience of vote-by-mail and a generous voting period, as we now think of ‘Election Day’ as being.”

Those who show up early are almost certainly hardened partisans, setting both parties on a scramble to chase their most likely supporters and bank as many votes as possible. The first to vote tend to be older, highly informed voters who are registered with a party — those likeliest to already know how they are going to vote. Those who show up later are younger, and much less likely to identify with a party.

Even before the first absentee ballots go out, the first vote has been cast. North Carolina officials said August 26 they had received a Federal Write-in Absentee Ballot from Francois Farge, a 51-year old Republican registered to vote in North Carolina but living in France.

Continue reading, Ballot Box at The Hill

 

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